7 Best Ways Readers Can Help Bloggers Succeed

Just before my recent trip to NYC, I got some not-great news. While the idea of a dog-centric memoir about Lilly and me perhaps has merit and while the book proposal draft I spent much of January writing is well done, it looks like our blog traffic isn’t yet in the zone to convince publishers to make a book deal. Our “platform” isn’t yet big enough. So, we need your help.

This rejection was only our first try. I do indeed have other options for book agents and publishers, and I will continue to revise the book proposal and pursue those avenues. However, there are some things you can do to help me … or, really, any writer / author / blogger you know and like.

Publishing Primer: What is a Platform

Once upon a time being a writer meant simply being good with words and crafting compelling stories or narratives. Today, publishers demand that authors and writers of all kinds be independent media sensations. I jokingly call it the 24/7 Me Network. While it might not rival the media whores created through politics or reality TV shows, the kind of attention a writer needs to attract on her own is HUGE. That’s true before a book deal, and it’s true after a book deal.

It is no longer enough to write.

• You must create, cultivate, and keep big, active communities of readers.
• You must produce new articles, posts, etc. all the time (whether you are getting paid or not).
• You must raise and maintain an “expert” status across all media, including time-sucking social media.
• You must prove through tangible measures just how much readers like you.
• You must constantly toot your own horn and get readers to click through to a variety of venues.

So, even though I’ve been writing about dogs since 1995, even though I’ve written for The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, pretty much every major dog magazine and scads of other top-tier publications … because I hope to parlay this blog into a book … what matters MOST is how much traffic the blog gets.

And, while my traffic is good, and those of you who take part are loyal and committed readers, I need more of everything to convince an agent to sign me and a publisher to fund me.

The plea for help I’m about to launch applies not only to me, but to any writer / author / blogger you actively want to support. Any and all help is appreciated.

7  Ways to Help Writers / Bloggers You Like

1. Visit the blog often. The number of unique visitors, separate visits, and page views matter.

2. Post blog comments. Thank goodness for those who visit the site and keep our numbers strong. Thanks extra to those who take the time to announce a presence through comments.

3. Give posts a Facebook LIKE (there is a button on the bottom of every post). All our blog posts automatically feed into both my personal Facebook profile and to our official Champion of My Heart Facebook Fan Page. The more “likes” a post gets, the more likely it is to show up in Facebook news feeds and for others are to click through and check it out.

4. Become a Facebook fan. Because the number of blog subscribers by email or RSS is pretty much invisible to outsiders, the VERY public number of Facebook fans is a quick and easy way for agents and publishers to gauge a writer’s community loyalty and size. For pure numbers, we’re thrilled when you LIKE our Champion of My Heart Facebook fan page, but it also helps to LIKE and comment on posts we put there (including news items and other links, not just our own links). It’s also a great way to get updates about us on things that don’t warrant a full blog post.

5. Post blog links and give thumbs-up via whatever social media you actively use. This helps us attract new readers and page views. We’ve experimented with a few tools. Results show that Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and YouTube do good things for blog traffic. This includes sharing posts and re-tweeting tweets, etc.

6. Nominate us, recommend us, vote for  us. There are, of course, other things you can do like asking your friends to LIKE us on Facebook or suggesting they subscribe to the blog. We appreciate blog award nominations and votes, like the ones that helped us win the Best Dog Blog Award. The ever-changing market, however, means we need to KEEP the momentum with new awards, new honors, etc.

7. Link to the blog from your blog or site (if you have one). Incoming links make a HUGE difference in how a blog gets ranked by Google. We were thrilled to see our Google Page Rank jump from a 4 to a 5 earlier in 2011. We’d like to earn a 6 by the end of the year. Links, especially keyword-based text links, make a big difference. Ideally, those links come from your main page, but we’re happy to get links from any spot you choose.

Traffic Boosting Experiments

I suppose this plea for help is a very long preamble to some explanations about changes you may have noticed on the blog. I’m doing a few experiments to help boost page views and other blog traffic metrics. Some of these things go against my natural instinct to put your experience, reader experience, first.

Real Content. For example, I tend NOT to write short, SEO-focused posts purely to boost our search-engine rankings. If you’ve ever searched for information, only to click through and find a post that doesn’t say crap about crap, but repeats certain keywords a lot, that … friends … is done purely for the site’s benefit NOT yours. I don’t do that. And, I won’t. Rest easy.

Will I sometimes go back and make sure my subheads and links are search-engine friendly? Yep, but I ALWAYS write for the reader first. And, I ALWAYS will.

Full vs. Partial Feed. I am, however, playing with how the posts post and how the feeds go out to subscribers via email and RSS. My theory has always been that a full feed (meaning the entire post) goes out because it is best for the reader. Much more convenient.

But, here is the rub. If you’re reading exclusively via email or RSS, then that loyalty does NOT show up in my raw traffic numbers at all.

So, for a while, I’m experimenting with only sending out an excerpt via email and RSS (rather than the full post) in hopes readers will click through to the blog each day to read the full post.

I don’t do this lightly, so if it BUGS you, if you HATE it, then PLEASE let me know.

Honestly, if this strategy does not double or even triple traffic, then it isn’t worth it to me. I’d rather those who subscribe have a good experience. (I’m also toying with switching to a new email subscription tool that makes MUCH prettier emails, but that’ll take time I don’t have right now.)

Excerpts With Read More Links on Site. In the past, I’ve also let full posts go live on the main page each day and only excerpted them with “Continue Reading” links at the end of each week. For a while, I’m going to excerpt everything from the get-go to see what (if anything) that does for traffic numbers.

Domino Effect. The downside of these trials is that the excerpts that get pulled into Facebook look icky, using a snippet of our main blog screen rather than my carefully chosen photos or graphics as the excerpt image. I’ll need to figure that out of these changes become more permanent.

Working Hard + Your Help = Goals

I’m working HARD every single day (seriously, weekends no longer exist), and there are many things I can do to increase blog success. But, I really could use your help.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything you have done to help us and everything you will do. It truly does mean a lot.