The Paradox of Choice

In economics there is a theory called “The Paradox of Choice”. It states that increasing the number of choices will improve the user experience, but only ultil a certain point. After that point the added choices will not only be indifferent to the user, but they might also become counterproductive.

A simple example: market researches found that individuals in a supermarket are 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they have to choose among six rather than among 20 flavors of jam.

Now, what do jam flavors have to do with your blog you might ask? Your blog, just like the supermarket shelf, presents many choices for the visitor. Every link, in fact, is a choice. When someone visits your blog he will need to choose among reading the home page, clicking on a single category, clicking on the advertising, contacting you and so on. If that is the case you need to make sure that you are not overwhelming your visitor with too many choices (links).

This approach applies to the whole blog design. If you place too many fields on the sidebar like “Latest Posts”, “Latests Comments”, “Top commentators”, “Blogroll”, Polls, Badges, Meta Data and so on the reader will probably get confused and avoid the sidebar. Similarly if you fill the bottom of your posts with “Related Entries”, advertising, subscription buttons, affiliate links and other extra information the user will just get lost and skip those sections altogether.

Do not get me wrong here, having those items on your blog are important, but not all of them bundled together otherwise they will lose the usefulness. Limit the set of choices for the reader and he will be much more likely to perform an action (i.e. click on a link).

Bloggers’ Rights

It is very important to be aware of your rights as a blogger and online publisher. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very useful section on their website called “Bloggers’ Rights”.

EFF’s goal is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected. To that end, we have created the Legal Guide for Bloggers, a collection of blogger-specific FAQs addressing everything from fair use to defamation law to workplace whistle-blowing.

Become a Better Blogger By Following Expert Examples

Being a new blogger is a daunting challenge. You’re starting from scratch, with no experience, and competing against bloggers who’ve been building authority and expertise for years. Fortunately, there are also a few crucial benefits. No matter what type of blog you want to build, odds are someone else has already done it. Top bloggers have spent countless man hours perfecting their blogs through trial and error. Why not take advantage of that hardwork by following their example?

One mistake many bloggers make is relying solely on what’s been written about blogging. There is a wealth of great information on how to build a successful blog, but only a small percentage of bloggers openly share their best techniques. There will always be specific questions that you can’t find an answer to. Actions speak louder than words. Instead of merely learning from what top bloggers say, you can learn by studying what they do.

Want to know how to optimally structure your blog for search engines? Look over top SEO blogs like SEOmoz and ProNet Advertising.

Want to know what a usable, eye pleasing design looks like? Checkout out43Folders and kottke.org.

Want to learn how to write indepth articles that challenge readers to improve themselves? Start reading Steve Pavlina.

Want to master consistency, post frequency, and personal branding? Pay attention to Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod, and Darren Rowse.

I could go on forever but you get the point. Just reading these great blogs isn’t enough. You need to look beneath the surface with a discerning eye. Nothing the best bloggers do is an accident. Every detail, from appearance to post frequency, has been meticulously perfected.

To become a better blogger, you need to stop being an ordinary reader and become a student of blogging. I recommend picking a few blogs that you’d like to emulate and doing an indepth examination of their sites. Remember, no detail is too small. Try to understand the reasons why they to do what they do, and you’ll be that much closer to becoming an A-Lister.

10 Principles of Successful Business Blogging

Great business blogging can add value to your business, create loyal customers and build trust in potential clients. On the other hand, bad business blogging, or inconsistent business blogging, can have a negative impact on your brand. Keeping the points below in mind should help ensure your business blog is working effectively to draw clients in, not push them away.

1. Use your professional voice. When you take a business-related call with a client who you’re not familiar with, do you use slang, swear, or are you otherwise impolite? Hopefully, no, and the same rules should apply to blogging. Think of your writing as an extension of your professional voice.

2. Edit each post you think is done.Maintaining good grammar, spelling and fluid expression is a simple way to show potential clients you’re an intelligent and professional person. The more informal your writing looks the less professional you and your enterprise will appear. Avoid embarrassing slip-ups by re-reading and rigorously editing each post before you hit publish.

3. Present information clearly and concisely. Make your posts scannable by including sub-headings, by making key words and phrases bold, and by using paragraph breaks frequently. This makes your writing look more professional and will enable busy clients to extract the essence of your posts even if they don’t have the time to read each word.

4. Be personal. A funny anecdote or interesting story can help build a friendly face for your business, as long as the story is relevant to the topic of your blog. Injecting a bit of personality into your writing will help establish yourself as someone clients can relate to. In doing so you’ll also be building trust. A post I read recently that I thought did this well was ‘Apparently I Work for Google‘ at SEOmoz, a business blog about SEO.

5. Don’t be too personal. Don’t get into specifics about your family, your relationships, your work stresses or otherwise delve beneath the surface of your daily life. This is not only unprofessional but can imbue your blog with a sense of negativity. Keep your voice positive and stay away from personal issues.

6. Keep your opinions and beliefs to yourself. Today’s world is increasingly divided along political and moral lines. If you reveal your thoughts on controversial issues there will be some clients who’ll no longer be willing to support your product or service. Keep politics, morality and controversy out of your business blogging, regardless of how strongly you feel about an issue.

7. Be objective. Too many business blogs serve as extended advertisements for the company and little else. It is no wonder that these tend to be unsuccessful. A good strategy is to take a birds-eye view of the industry you’re in while frequently returning back to your own business.

8. Treat readers like you would customers. Respond to every comment and e-mail in a prompt and courteous manner. Answer every question to the best of your abilities. Enforce a strict comment policy to ensure your blog comments are a happy and productive place. Your readers are potential clients and will generate an impression of your customer service based on how you manage your blog community. Take the time to do this well.

9. Less is more. Every post you write is a reflection on the quality of your business. Take the time to produce well thought-out posts which offer value to readers, even if it means you end up posting less regularly.

10. Don’t start what you can’t finish. If you start a business blog you better be prepared to stick with it. A client who enjoys your business blog for a month only to watch it fall into disuse and disrepair will make some powerful assumptions about your business as a result of this. If you’re not absolutely committed to your business blogging then, simply put, don’t start. If you lose your enthusiasm at any point be sure to recruit someone who can keep things afloat for you.

10 Ways To Improve Your Readers’ Experience

Ultimately, building a site is all about getting returning visitors, and that is in turn influenced by your website’s user experience. You need to make sure that every time people come to your site they can find what they are looking for. Here are my top 10 tips on improving your readers’ experience.

1. Make Yourself Easy To Contact / Create an “About” Page – Although some first time visitors will be more interested in your site’s content than you as a blogger, repeat visitors will want to know about you. Creating an about page makes your site more trustworthy because your readers can put a face to your site. It helps to show that you aren’t just some faceless machine churning out posts, that you are actually a human who can relate to their experiences.

Making yourself easy to contact should be obvious. Blogging success comes with the peril of many e-mails, a lot of those messages will contain genuine gold. Your readers will inform you when your site has a problem, they will give you ideas for new posts, and if you build a good relationship with them, they will likely recommend you to family and friends (related: How to Write an Effective “About” page).

2. Speed Up Your Site – You might be operating on a cable modem, but a big percentage of Internet users still use dial-up connections. If your site takes too long for them to load, they will likely pass and not come back. Take some time to optimize the loading time of your pages.

Firebug for Firefox is an excellent free tool which enables you to identify bottlenecks. As an added bonus of speeding up your site, you will hopefully consume less bandwidth, bringing your hosting costs down (you can read more about it on the articles 6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site and Formatting Tips to Speed Up Your Website).

3. Organize By Category, Not Date – It may be important to you when you wrote a specific post. You might remember the time-frame better than anything else, and organizing your archives by date makes it easy to find. But for all your readers, they are more interested in your categories than when you wrote a specific post. Organizing by categories can make it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for.

An extra tip – keep your categories list lean. Somewhere between 10 and 15 is a good number for most sites. If you get too many you risk your users not being able to find what they are looking for. If you have too many now, try collapsing some of your categories with only a few posts in them into a larger group (related: Organize Your Categories: 5 Practical Tips).

4. Use Above The Fold Images – It is often quoted that an image is worth 1000 words. Well, by placing an image “Above the fold” in your blog posts, you can quickly relay to your reader what a particular post is about. They won’t have to read the first 3 paragraphs to know if they are interested or not. If they find your image interesting, they can keep reading, otherwise they can continue on to a different post. I think you will find that if you use images earlier in your posts, you will tend to intrigue more readers.

5. Make Your Content Scannable – People read webpages, and especially feeds, differently than they read other media. They don’t take the time to read every sentence. Your visitors are more likely to scan your posts than read them. You need to make it easy for them to pick out your best points quickly.

Tips on this include making strategic use of bold and colors, organizing your content into lists, and using blockquotes to make specific points stand out. If you just create huge blocks of text, without any breaks or highlights, it will intimidate your readers and cause many of them to leave (related: Writing for Your Readers).

6. Avoid In-Line Advertising – Under no circumstances should you use an in content advertising scheme such as Kontera or Intellitxt. These advertisements work by betraying the implicit trust between a blogger and the readers. The ads are displayed as double underline blue, easily confused with a normal link.

They make your reader think that you recommend whatever product is being advertised, when in fact you don’t. Use these and you will begin to lose repeat visitors. It is no wonder that hardly any A list blogger tries to monetize with this method (read more about this here: Stay Away from In-Text Advertising)

7. Quickly Respond To Comments / Reward Top Commentators – As a blogger you want to encourage reader involvement in your site. One way of doing this is to do whatever you can to increase comments. Two of the best methods of increasing comments are quickly responding to comments on your site, and rewarding your top commentators with search engine enabled backlinks.

By quickly responding to comments, you can turn your static post into a dynamic forum, having visitors coming back to the same post time and again to respond to the conversation. Rewarding your top commentors will incentivize your readers to lurk less, and participate more (check the Top Commentators Plugin).

8. Show Top Posts / Related Posts – Make it easy for your new readers to navigate your website. Although your returning visitors may not be interested in your archives (they read them when they were published), to the first time visitors your archives are as new as any other post. By enabling related posts and top posts you can make it easy for those readers to skip from one post to the next, covering the entire site. Enabling these plugins will go far to driving up your pageviews (check the Popularity Content and Related Entries plugins).

9. Get a Distinct Theme – What theme are you using? Is it the same theme as 1000 other blogs? Do your readers a favor by getting a distinct theme. It will make your site more memorable to them and allow you to customize your navigation in order to tailor it to your particular niche. If you do decide to get your own theme, make sure that you run it by a few trusted friends. You may think the colors are fun and upbeat, they may think it induces headaches. Take their criticism seriously.

10. Validate Your Website – Do you want to be sure your website works for all your visitors, with all browsers, or you do want to rely on the often used phrase, “Well it works for me.” Take the time to validate your website and make sure it conforms to internet standards. You don’t want to turn away some visitors just because they don’t happen to be using Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Should We Remove the Timestamp?

We all know that focusing on timeless content is a good thing. This will ensure that your posts and articles will be useful tomorrow, next month and maybe even next year. Steve Pavlina’s success is undoubtedly related to his thoughtful, timeless content. In his own words:

In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content. The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered. We forget yesterday’s news, but we remember those things that have meaning to us. So I strive to write about meanings instead of happenings.

While thinking about this issue, one question came to my mind: if timeless content is what most of us aim for, would it make sense to remove the timestamp from the posts? Throughout all my blogs I already position the dates below the posts, as opposed to leaving them right after the headline, which might discourage some readers from reading the older posts. But would it make sense to remove the timestamp altogether?

Some popular blogs around the Internet are starting to adopt this model. I talked to some of these bloggers and asked their opinion on the topic, check it out:

Darren Rowse

(removed dates completely on his Digital Photography School blog)

If the content is timeless and not ‘newsy’ in nature I think that
removing the timestamp from a blog is a very worthwhile thing to do. I’ve been doing it since the start of Digital Photography School (digital-photography-school.com/blog) a year ago and have noticed a few interesting things:

1. I get a lot more links on ‘old’ posts over time. On my blogs with dates on them I find that despite them getting traffic from Google that they are rarely linked to after a week or two. On DPS I’m constantly getting links from sites on posts even after a year.

2. I get more comments on old posts. Even though I leave the dates on comments (so people can really tell how old a post is from that) I find that not promoting the date gives a perception of ‘freshness’ in people’s minds and makes them more willing to interact with the post.

27 Lessons About Blogging

John Wesley from “Pick the Brain” published an interesting article titled “27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers.” Basically he is sharing what he learned on the first six months of his successful blog. My favorite lesson from the article is:

If you aren’t sure a post is good, sit on it for a day. If you still aren’t convinced, delete it. A bad post is worse than no post. Bad posts make people question if your blog is worth reading. When you make a bad post (and you will) learn from it and move on.

Below you will find a summary of all the points, the full description is on his blog:

1. Help people solve a problem and differentiate yourself
2. Be prepared to invest 2-3 years before seeing any serious returns
3. Make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to your RSS feed
4. Offer a full feed
5. A bad post is worse than no post
6. Be prepared to completely run out of ideas after the first 3-4 months
7. It’s not always what you know, who you know is important too
8. Write catchy headlines and list posts
9. Make the opening paragraph as compelling as possible
10. Courteously encourage friends, family, and casual acquaintances to vote up and link to your posts
11. Don’t write every post for the social sites
12. Listen carefully to every piece of feedback but don’t be a slave to it
13. Experiment. Take chances. Piss a few people off
14. Always look for a different angle
15. Don’t participate in every meme or trade links with everyone who asks
16. Write about your life in a way that’s relevant to your topic
17. Make people think
18. Don’t be anxious to plaster Google Ads all over the place
19. Design matters
20. Posting comments on other blogs is overrated
21. Respond to your commenters
22. Obsessively reading other blogs and checking traffic stats are not productive activities
23. Once you have a bit of success don’t flaunt it
24. Make use of blog carnivals
25. Display your best posts on every page
26. Read blogs about blogging
27. Do what works for you

12 U.S. Laws Bloggers Should Know

As the blogging phenomenon evolves legislation will naturally play a role inside it. The Aviva Directory published an interesting article titled “12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know“, highlighting 12 laws that affect bloggers and how you can comply with them. Even if you are not a U.S. citzen the list should provide some good pointers:

1. Disclosing paid posts: there is a recommendation from the Federal Trade Commission suggesting that sponsored posts should be disclosed. The advice, therefore, is to make it clear what is sponsored and what is not on your blog.

2. Deep linking: while deep linking (linking directly to an internal page of a website) is not illegal it might get you in trouble if you do not reference it correctly. Do not claim an external page is part of your website, for instance.

3. Using Images: do not use copyrighted images without the permission of the author. Thumbnails, however, tend to be considered “fair use” under the Copyright Law.

4. Stolen content: Copyright Law protects most forms of published material. It is not always easy to enforce that claim on a third party, though. Always consider the costs and benefits of going on a litigation.

5. Domain names: do not register a domain that contains a trademark. While there are some “fair use” exceptions you will probably have a hard trying to keep it.

6. Private data from readers: the law is not clear regarding private information that is gained through websites. Despite that do not share or sell sensitive information from your readers.

7. User generated content: not all bloggers are aware of the fact that they do not own the comments that are posted on their blogs. Once a person publishes a comment on your blog he or she will be the copyright holder of it. You can solve this issue by having a “Terms of Service” section on your blog.

8. Liability for user generated content: while the people commenting on your blog will retain the ownership of the content you might still be liable if they commit intellectual property violations.

9. Tax Law: if you are generating income through your blog you will probably need to pay taxes. Make sure to use tax deductions where possible.

10. Incorporating a blog: perhaps creating a Limited Liability Company (LLC) for your blog would be a good idea, specially if it represents your main business venture.

11. Spam Law: if you are distributing emails or newsletters through your blog make sure to comply with the law. The emails must be labeled correctly, and they should not contain false or misleading information.

12. Journalism Shield Law: unfortunately bloggers do not qualify for Shield Law protection like journalists do. In some states the definition might extend to bloggers, but you will need to check it out.

Copyright Law: 12 Dos and Don’ts

As the blogging phenomenon expands, copyright concerns become quite important. Technology makes it really easy to copy, modify and share information, whether we talk about text, images, audio or video. The problem is that the vast majority of people do not have a clear understanding of the Copyright Law, which might result in illegal and costly mistakes. Below you will find 12 Do’s and Dont’s that will clarify what you can and what you can not do as an online publisher:

DOS

1. Do use material under public domain: you are free to use any work that is in public domain. This includes federal government documents, materials produced before 1923 and materials produced before 1977 without a copyright notice.

2. Do quote something you find interesting: the Copyright Act defines that short quotations for the purpose of criticism, commentary or news reporting are considered “fair use”. Notice that the quote should involve only a small portion of the work, and it should not replicate the “heart” of the material.

3. Do use facts and ideas: Copyright Law protects the expression of facts and ideas. That is the form, combination and structure of documents and not the facts themselves. You are free to use facts and ideas reported on articles or websites.

4. Do use other materials that are not subject to copyright: apart from facts and ideas there are many other classes of materials that can not be protected under the Copyright Law. Those materials include names, familiar symbols, listings of ingredients or contents, short phrases, titles, slogans and procedures (notice that some of those materials might be protected by trademark, though).

5. Do use a company name or logo if you are talking about it: trademarks should protect a company from people trying to use its name or logo to deceive customers. If you are criticizing or analyzing a company, however, you can use its name or logo under a “nominative fair use”.

6. Do use a company name on your domain: as mentioned on the previous item you can use a company’s name as long as you are not trying to deceive people that you speak on behalf of this company or that you are related to it in any way. This right applies to domain names. Someone could create a website to complain about a company, say Microsoft, and use a domain name that contains the name of this company, say microsoftsucks.com.

DON’TS

7. Don’t assume that if you credit the author there is no copyright infringement: a lot of people wrongly think that if they credit the author of an article or image they are not violating the copyright law. You can only use copyrighted material if you have explicit permission from the author to do so (or if you make fair use of it, as explained before).

8. Don’t copy material just because it does not show a copyright message: the Copyright Law required a copyright notice to protect works until 1977. In 1978, however, the law changed and abolished the requirement for copyright notice. This means that every published work (be it on paper or digital media) automatically gets copyright protection, whether expressed with a notice or not.

9. Don’t equate Creative Commons with “free for grab”: while Creative Commons licenses are less restrictive then standard copyright they should not be interpreted a “free for grab”. In order to understand what you can or can not do with Creative Commons material you should check what kind of license it is using. Certain licenses will require you to credit the original author, while others will require that you release any modifications of the document under the same license.

10. Don’t copy material just because you are not making a commercial use: while making commercial use of copyrighted material might make it easier for the author to claim damages against you the commercial use per se is not a requirement for copyright infringement. Even if you are not making a commercial use of the material you are still infringing the law if you do not have a permission from the author.

11. Don’t assume that if you remove the copyrighted material you will be out of trouble: a lot of people copy images and text around the Internet thinking that in the worst of the cases they will receive a take down notice from the author and remove the material from the website. The removal of the copyrighted material will not remove the copyright infringement at all. Should the author decide to go after you in count you will be in trouble all the same.

12. Don’t copy material just because you can’t find a copyright holder:the fact that a copyright holder can not be identified does not imply that the material can be freely copied. Similarly if you locate the copyright holder, email him asking permission and receive no answer back you would still be infringing the law if you use the material.

This article was not written by a lawyer and it does not intend to constitute legal advice.