This is a really good presentation by Tim Ferris about blogging and about how he blogs. If you don’t know who Tim Ferris is, he’s the guy that wrote the book “4 Hour Work Week
There are some really good nuggets in here which I’ll share with you here courtesy of Alex:
- POSTING TIMES: Tim’s ideal posting times: 7am PST and 6pm EST
- BEST DAYS TO POST: Best days to post to engage discussion and get trackbacks: Tues, Thur & Saturday.
- WORDING: Changing your “Categories” section to “Topics” encourages more browsing.
- SIDEBAR BOX & TABS: If you have “All-time most popular” as your first sidebar tab, then it becomes a fulfilling prophecy. Better to follow Tim’s model and put “all-tim” and your 2nd tab (see Tim’s site for the layout).
- Add a “Reasons to Subscribe” page near the top.
- POST DATES: Because of bias toward newer content, make sure your post date is at the footer.
- TIME ESTIMATE: For very long posts, give the reader an estimate (in bold) of how long the post might take to read (e.g. 3 min, 15 min, etc).
- RESOURCES: Consider using Evernote for your post research. (I love Evernote, it synchs between multiple computers, your iPhone, and the web)
- WRITERS BLOCK: If you’re ever blocked, write about what makes you angry (but never attack other people).
- WRITING THE POST: For long blog posts, print out first draft and edit by hand. Don’t be concerned with SEO on 1st draft
- SEO: if your keyword is “steak” go to Google analytics, search for synonyms and sort by average monthly value to find your choices. Make sure your post can only be described one way. Do not have 2 topics in one post. You end up splitting your anchor text.
- VIDEO & PHOTOS: “Short” is good when it comes to video. Very rarely does he do standalone video posts – he generally has some value-add in the post. Nothing travels faster than text, text stays around and gets indexed. So have at least a “this is what I talk about in this video” text.
- CONTENT: Do evergreen content – dont chase the news.
- PHOTOS: To find cools photos, go to flickr, advanced search, creative commons, and sort by most interesting.
- COMMENTS: He uses askimet, and quickly scans thru comments to see if there’s any spam that’s been missed. Deletes abusive comments. Tries to save good comments because of hidden gems for use in future posts. Saves them to Evernote. Add a “comment rules” section.
- PLUGINS: Uses very few. One is the Redirection plugin.
- USABILITY: Also, embeds crazy egg to track where people are clicking. It’s a free service.
Other things to notice about the presentation:
- He spent $1200 to setup his current blog, but his first blog was free.
- He doesn’t use very many fillers like “uh” and “ums.”
- I don’t think he’s a very engaging speaker. Despite that, I’m interested in the topic he was talking about so he held my attention, but I don’t think I’d want to hear him talking about anything else.
- He’s done a lot of testing.
- I’ll probably start implementing some of his suggestions on this and on my other blogs.
- In case you want to look at his blog, it’s here.
