To test whether your blog has adjustable fonts in your browser there is a font size setting. In Internet Explorer and FireFox it is under the “View -> Text Size” option where you can increase or decrease the font. If you do this and your blog’s text doesn’t change that means you have hard coded pixel values for your font settings. You may have to switch this to emphasis values using the “em” font size setting or use good old traditional font tags. If this sort of HTML and stylesheet coding is beyond you, enlist the help of your local web monkey or ask your friend who is a web monkey.

If you are absolutely determined to use a fixed font since any other font sizes totally wrecks your blog design consider making it big, not huge, but big enough so that any human can read it. You wouldn’t want to lose readers because they can’t read your blog entries would you?

I checked and was surprised to find out that I had never submitted my blogs to the Yahoo! directory so I spent 10 minutes getting it done. As a rule I don’t consider most directories too important but there are a handful of prominent directories that are worth the time, especially if you are having trouble getting your blogs into search engines. The Yahoo! directory is definitely worth your time given the prominence of Yahoo! so follow Wayne’s instructions on how to do it. Once you have done that move on to DMOZ (see below).

All Powerful DMOZ

I especially suggest you submit your site to DMOZ - The Open Directory Project because Google places a lot of value on DMOZ backlinks.

If you are interested in more directories to submit your site to take a look at this post about Free Directories from Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Two Vital Rules

There are two important rules to follow when submitting your blog to directories -

1. Make sure you follow the instructions to the letter. It’s very important you submit your blog to the right category in the directory and carefully fill out all the pertinent details about your blog.
2. You must have patience. Unfortunately some people will find that no matter how hard they try their site will never get listed. Some sites get listed in a day or two. I don’t know how it works but I do know that the best thing to do is submit and forget about it and definitely DO NOT submit more than once. There are human beings at the other end updating these directories so you don’t want to do anything that will make their job difficult.

While directories won’t send you much traffic they are important factors in your overall backlink strategy and since it doesn’t take much time it’s worth doing it for at least the big two - Yahoo! and DMOZ. If you have the time it doesn’t hurt to use the other directories as well, just don’t expect amazing results.

The subscribe to comments plugin allows your blog readers to subscribe via email to comments made to your blog posts. The plugin is very versatile and requires some technical skills to install and customize but as long as you are used to playing with your WordPress themes you should be fine.

I usually install this plugin to produce a tickbox in the comments entry area in each blog post, which if ticked will email the comment maker each time a new comment is added to the topic. Some people have it automatically set to “on” if a person makes a comment but I prefer to leave the choice up to my readers. The plugin also includes a subscriptions manager area so your readers can change their settings without contacting you.

While WordPress comes with a default RSS feed for comments it’s smart to have an email option available. I personally prefer to subscribe to things like comments via email however I will use RSS for the main topics of a blog. As per usual the more options you give to your readers the better.

Subscribe to comments is a fantastic tool for keeping the conversations active at your blog. It makes your blog “stickier” bringing users back to provide more commentary as the conversation continues. If you actively encourage comment conversations at your blog - a smart traffic strategy - then this plugin is a must.

A fantastic traffic tip is to sit down and recount a story about something that just happened to you or one that you remember from your past that had strong impact on you. It’s best if you can tie it into the theme of your blog somehow and since most people blog about something relating to their lives it should not be too hard.

Don’t worry if you are not that great a writer, just think about how you would verbally tell the story and type it out. Keep it simple, you don’t have to impress people with your fantastic vocabulary, just let it flow naturally. The spellcheck will fix the most obvious errors and a good once over should bring it up to publishable standards (except for you perfectionists out there of course).

Stories are fantastic human attention grabbers. They invoke emotion and create that magic ingredient called empathy, which is one of THE best traffic building tools available to you. The more your audience can empathise with you and your stories the more rapport you will establish. Your loyal audience will grow as they come back each day to learn more about your life and how it reflects on their life.

What Is A Pillar?

A pillar is the foundation for a structure that carries weight and provides the main support. Without pillars the foundation collapses. The same holds true for blog traffic if you are aiming for long term stability and growth. You need pillars, but in this case you need “content pillars” since blogging is all about content.

There is a style of blogging that is very much based on news. Whatever is happening in the moment is written about by the blogger. Sometimes a blogger can bring together views and news from many sources, often gleamed from tracking RSS feeds from various news sources online, adding a touch of personal opinion and presented in easy to digest summary posts.

This is a fine strategy if you don’t care too much about long term growth. If you can commit yourself to maintaining news posts and keep your knowledge and your blog up to date you can build quite a good following of readers. The problem is that when you stop posting often or your motivation moves elsewhere you largely have a blog full of old news and your traffic will start to dwindle as a result.

Content Pillars

This is where content pillars come in. A content pillar is a major article or feature that has long term value, which is not time or event dependent. The most common form of content pillar on a blog is a how-to article written in a tutorial style. Often the more practical the better.

Good examples include “how to choose the best domain name” or “how to repair a leaky tap”. These topics are going to remain interesting and valuable to people long after they are posted. Even if you stop blogging altogether chances are your traffic to these posts will remain relatively stable. In this sense your blog becomes a resource, not just a news distribution point.

To apply this principle to your blog all you need to do is sit down and churn out some quality articles specifically teaching your audience something relevant to the topic you blog about. Don’t just rehash what other bloggers are doing or give your opinion of current events, create something of “pillar” quality and your traffic will increase as will the long term value of your blog.

Of course that’s not to say you can’t write a blog purely for news, just be clear on your purpose for blogging and be especially careful if your goals are long term and your motivation is short term.

The best blogs usually offer a mix of the two types of content - “ageless” instructional pillar articles mixed with a good helping of current events. As I mentioned in the The Evolution Of Blog Traffic, pillar articles are often the linchpins for your explosive growth periods and it’s very hard to grow big without them.

I have a blog traffic methodology that I teach in my Blog Traffic School course (soon to be launched) that is focused on The Evolution Of Blog Traffic. This is a concept that describes how blogs move through different growth stages, which unless you are famous or lucky, all bloggers have to go through. It goes like this.

The Evolution Of Blog Traffic
1. Start your brand new blog - no content
2. Produce content including key “pillars” articles
3. Network with other blogs using comments, trackbacks and email
4. Other bloggers you trackbacked/commented start to monitor your blog, usually through RSS
5. Start to accumulate links from other blogs, particularly when you publish a pillar article
6. “A” list (popular) blogger finds your site and links to one of your pillar articles, flooding you with traffic
7. More “A” listers are made aware of your site and each pillar article you publish has a compounding traffic effect
8. Rinse and repeat, growing off the back of network effects and quality content

In a nutshell this is a typical blog traffic growth pattern. Your blog is likely somewhere within the cycle depending on how much effort you put into producing good content and making sure other people know about it.

If you have only just started your blog then your first job is to produce great content working particularly on some pillar content. If you already have a substantial collection of good original content but not the traffic you would expect from it, work your network by contributing comments and trackbacking other bloggers. Bloggers love to see other bloggers mention their site and the trackback ensures they know about it increasing your exposure and the likelihood that they will do a post about your blog exposing you to their audience.

The recent comments plugin for WordPress blogs is an essential traffic building tool. The basic functionality is to allow you to list a summary of the comments made to your blog listed in chronological order with the most recent at the top. It is a customizable plugin allowing you to play with different variables by using different lines of code. I usually use the basic settings and list the five most recent comments in my blog sidebar.

How This Plugin Builds Traffic

The key element here is a concept known as social proof. Social proofing is an everyday human behaviour that causes people to take action based on what they see others doing. A fantastic but simple example of this behaviour is when you see a crowd of people with their heads tilted skyward looking at something airborne or on a building - most people walking by will also look up to see what all the fuss is about - that is social proof.

The whole idea of having comments within a blog is part of social proofing. When a new person visits your blog for the first time and they see other people leaving comments and interacting with your content the new visitor experiences a social proofing feeling about the validity and credibility of what you are publishing.

The new visitor thinks - “Hmm, there are comments here, that means other people read this site so there must be something good, I’m going to read too”.

By using the comments plugin you further enhance your social proofing generating repeat readership and instant credibility. Just be sure of course that you have some comments before using the plugin!

The other good point is that this plugin can increase your pageviews and visitor length time as readers click recent comments taking them to individual blog entries where they can get involved with the conversation you started by writing your article. Increased pageviews and visitor length time are two very important metrics when it comes to building a popular blog.

RSS Scanning

Just as some people prefer to scan headings in articles to determine what they want to read the same goes for RSS. While personally I dislike seeing summaries in RSS feeds forcing me to click through to the web page version of the blog article I realize some people prefer summaries so they can scan quickly.

My opinion is that both full text and summaries should be available and the options should be the responsibility of the RSS reader software to provide, not the blogger, giving the power to the user to choose which format of RSS they want to read. For the moment though many RSS readers don’t allow the option and of course as long as bloggers only activate the summary version within their blog software feed readers will only be able to offer summaries.

Offer Both Options

The best solution is to offer both a full text and summary RSS feed from your blog so your readers can choose which to subscribe to. This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to implement depending on which blogging platform you use. If you don’t have the ability to control and switch between full and summary text for your blog feed than using a service like FeedBurner can help you to do it.

Using FeedBurner To Create Multiple Feeds

Using FeedBurner you can create two feeds that both draw from the same root feed from your blog. Within FeedBurner you can change the option and choose how much text to show (truncate) your RSS feed. Simple create two feeds, call one ‘full’ and the other ’summary’, use the truncate function within FeedBurner to limit the feed for the summary version and then link to them both on your blog.

It’s definitely not the best solution but given the variables involved with all the different blogging platforms it’s the most widely applicable method. I suspect as blogging software evolves more and more options will become available to control your feed. If you presently use WordPress, which I use, you get reasonably good control over your feeds. Services like Blogger unfortunately don’t provide much control over your RSS feed so the sooner you upgrade to a professional solution the better.

Headings Capture Attention

From a copywriting point of view headings and sub-headings have proven to be effective at capturing and retaining the attention of readers. Copywriting’s purpose is usually to generate sales, or specifically to elicit an emotionally triggered response to the words written on paper or screen. While blogging doesn’t necessarily have the same purpose the techniques are just as sound.

Headings gain the attention of your readers and sub-headings ensure attention is retained from start to finish. Headings break down blocks of text to less daunting segments. Tests have been conducted on heading use which demonstrated that even if non-related headings were used they still were more effective at capturing the attention of readers than not having headings at all.

Speed Scanner

Many net users are notoriously impatient speed readers. They look to digest information as quickly as possible and only “screen” content by scanning over the page quickly to see if anything interests them. For this type of user the article heading and all the sub-headings are the most vital element to keep them reading your writing. If you don’t have them chances are they will completely ignore your article.

Flow Of Ideas

Headings help you as an author to sequence your thoughts and arguments into a logical order. I structure a lot of my major articles by thinking of the top headings first and then go through and fill out the content. This gives my writing structure and a blueprint I can follow to help get my ideas from my head to a computer effectively.

Apply Headings After The Fact

Sometimes you may have an article just pore out of you and you don’t want to stop the flow to break things up into headings. Once you have finished your article go through and break up each significant new idea into a section and label it with a nice attention grabbing heading.

It’s a simple rule - headings, use them!

Defining Your Niche

The most important thing is to pick a niche that is 100% in-line with your blogging goals. If your blog is designed to generate new leads for your small business you better produce content that is relevant to your target audience - your prospective customers.

If you aren’t exactly sure what your target niche is yet, don’t worry, start writing about what interests you and your audience will define itself. If it’s not the audience you want slowly take your blog in new directions and see where you end up. You are the captain of your ship and it’s never too late to change course. You may lose some readers along the way if you keep changing focus, but eventually you will settle on a mix that brings in the right type of people to meet your traffic goals. It can be quite surprising to learn what people find interesting.

If you already know the audience you want ensure your content is interesting and relevant to them and keep testing. See which articles get a better response and follow the methods that work best. Always remember to ask yourself “how does this benefit my audience?” and work towards helping others. If you aren’t blogging purely for pleasure than you have to consider what others want first, beware of getting stuck too much in your own ego.

Keep Things Personal

One of the true strengths of blogging is the power of personality. Many bloggers blog in a traditional sense, diarising their lives each week with personal anecdotes, stories and opinion. This is fine for hobby and personal blogs but if we are talking business blogging you don’t want to turn people away by complaining about how big your ass is after all the food you ate at Christmas, posting a bunch of pictures to prove it!

To get the right kind of traffic to a business blog you want to project your humanity but also stay tightly on-topic. One of the best ways to do this is to blog about your business mistakes. By explaining how you went wrong, what you learnt as a result and how you dealt with the situation you provide fantastic content. Your readers connect with you (rapport building) because they make mistakes too, all humans do and you provide a practical lesson that your readers will learn so as not to make the same mistake you made. You also demonstrate your professionalism by explaining how maturely you dealt with the situation. Of course this assumes everything did work out reasonably well, but I’m sure you get my point.

The key to good business blog traffic is personality and focus without too much of either ingredient. You don’t want to express your deepest darkest fears, fantasies and passions (unless that is the purpose of your blog - voyeur blogging perhaps), but you do want to inject your emotions, personality and unbiased opinion into your articles. Emotive and personal opinions should be used to enhance your content, not dilute it with rambling off-topic diatribe.