Category: Blog

Get More Readers on Your Blog – Part 2

This is a continuation post. So few weeks back I had a great time attending Problogger Event in Melbourne. Not only I had a chance to meet interesting people but had to chance to listen to successful bloggers as Chris Garrett, Yaro Starak, Collis Ta’eed, Pip Lincolne and Darren Rowse who are making their share of money blogging and doing that passionately.

You can find notes from this day and other details on the Problogger site. If I had to summarise from my learnings and from the event on ways to get more readers, here a list:

  1. Be passionate about what your topic of interest is [if you are doing it for fun or money]
  2. Be persistent and disciplined
  3. Create Excellent Content [this will get you more traffic and recognition in the long run]
  4. Network passionately with readers, bloggers and competitors
Re-reading what I have written above sounds generic and seems to be applicable elsewhere too but I think these are the key elements. If you take any of the famous blogs which makes money or not these steps are followed there, some more than the others.
If you had to write 5 steps to get more readers, what would your list consist?

Get in first and select an appropriate username

What do you think of the username tejaaa when you see it first on your screen? What thoughts come to your mind? What do you think of the person who holds that username? Some of the thoughts that might go through my mind on seeing such a name are: –

  • Unprofessional
  • Not sure if the person with such a name has a lot to offer
  • Does that even mean something? What’s the story behind that name? [I only think of this question if I have known the person with the username or seen his work]
And yet, I myself am stuck with the username tejaaa on few of the famous services. 
We all recognise the importance of a good/professional email account and when Gmail launched a lot of us were running fast to catch the “professional” username. I even had people offering me upto US $100 just to get my gmail username which is firstname.lastname@gmail.com [which ofcourse I did not sell]. 

But till today I still do not have an appropriate username for a lot of other services I use such as Delicious, Facebook, etc, etc. I was not late in signing up for these services but I think I did not give enough importance of thinking about my username for these services and took the pride in keeping my known old username of tejaaa. When a new service starts a lot of time we don’t know and we don’t think how main stream the site or service will go and hence you do not put in a lot of though.

My story starts in mid 90’s when I first created my first email account on Hotmail. By then I was late to the party and all the possible good email combinations were taken out. And funny enough in rush and excitement I decided to settle for the name tejaaa in front of the email domain at that time. ‘Tej‘ came from first part of my name and ‘aaa‘ came from the fact that I was always aiming for excellence and thus wanting to aim for AAA’s all the time. Now I am a person who likes to have certain degree of structure and uniformity in all I do. So since then do reduce confusion for myself and to maintain uniformity of names across different services I always selected the username tejaaa when signing up for a service [don’t we all do that?]. And this went to the point that even when my firstname+lastname combination were available as username, I was just opting for tejaaa so my friends from other services will be able to search for me easily. This was not bothering me till I started reflecting on this and all of a sudden my own name starting irritating me a lot.

So much so that I updated my username to an appropriate name on LinkedIn and Twitter today [there was a fair bit of pain involved in getting Twitter Lists working again on 3rd party tools]. And then there are services such as Facebook and Delicious that will not give me that option at all [such is life]. So key lessons learned from this are: –

  1. Always select an appropriate and meaningful name, no matter what the service is [exceptions may apply such as for porn sites etc.]
  2. Get in first and get the name, you never know when you will use that service
  3. It’s painful to change your Twitter names from your business card once they are printed, so follow rule no. 1 & 2

Do you have such a story where you are stuck with your old username on Twitter or any other similar service and you regret now?

Get More Readers on Your Blog – Part 1

I am just preparing myself for the Problogger Event in Melbourne tomorrow. I was asking myself as to what I am going to learn tomorrow. Will I be learning something drastically different? I hope so but may be not. Although I don't have a famous blog but I have been blogging for quite a few years, now on and off. I have heard and read some topics over and over again [It is a different thing that I haven't applied them consistently]. In my view I am attending the stories to listen to the stories and experiences and learn something from it.

Now as I embark on my new project, blogging and using my blog as a tool is an important part as my strategy. So I decided to spent exactly 3 minutes in answering a question "How do I get more readers?" and below is 11 points that I came up with.

  1. Decide on topics of your interest
  2. Write Good Content [which adds value to you and will add value to your reader, even if it's 1 reader]
  3. Write often, write more and put in the quality
  4. Spark conversations
  5. Respond to comments
  6. Link to other social media sites
  7. Write and create conversations about others
  8. Invite others to write on your blog/Interview others
  9. Do guest posts on other blogs
  10. Expand your social circle in the field of your interest. Network fast and network well.
  11. Be disciplined and repeat everything above.
After I attend the event tomorrow, I intend to post about my learnings, so expect a second part of this post.

Just Write!

MaheshNBhatt

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” Louis L’Amour

via Twitter.com/MaheshNBhatt

This is more of a reminder for myself than anybody else. With some much information shared everywhere using different streams I fail to write. My excuse is I do not have anything worthwhile to share which hasn’t be shared 1000 times before.

But if I write and I write more, I will be able to bring up my own perspective on a post even though that topic is posted 1000 times before. So keep writing.

This weekend belongs to Dyson

I come to my knees when it comes to Customer Service and Customer Experience and I experienced both when dealing with Dyson this weekend.

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image credit : – srboisvert

In Australia, I haven't come across many service providers and manufacturers which are as good as Apple in terms of their Customer Service. Now I have to add Dyson next to them. I have a three year old vacuum and the bearing in the turbine head has gone bad. I called up Dyson to get a new replacement and happily pay them ~$130 for it. Guess what, not only I got hints and tips to improve the performance of my vacuum cleaner by a pleasant customer service rep, but before I knew it she had organised a replacement turbine to be sent to me for free!

What got me to love Dyson? It was not the free stuff, it was the customer reps politeness and willingness to listen to me and help me out and provide me more than I asked me. She even wanted me to call them again if I had other problems. This is something that not many companies are doing this days. She surprised me!

The result, made my day,  * * * * * stars for Dyson, I knew they had a great product, now I know they have a great team as well. Now the little salesman in me is going to tell this story to ~100 people and even if 1 person buys a Dyson product because of my story, it will all be worth my time.

Virgin Plans Launch of iPad only magazine -Now What’s Next?

Media_httpmashablecom_wpxbe
via mashable.com

What’s next now? I don’t think it will be very long before airlines remove all that paper stuff from the magazine pouch and just have an iPad instead [or an equivalent or better decide].

The device can be used for:

1. To hold airlines own website which does not need to be printed any more. It just needs to be updated on the iPad

2. The device can hold it’s updated food menus

3. The device can hold deals and offers from other advertisers that sign up with the airlines

4. The device can hold movies, music etc. The device can also connect wirelessly with the server and can media of all sorts can be accessed from there

5. The device can make existing screens redundant as people can just use these devices instead to entertain themselves. This also have a lot of advantage as people can hold it the way they want, in the angle they want etc. They don’t have to worry about the person in front of their seat constantly reclining the seat!

6. They may not even need to buy newspapers and magazines as their electronic edition can be accessed from the iPad like device

7. People can browse Internet and connect to other sites. They don’t need to worry about lugging their own laptops in the flights and squeeze them in the limited space they have.

8. Competitive advantage for Airlines introducing this.

Cannot wait myself to see it all happening.

Posting on Posterous from iPad and iPhone

OK, have I told enough as to how enjoyable it is to post/blog on this Posterous blog? It is a great experience to say the least and I look forward to it’s continual evolvement. But sometimes I have the urge to post something from my iPhone or iPad while I am browsing the Internet. I just want to have the luxury of having the bookmarklet available when I need it. So I just added the existing Posterous bookmarklet to both my iPhone and iPad.

Bookmarks

Now while I am browsing through Internet and want to post something through the blog, all I have to do is invoke these bookmarklets to post to Posterous. The results are below.                                              

I pray that Sachin Agarwal doesn’t come and kill me for posting the iPhone image :). Obviously the bookmarklet was never meant to be used on my iPhone and hence the issue with the size of the pop up window but it still does the job until there is a bookmarklet created specially for iPhone.

Tpad

From my iPad

Iphone

From my iPhone