Principles of Effective Blog Design

This is a guest post by Peep Laja, CEO of Traindom.

People judge books by the cover, and other people by their looks.

Take a look at these two men:

Now answer these questions (you can’t choose “neither”):

Which one would you rather ask investment advice from?Which one would you rather have babysit your children?Which one would you rather have cook your dinner?

… and so on. You don’t know anything about these men. Yet you make assumptions and can even take decisions based on their looks.

What does that have to do with your blog? Everything!

“As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.”—Dr. Brent Coker

Dr. Brent Coker studied the impact of attractive websites on human behavior. Websites that are more attractive and include more trimmings create a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in consumers.

If somebody knows you well, they don’t care about your looks that much. If they see you for the first time, looks matter a lot.

The content of your blog is always more important than the design, but you need to woo people with your design first. You draw them in with design, and keep with content.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”—Steve Jobs

The following advice will help you design a better blog and this in turn will help you sell more (whether you’re selling free sign-ups, coaching sessions, products, or whatever).

Who is your site for? What are they looking for? Value function over aesthetics: 76% of people want it to be easy for them to find what they want.

What kind of blog layouts are they used to using? Remember, people spend most of their time on other websites, not yours. Avoid totally new and never-seen-before layouts. Your car isn’t unique, and your house might not be either.

For return visitors, search is vital. Make sure your search box is clearly visible (above the fold), at least 27 characters wide and that the search can actually find relevant stuff. WordPress’s built-in search is very poor, and it lists the results by date, not relevance. Use a plugin like Relevanssi to improve it tremendously.

Use plenty of white space. Don’t fill every possible space with banners, messages, or whatever else. The more breathing room there is, the easier it is for visitors to consume the information you produce.

Here’s an excellent post on using white space.

You should never publish a blog post without an image. A visual communicates your ideas much faster than any text can.

The best images follow the rule of thirds: an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

Image licensed under Creative Commons

See how the image on the right is more interesting? That’s rule of thirds in action.

Content and clarity are important parts of the design.

What is this place? What can I do here? How is it useful? First-time visitors need to get answers to these questions within their first seconds on your blog.

Make sure it’s possible to clearly understand what your blog is about and who’s it for—no matter which page the visitors land on. The better you build a connection between your reader and your blog, the higher the chances they will stick around.

People start reading your website from the top-left corner. The fixations go in order from left to right. That’s where you want to place the most important information.

The text on your blog should be beautiful and easy to read.

Use large fonts (at least 14px), short lines (see the width of Tynan’s blog posts), and lots of white space. Create a new paragraph every three or four lines, and a subheading after every two to three paragraphs.

The best blog typography lends a meaningful purpose to the content while triggering emotions in your readers in the process. Besides picking a beautiful web font, make sure that different text elements have a different look and feel (main headings, subheadings, regular text, italic text, quotes, lists, and so on).

Here are 10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and how they did it. Also take a look at Space, a WordPress theme designed for reading.

You can use TypeTester to test and compare different fonts, sizes and so on.

Over 95% of people won’t buy anything on their first visit. Hence you should not even try to sell to your first-time visitors. Instead, try to get them to come back so you can build a relationship and add value before you make them an offer of any kind.

How can you do that?

Invite them to subscribe to your RSS feed (and state how many people already do as a type of social proof).Use a lead magnet to attract them to sign up to your email list.Invite them to subscribe to your blog posts over email (Feedburner is a good tool for this).Ask them to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Make sure you focus on one of these options most (email list is best), but give a choice of up to three options.

This is how aext.net is doing it:

The aext.net follow invitation

The best signup forms:

put the form labels above the input box (not next to it)give clear reasons to take actionhave the submit button say what’s coming nextask for as little user data as possible—an email address is enough in most cases.

The more fields people have to fill in to subscribe, the less likely they’ll be to do it. Email personalization by name is not working as well anymore anyway, so you might as well not ask for those details.

The One Question, a site helping people find their life purpose, has 30% of new visitors sign up via this form every day:

The One Question subscription form

Why is it so effective? The form offers the exact thing people search for on Google to come to the site. If you offer people what they want, they are happy to sign up.

You don’t need to hire a fancy designer and pay top dollar for your logo. Even huge budgets might not make much difference here.

You can create a beautiful logo using text. Pick a beautiful fontand a background color you like—and voilà! A designer from Edicy took just 15 minutes to create this logo for an imaginary company (Tajo Oja):

Edicy's text-only logo example, by Tajo.ee

Stock photos seem like a good idea, but 90% of them are utterly fake and cheesy. Have you googled “women laughing alone with salad” recently?

How can you expect to be taken seriously if you feature suits shaking hands and half-naked women measuring each others waists?

Some people advocate that given the proliferation of low-cost cameras and smart phones, your own photography should be used rather than stock.  I agree.

Let’s say you like the color red, but can’t decide what other colors match your favorite shade of red.

You don’t have to guess or ask your friends. You can use online color matching tools for this:

That’s actually not the right question to ask. You should only change it if there’s a real need behind it. What’s not working for you today? Put the goal first, and the redesign second.

Will the new design help you get more clicks to your ads? Increase pageviews or signups?

Ideally you’ll see your blog as a living, breathing organism that never stops evolving. Constantly A/B test your most important pages and design elements, and measure the improvement. You can only improve what you measure.

Peep Laja is the CEO of Traindom, online software for building online courses and membership sites.

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50% Discount Ends in 36 Hours on the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit

A few weeks ago here on ProBlogger we launched a product I’m really proud of—the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit written by the Web Marketing Ninja (the guy who has helped me shape my own blogging business model over the last few years).

The kit is essentially based around three things:

a comprehensive ebooka library of 21 templates, documents and examples to help you develop your own blogging business modela 70-minute bonus recording of a Q&A webinar that the Ninja, Chris Garrett, and myself did last week for buyers of the kit.

The kit is really about helping bloggers who want to get serious about turning their blog into a business to do just that. You can read the full details of what’s included and who it’s for here.

We launched the Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing Kit with a limited-time 50% discount (down from $99.99 to $49.99).

The kit has had some really positive reviews and feedback so we’ve left the discount open a little longer than we’d anticipated, but that discount ends in around 36 hours time (this Friday, US time).

So if you’re looking for some teaching from an experienced online marketer on how to make your blog profitable, grab your copy of the kit today.

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6 Lessons I Learned Selling a $50,000 Website

This guest post is by Chris The Traffic Blogger.

My hands were shaking like crazy and I had to focus very hard on entering my bank account information correctly. Just minutes prior a buyer had been approved for my website on Flippa (see the actual auction page here), and I had to somehow manage to calm down to fill out my escrow payment options.

The bid was an astonishing $50,000!

Yeah, that amount was almost enough money for the down payment and closing costs of my first home combined. Even now, when I think about it, I still get chills up my spine at the sheer amount of money that my website sold for. If I had been a little more patient, I may have been able to sell it for closer to $75,000, especially with the steady $4,000 it was earning per month on autopilot.

Today I’d like to touch on six major lessons I’ve learned from selling my first website for so much money. It’s my way of saying thank you to Darren, Georgina, and all the contributors of this fine community for your support and advice over the years. Also to you, the reader, for your comments, emails, and patronage.

I felt that escrow was essential for providing a safe environment for selling my website. The way it works is like this: if the buyer cheats the seller, then escrow holds the money until the seller’s goods are returned. If the seller cheats the buyer, then escrow charges the seller for the transfer fee and cancels the transaction entirely.

I also liked all the options I had for presenting my information on Flippa, such as attachments, a chart of the last year’s earnings, and even Google analytics. All this information was readily available on the auction page, along with countless other little details.

The only major snag in selling the site occurred when the buyer couldn’t figure out how to use my EPP codes and login information to transfer domains from my hosting provider to his.

This was one of the reasons why I went through so much stress and agony trying to sell my website—I didn’t totally understand the process either, nor did I have the experience of knowing how to transfer the domains to the buyer.

I lost about three nights’ sleep before I calmed down enough to come up with a solution to the transfer issue. Instead of trying to get the transfers done between the two of us, I had the buyer change my personal information on the domains to his and also my passwords so that he essentially controlled my domains.

Now the transfer process was on the buyer, not between the buyer and seller, since he owned the domains. This decision allowed us to move forward with the escrow payment process, instead of getting bogged down in figuring out the technical issues of transferring between hosting providers. I think I actually had a few hours of sleep that night!

I had a blogspot.com domain changed to .org about two years into the site’s existence. When I went to enter my .org site’s age I put down three years. However, Flippa detected that the .org extension was only available for the past year and said that I was basically contradicting the evidence Flippa had discovered.

There was no way to go back without completely cancelling the auction, so I probably lost a few potential buyers to this mistake.

I knew why I was selling my site six months prior, when I decided that I wanted to focus on other projects. I intended on using the influx of quick cash and free time to build up other projects.

To achieve the selling of my site which was so dependent upon me to survive, I then had to go about the process of replacing myself with a team of writers that could blog in my stead. The new owner was pleased to see a writing staff, as that meant he could take over without needing to create his own content. This was the only reason I was able to sell the site in the first place—otherwise it would be like Darren selling problogger.net years ago when he was the sole contributor. It just wouldn’t have worked.

Google Docs were amazing for listing all the account logins, instructions, and writer information that was needed to run the site without me.

Given the time difference between the buyer and myself (I was on the US East coast; he was in Malaysia), Google docs provided us with a convenient method for storing information and communicating, and it worked out far better than hundreds of small emails would have.

I understand that you most likely do not have a website worth $50,000, but that you would love to get it to that point. If you are serious about blogging and want to turn your hobby into a business, then you need to create a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is simply a system for obtaining leads, building trust, and finally converting leads into buyers. Even if this is simply a post series that you link to, it’s better than nothing. Whether you use email marketing or advertise products on your sidebar, you need to have some method for determining how much money you can make per new subscriber to your site. This will enable you to make calculations regarding what services you could afford to outsource to and still make a profit while growing your site.

Even though building backlinks is crucial for growing your website, you still have to focus a large portion of your effort on your sales funnel, or else you’ll be gambling instead of taking calculated risks.

I’ve learned a lot from this process, and unfortunately I couldn’t possibly fit it all into a single post. I have compiled everything I learned from this experience into a downloadable report which can also be viewed online if you don’t wish to download it. There’s no opt-in: this is my way of saying thanks to you!

Have you ever sold a website? I’d love to hear what you learned from the process, too.

Chris is a self proclaimed expert at showing bloggers how they can get traffic, build communities, make money online and be successful. You can find out more at The Traffic Blogger.

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Is Facebook Trying to Kill Privacy? [OPINION]

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Facebook has finally done it. It’s just a few updates away now from euthanizing the concept of privacy, already ailing on its network.

Timelines and Open Graph, introduced at this week’s f8 conference, sit on either edge of the sword that’s just been run through privacy’s heart. It is finished. It is done. This turn of events probably makes CEO Mark Zuckerberg happy. Let’s look back:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

That was Zuckerberg’s January 2010 argument that sharing is the new social norm. But that’s only half of the sharing equation. Zuckerberg didn’t talk about the other half: privacy.

The first big change Zuckerberg revealed on stage was Timeline, the completely overhauled version of profile pages. No longer is your Facebook profile about what you did recently–now it’s about everything you’ve done on Facebook and beyond.

SEE ALSO: Facebook’s New Profiles: First Impressions

The Timeline interface lays out everything you’ve shared on Facebook. One of the new features, Map, lays out your checkins on a world map. My map is sparse because I primarily use Foursquare to share my location. But now that I see how sparse that map looks, I feel compelled to start sharing my location via Facebook.

In addition to laying out everything you already shared for the world to see, the Timeline encourages you to share more than ever about your life so far. Millions of people are likely to post their baby pictures so that the beginning of their Timelines — birth — isn’t just an empty box.

Timeline is just the appetizer. The second announcement, the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is what will forever transform the world’s largest social network.

There are a couple of key changes that deserve mentioning. The first is the addition of customizable actions and gestures. No longer do apps prompt you just to “like” something on Facebook. Instead, you’ll share that you “hiked a trail” or “rode your bike” or “kissed a girl” (and liked it). Any action can be shared via Facebook, and the only limit is the imagination of developers.

The second addition is the new permissions screen for giving apps access to your Facebook account. It’s more robust and explains exactly what an app will be sharing with it. The result is that the prompt will only appear once. Once you accept, the app can share exactly what you’re doing to your Facebook wall as you’re doing it.

There is no longer a “Would you like to post this to Facebook?” prompt. It just posts. When you run with Nike+, it gets posted. When you use your favorite cooking site to make a new dish, it gets posted. When you go to bed with a device tracking your sleep patterns, it gets posted.

Everything can, and eventually will, get posted. Facebook has done something nobody has ever been able to do at scale: It has enabled passive sharing.

In 2009, Mashable‘s CEO and founder Pete Cashmore argued on CNN that privacy was dead, and social media was holding the smoking gun:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

“Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.”

While I agree with his assertion that in an age where attention is king, privacy is simply an illusion, I disagree about the murderer. Sure, Twitter, Flickr, Google and others played a part in privacy’s death, but Facebook made the killing blow.

But thanks to what Facebook launched at f8, we’re at the point of no return. Facebook’s passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.

Sharing with just your friends doesn’t protect your privacy. I know the people at Facebook will disagree and argue that users can control what is shared with whom. But this is simply an illusion that makes us feel better about all the sharing we have done and are about to do.

We may not notice the impact on our lives immediately. But it won’t be long until your life is on display for all of your friends to see, and then we’ll all know what Facebook has wrought.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Editor-at-Large Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

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Mashable is the largest independent online news site dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. With more than 50 million monthly pageviews and 14 million unique monthly visitors, Mashable has one of the most engaged online news communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

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New Net Neutrality Rules Become Official

The revised Net neutrality rules that the FCC approved in December became official on Friday when they entered the Federal Register. They will take effect on November 20.

Net neutrality advocates have long lobbied for laws that prevent Internet providers from blocking competitive content, charging for faster connections to certain sites, and a slew of other tactics that would destroy the “open web.” Meanwhile, broadband and wireless providers have argued that it’s government regulation — not Internet provider discrimination — that threatens the open web.

While the new rules [PDF] do prevent fixed broadband providers (cable, fiber and DSL) from blocking access to sites and applications, they are different for wireless providers and not as clear as advocates on either side would like.

The rules lay out three basic protections:

Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics and commercial terms of their broadband services. No blocking: fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services. No unreasonable discrimination: fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

When a draft of the rules came out in December, roughly 80 grassroots organizations signed an open letter avowing their disapproval. The letter complained that the Order “leaves wireless users vulnerable to application blocking and discrimination,” uses “unnecessarily broad definitions,” and claims that specialized services “would create a pay-for-play platform that would destroy today’s level playing field.”

Wireless providers, which are in favor of minimal regulation, also complained. Verizon filed an appeal, Sen. Mitch McConnell said that the rules would “harm investment, stifle innovation and lead to job losses,” and the Republican party reportedly started planning its repeal within an hour of the rules’ approval.

The House of Representatives voted to overturn the rules in April, but the resolution is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled senate. President Obama has threatened to veto it even if it does.

Now that the rules are official, however, all parties are free to launch their legal offensives. Get ready for another round of lobbying, damning public statements and lawsuits.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun

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7 Powerful Reasons Why Companies Will Pay for You to Blog

This guest post is by Lina Nguyen of Words That Influence.

Influential bloggers are being paid top dollar to write sponsored posts (thousands of dollars per post is not unheard of). They’re gifted with luxury items, cars and overseas trips, and invited to events previously exclusive to A-List celebrities and long-established journalists.

Bloggers worldwide are proving to be fierce competition for mainstream media, as companies decide how to get the best return on investment for their marketing buck.

If you have the following seven things, then your blog and social media networks will be highly valuable digital assets, sought after by major companies.

Even if you don’t quite have the same reach and clout as some of these bloggers, you can still apply these principles to negotiate your own deals with smaller businesses in your niche.

ProBlogger Training Day event speakers Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace are travel bloggers who landed a corporate sponsorship deal with a major airline, to cover a high profile international sporting event. At the end of this post, we’ll see these seven points in action, as we take a look at their success in attracting sponsorship from a major brand.

The people in a profitable niche for major companies tend to be decision makers, consumers or influencers in the buying process, for either highly priced items (like cars, technology, travel or finance), or highly consumed items (like food, health products, household goods).

How do you know if your niche is profitable? Just take a look around in mainstream media. If companies are already paying big bucks to advertise to your audience on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, then you’re in a profitable niche.

If you’ve created a group of people who gather on your blog and social media networks, then what you’ve created has the potential to be extremely financially valuable.

Companies always want to know where their target market is hanging out and get in front of them. Trouble is, as outsiders, whose primary motivation is to sell, they’re not exactly welcomed.

That’s why they’re willing to pay to get access to your tightly formed online community, which has its very own culture, rules and etiquette. Your intimate knowledge of how your community thinks and behaves has a valuable price tag on it.

Being in a commercially attractive niche and having impressive reach in numbers (in terms of blog traffic, subscribers and social media followers) makes your community really valuable. A big corporate client will be after the exposure you can give them.

What kind of numbers are valuable? That all depends.

Essentially, it comes down to the demand to reach your niche, how targeted your audience is and what other advertising avenues are available to the company to reach that specific audience.

The more profitable the niche, and the harder those communities are to access, the more money a company will be willing to pay you to get in front of them.

This is what makes a blogger much more appealing to companies for advertising potential than say, television, print media, billboards and flyers.

Bloggers engage with their audience, who eagerly share their thoughts and feelings. In addition, they actively give bloggers permission to communicate with them, by following or subscribing.

Engaged communities also show clear signs of activity, through comments, posts and tweets. This is valuable in the eyes of a potential marketer, because an active community gives the company a way to evaluate and measure a campaign’s success.

An indicator of a successful marketing campaign is one where the target market responds to it, hopefully positively (although a highly engaged negative response can also be seen as successful, depending on the company’s objectives).

A blogger with a highly engaged and active community is more likely to have influence, which is what’s really going to make a company take notice.

A company will pay for your ability to help get the word out, your referral or your endorsement.

If you can do all three, to an audience who will listen to you and believe you, then you are in a very strong negotiating position to command a price.

A bigger company with a large marketing budget is most likely interested in building brand awareness, exposure and chipping away at a longer-term objective to improve market perception.

The good news for a blogger is that they’re unlikely to expect a huge spike in sales from working on a one-off campaign with you. This eases the pressure off you, relieving expectation that you’ll influence your readers to rush out and buy the product.

Having said that, if you do have the clout to change attitudes, beliefs and market perception about a particular product or service—or you can get people to buy in noticeable numbers—then that will clearly make you extremely valuable in the corporate marketplace.

If you have all of the above advantages, then what a company wants is to align with your brand. You’re obviously credible and your brand says something that they want to be perceived as being.

They want your audience to think they’re worthy of attention, too.

Is your going rate less than the cost of advertising with traditional media power houses, or a celebrity endorsement? Most bloggers are. You’re instantly more appealing, price-wise—especially if you’re willing to accept non-cash payments which the company can offer you at low cost to them.

More importantly, if a major company is willing to do business with you, then they see you as a profitable return on investment.

To demonstrate these seven points, let’s take a look at a blog that’s had success in attracting big-brand sponsorship.

yTravel Blog's Caz and Craig Makepeace

After blogging for a little over a year, Craig Makepeace and Caz Makepeace secured a sponsorship deal with Australia’s leading international and domestic airline, Qantas, to travel around New Zealand and cover the Rugby World Cup.

If you would like to hear more about the specific steps they took to secure this sponsorship, you can listen to my exclusive interview with Caz on my blog, Mother’s Love Letters.

Blog: y Travel Blog
Niche and Community: Travelers, world-wide.
Sub-niches: Independent world travel, working holidays, family travel.
Reach: 

50,000+ visitors a month70,000+ Page Views per month3,000+ Facebook fans5,000+ Twitter followers1,200+ subscribers

Level of engagement: Average 15-20 comments per blog post. Daily social media interaction. Reply to almost every blog comment. 12,000+ Tweets to date. Facebook fan page is the most interactive and engaged in this niche.
Influence: Klout Score: 70

Brand:   Fun-loving, friendly travellers who are about making your life a story to tell. They believe life is all about the memories, so they make sure they live their life in a way that creates many memories through travel. Their goal is to help people get inspired, get informed and get going.

The deal: All expenses paid 12 day tour of New Zealand, doing activities and attending Rugby World Cup matches. Qantas will also be promoting the bloggers. In return, all Craig and Caz have to do, is have fun, blog, Facebook, and Tweet!

What impressed Qantas most: The bloggers’ level of engagement with their active community.

A key secret to their success: Guest posting. This was key to growing traffic.

Their top tips: Be clear about your brand and make it authentic. Network and build relationships in order to build your community. Social media is crucial, but look at offline networking opportunities, too. Value yourself. Consider how short-term income opportunities for advertising and sponsored posts that compromise content quality may affect your blog perception and brand in the long term. Learn how to write a sponsorship proposal. Don’t be limited by the fact that you’re a new blogger. Every big blogger starts off by being a new blogger.

Is corporate sponsorship for bloggers something that’s common in your niche? Are you looking at aligning yourself with a company, as a monetization strategy?

Lina Nguyen is a blogger in the Australian Mummy Bloggers niche. She is also a copywriter, digital media consultant and online communications expert at Words That Influence.

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How the World Uses Social Networks [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Amidst the Facebook-centric society in which we now seem to live, it’s important to remember that groups of people around the world use social networks differently. We’ve taken a look at the social media breakdown in 10 countries — how they’re engaging with social networks, blogs and Internet culture.

Based on data provided by Nielsen, Facebook is clearly the favored social network. However, you might be surprised to see how runners-up like Twitter and LinkedIn rank on a global scale.

Take a peek at our infographic, and please let us know in the comments below which social networks are popular (or gaining popularity) in your country of residence.

Editor’s Note: Because reliable data about emerging online markets like China and India is difficult to source, they were regrettably omitted from this graphic.

Infographic design by Nick Sigler

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

Infographic design by Lorena Guerra

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NASA Details the Next 25 Years of Space Exploration

NASA has just published the Global Exploration Roadmap, a document detailing the agency’s plans for the next 25 years of space exploration. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the future of space technology, travel and exploration.

The 38-page document was developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, which is comprised by 14 space agencies including Roscosmos (Russia), UKSA (the UK), CNSA (China) and NASA. It’s a vision of robotic and human space exploration within the Solar System, with the premise humans may one day live and work in space, the Moon and, perhaps, Mars.

The document is only a first iteration of the roadmap. But it’s very detailed and contains two post-ISS mission scenarios for the next 25-year period: “Asteroid Next” and “Moon Next.” Both options emphasize sustainability, but prioritize the order of sending humans to the Moon and asteroids differently.

Both scenarios are exciting, including a human mission to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) in the 2030's, a deep space habitat (DSH) in 2034, and – in the Moon Next scenario – a human mission to the moon in the 2020's. The step next step would be sending humans to Mars, a dream many of us would love to see come true in our lifetimes.

Global Exploration Roadmap further details key objectives of space exploration and its impact on the economy and Earth safety. A special chapter is devoted to long-range human exploration strategy and the many challenges it brings. Another chapter details the role of the International Space Station as the first step towards the future of space exploration. There’s also mention of robotic missions, which should pave the way to human deep-space exploration.

Check out the two mission scenarios below and the entire Global Exploration Roadmap (in PDF format) here or the high-resolution version here or click below.

Images courtesy of NASA

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9 Lessons I Learned from Running a Sweepstakes

This guest post is by Jonathan Thomas of Anglotopia.net.

A common way for a blog to build its newsletter and traffic base is to hold a contest. My blog, Anglotopia, has been around for over four years now and we’ve had various successes and failures with contests. Eventually we basically just stopped having them, as they really weren’t worth the time.

Image copyright Yuri Arcurs - Fotolia.com

Then earlier this year, an opportunity presented itself, thanks to the generosity of one of our airline partners, to hold a sweepstakes—this time the prize was a free trip to London. The airline would provide the tickets, we roped in some other partners to provide other aspects of the trip, and then covered the rest of the costs ourselves.

What followed was a huge lesson in how to manage a major sweepstakes—something we’d never done before. It was a true trial by fire. Here are some of the key lessons we learned.

Take what you think your server will need, and double it. We moved to a new server right before we launched the sweepstakes, but when the competition really started to get traction, our server couldn’t cope and crashed several times.

A major organization plugged the contest to their email list of 300,000 subscribers and the server just collapsed under the deluge. This leads to angry entrants who won’t hesitate to email you and complain, but it also hurts your credibility.

The biggest problem we had off the bat was finding a way to gather what we hoped would be thousands of entries. Because of compliance issues (explained below) and the types of data we had to get from entrants, we couldn’t use a simple Mailchimp form.

We needed a custom form that collected all the data into a database that we could download in Excel format to share with the partners, as well as automatically add to our mailing list. We also needed a service that would send entrants right into Mailchimp, rather than have us import the list (which creates more compliance problems). And we had to balance cost as well.

In the end we chose Formstack as we could easily scale their pricing to work with the number of entries we were expecting, and then scale it back down when the contest was over.

Because of the nature of the prize, the contest was only open to US residents in the lower 48 states. I got several dozen emails from Canadians who were cranky that they couldn’t enter the contest. They usually get a raw deal when it comes to contests like this. I wished I could have opened the contest to other countries, but realistically we just couldn’t.

Think about your target audience, and also think about who you’re going to offend when putting together the prize. We didn’t suffer any long-term damage from mad Canadians, but it wasn’t pleasant getting their angry emails.

People by and large are not easy to reach—even when they enter a contest. They’ve got lives, they’re busy, and most of the time they just don’t read the pages they’re looking at.

Keep entry to the contest as simple as possible—all we had was a form that people filled out, and even this proved too much for some people. You may be tempted to make a complicated process, but if you do this, you’ll just get more angry emails from people who just don’t get it. The KISS principle applies here: keep it simple, stupid.

A custom contact form feeding into a database is a simple enough solution to allows people to enter a contest. The problem we ran into that situation was that people using older browsers (*cough* IE6 *cough*) couldn’t see the form, period. I would get very angry emails from people wondering why they couldn’t see the form, despite instructions telling them it was there. Telling someone to use another browser just made them angrier.

So, my advice is: provide the form entry, also provide a hard-coded link to the form, and also have buried in the terms and conditions a way for people to enter manually. Also, it’s fine to use Facebook to generate entries, but I would not recommend making a Facebook-only contest, as this makes people who hate Facebook angry (and there are lots of them, I now know!).

The biggest issue you face with running a contest is complying with various laws and regulations which vary from state to state. I am not a lawyer: I am a small business without the resources available to hire a sweepstakes lawyer. So, I did the next best thing—I grabbed the terms and conditions from a similar contest, then just edited them to fit my site, and put everything under my LLC (in the USA, a Limited Liability Company).

Don’t even think of holding a sweepstakes if you’re not incorporated, as you can open yourself up personally to lawsuits. You’ll also need to check with your local tax authority about how to deal with the value of the prize. Most companies pass off the tax liability to the winners—something they’ll have to understand when entering.

When all was said and done and the sweepstakes was over, we added 15,000 people to our email list. We were at 1,000 before, so this provided a massive amount of growth. Good things happen when we deploy our weekly newsletter to that number of subscribers.

The problem, though, will be with the quality of your list. Sweepstakes listing sites picked up on our contest, so we got a lot of entries from people who wouldn’t normally visit our site and weren’t interested in our niche or our message. When we deployed our first post-content newsletter to our email list, we got hundreds of unsubscribes and spam abuse reports from people who couldn’t figure out who we were despite the fact that the only way they’d be on the list was because they entered the contest.

This is all well and good except that if you use a third-party service like Mailchimp and you have a high abuse rate, you’ll have your account suspended—no matter how much you’re paying them. The lesson here is that sweepstakes lead to a low-quality email list—we’re still shedding subscribers weekly three months on—but the list is still going strong and it’s been very worthwhile. There will always be list attrition, especially as your list grows.

To choose a winner—even if you have thousands of entries—is simple: go to Random.org and have it generate a random number between one and the total number of entries you have.

Choosing the winner takes five seconds. Contacting them and letting them know they won is a whole other matter. Set out in the terms and conditions that if they don’t respond within a reasonable window, you’ll choose another winner. Once you’ve contacted the winner, it’s your duty to make sure they are able to claim their prize, and that includes hassling sponsors. If your sponsors pull out after the fact, you’ll have to provide the prize instead to avoid a lawsuit.

I think this is the most fun part of running a sweepstakes—making someone’s day (or in our case, their year) by telling them they’ve won a major prize. The winner of our sweepstakes was very responsive and grateful for everything we were doing for them.

Despite the prizes being provided for free, it cost money to run our contest, and your costs may vary. We had to invest in server infrastructure, Formstack for data collection, and so on. When the contest was over, we had to upgrade our Mailchimp account to a much more expensive tier due to the size of our new email list.

You may also want to consider marketing costs—we got a lot of free promotion for the contest, so we didn’t spend much on marketing, but we had to have graphics made, and it’s not a bad idea to do some Google Adwords or Facebook advertising to get the attention of the right people. Ideally, the costs of running a contest will lead to direct growth in your business, so that it won’t matter too much.

Have you ever run a sweepstakes? What lessons did you learn?

Jonathan Thomas runs Anglotopia.net—the website for people who love Britain—it started off as a hobby blog and turned into his full-time job thanks, in large part, to advice from ProBlogger. He also runs Londontopia.net—the website for people who love London. You can connect with him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas.

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HOW TO: Use the New Facebook to See Who Has Unfriended You

In addition to showing users a timeline of their activity on the site throughout the years, it turns out that Facebook’s new profile provides a rundown of which friends they’ve lost.

Here’s how you can see which friends you’ve lost:

1. Enable the new Facebook timeline.2. Pick a year in the timeline and locate the “Friends” box.3. Click on “Made X New Friends.”4. Scroll through the list. Where you see an “Add Friend” box, you know that you are no longer friends with that person. If you haven’t unfriended them, they’ve unfriended you.

There’s still no real-time Facebook alert for an unfriend. But if you’re really interested in learning more and more quickly about your declining online popularity, a browser plugin like Better Facebook is a good alternative.

[via BuzzFeed]

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3 Tips for Retaining Your Software-as-a-Service Customers

Guy Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder of Totango, which analyzes user actions on SaaS applications, providing sales teams invaluable information in qualifying prospects and prioritizing people to contact who are most likely to buy (or renew).

Once you’ve determined how to convert SaaS trial users into paying customers, you will need to address the second piece of the puzzle: how to keep your customers happy so they continue to pay for your service.

Below are three tips to avoid churn and to retain your customers.

Customers that are engaged and getting value from your service are generally happy and don’t leave. Conversely, those who are not using your service as often are much more likely to cancel their subscriptions.

This is why it’s important to measure an engagement score for each customer and to monitor it regularly. Putting a system in place that monitors customer engagement requires work. But it is absolutely essential to systematically keep engagement high and churn low. Every SaaS business should construct this score from three main items:

Activity Time: How much time users spend with your service. Visit Frequency: How often they come back. Core Action: What they do when they visit.

Customers enter “risk stages” in their lifecycle during which they are more likely to cancel (or opt not to renew) their subscriptions.

An obvious risk is when the subscription expires, and the customer must decide whether to renew. You want to ensure they reach that decision point when they are happy with the value and experience they are receiving.

Each SaaS business will have a handful of such stages, depending on the nature of their offering and sales model. The key here is to make sure you think through these lifecycle stages, identify risk points and provide extra care to customers at those times.

Too often customer support, advocacy and success teams spend all their time reacting to customer needs. Essentially, they are waiting for tickets or training requests to come to them. Being reactive and responsive is critical, but should not come at the expense of being proactive as well.

A good customer success team devotes at least 30% of its time to proactive work: identifying customers with low engagement and proactively reaching out to them to remove roadblocks, essentially ensuring that customers at risk stages are highly engaged and in good condition.

The rate of customer churn has a significant impact on the growth and viability of the SaaS business. Keeping an eye on customer engagement, addressing risks and remaining proactive will help keep your customers satisfied and paying.

Image courtesy of Flickr, fosforix

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Photo Dating? Startup Matches Singles with Similar Faces

Online dating startup Soul2Match promises to match singles based solely on one piece of information from each of them: their headshot.

Yes, founders Jorn Eiting and Linda van Liempt are serious. They cite several studies that show what we’re all really looking for in our ideal mate is ourselves.

“The more two people have similarities in their faces, the more they look alike, the happier they are in the relationhsip, the stronger the relationship,” says Eiting, who announcing the launch of the Soul2Match iPhone app [iTunes link] on Tuesday.

The research itself is less absolute. Some of it shows that couples with similar levels of attractiveness are the happiest. Other research says people trust those who have similar facial features more than those who don’t.

The best proof for Soul2Match‘s matchmaking method? A 1999 study that used computer-graphic image manipulation to generate male faces that looked like female participants. For example, if a woman’s cheekbone stuck out 0.3 percent more than the average woman’s cheekbones do, the program would generate a male face with cheekbones that stuck out 0.3 percent more than the male average. Women were more likely to rate faces as attractive that had been manipulated to match their own.

Trouble is, a later study by Lisa M. DeBruine of McMaster University showed that people are more likely to rate faces similar to their attractive when it’s the same sex than photos of the opposite sex.

“The same-sex bias … is a product of specialized responses to facial resemblance as a cue of kinship,” DeBruine wrote; it helps us “favor kin in a non-sexual prosocial context and avoid kin in a mating context.”

In other words, her theory is that it’s all part of the brain’s recognition mechanism that helps us be nice to family members — and avoid incest.

While the research behind it might be less than bulletproof, Soul2Match does have this going for it: it’s an extremely simple dating site. Instead of filling out long questionnaires, users take a photo of themselves and post it to the site or the iPhone app. The site uses facial recognition software to analyze features in the photo and the photos of other users, and spits out a “compatibility score.” There’s an option to message people who are highly compatible with you.

Eiting and van Liempt, for instance, are a couple — and have a compatibilty score that is higher than 70%.

In my trials of the site, however, I wasn’t able to find anyone who was more than 24% compatible.

I would like to believe that I’m particularly incompatible, and that Soul2Match will work well for those who want to leave their time-consuming online dating questionnaires behind forever. But it seems the site’s main draw will be entertainment value.

“There’s only one way to find out, and that’s by using it.” Eiting says.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, adventtr

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7 Ways Interviews Can Skyrocket Blog Growth

This guest post is by Srinivas Rao of The Skool of Life.

The idea of interviewing people might give you the jitters. It might make you feel like you’re standing naked in front of your elementary classroom with nothing intelligent to ask or say. But the only way you’re ever going to find out is if you put yourself out there.

I took a gamble and started interviewing people as part of a weekly series on my blog. That eventually became my calling card in the blogosphere. David Siteman Garland built his show The Rise to the Top through interviews and went on to publish a book. And Andrew Warner at Mixergy has interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world and built his own brand in the process.

Interviewing experts in your field is a gold mine waiting to be cashed in on, and it offers many benefits to the blogger.

Interviewing other people, especially those who are experts in their field, is a great way to create killer content for your blog.

When you interview an expert you end up creating highly educational, valuable content that your audience can learn from. It brings a different perspective to your audience, and gives them ideas they may not have considered before. The key to turning your interview into killer content is to put the spotlight on your interviewee.

The greatest benefit I’ve received from interviewing people is the relationships that I’ve formed with them. The people I’ve interviewed have become some of my biggest supporters and greatest friends.

When you interview somebody you have an opportunity to have a conversation that goes beyond what you might have via email, Twitter, or blog comments. As a result you have an opportunity to form a stronger connection with that person.

The benefits of interviewing people have extended far beyond blog traffic for me. When one of the bloggers I interviewed learned that I was moving to Costa Rica, she introduced me to some real estate developers who provided me with six months of rent-free living in exchange for some social media and online marketing advice.

When I found out I would be speaking at Blogworld NYC, I jokingly wrote about the fact that I was going to land from Costa Rica without having a suit to wear for my speech. Another blogger I’d interviewed asked me for my size and he bought be a brand new suit and shipped it to my friend’s place.

The beauty of relationships is that they provide a solid foundation that will extend beyond the life of your blog. After all the blogosphere is fueled entirely by people, so getting to know a few will be essential to your success.

When you interview people, you may even come across potential business opportunities.

A well-known blogger on the Adage 150 list who I interviewed extended me an invitation to be a paid contributor to his blog. I ended up launching a product with another blogger I interviewed that enabled me to generate my first couple hundred dollars online. I’ve always believed that conversations evolve into relationships, and relationships evolve into opportunities.

Interviewing people has resulted me in getting tens of thousands of dollars in valuable advice.

When I first started interviewing people my mindset was, “This person is famous. They’ll tweet each interview and it will go viral.” That never happened, and the problem with that mindset was that it was all about me.

I soon came to the realization that I had the attention of a person who charges hundreds of dollars an hour for their time. If I made it all about what I could learn and what I could teach my audience, the quality of the interview would go up dramatically.

From that point forward I treated everyone I interviewed as if I was paying for their time. Given that you’ll often spend some time talking to your interviewee “off the record,” you’ll likely also get some invaluable insights on how to grow your blog or business.

They say around 95% of communication is non-verbal. And one thing I think most bloggers don’t do nearly enough of is experiment with different types of content. A blog is a multi-format platform. You can use written content, audio content, and video content. While most bloggers have a presence on Twitter and Facebook there aren’t nearly as many who have a presence on iTunes. In fact it’s a great differentiator when you consider the following:

The competition for written content is vast.With audio content the competition decreases.With video content there is even less competition.

When you interview people (especially using audio or video), you have an opportunity to experiment with different types of content and differentiate yourself from other bloggers.

While writing is a nice way to let your audience get to know you, when your audience gets to hear your voice, you’ll be able to form a deeper connection with them.

Human beings are dynamic and the written word is one of many ways in which we communicate. Exploring multimedia content like audio and video humanizes your brand and gives your audience a more in-depth view into who you are beyond your writing.

Interviews can also send a significant amount of traffic to your blog. When you interview influential people, it’s likely they’ll share your interview with their audience and if it’s a high-quality interview you’ll end up getting traffic to your blog.

While traffic is a nice benefit, experience has showed me that you shouldn’t interview people in the hopes of generating more traffic. In fact, the reason I ranked it last on this list is because I think all the other benefits of interviewing people significantly outweigh the traffic increase that you’ll get.

So what are you waiting for? In the famous words of AT&T “Reach out and touch someone.”

Srinivas Rao is the author of The Skool of Life and the host/co-founder of BlogcastFM. Download his FREE Webinar on the 7 Pillars of Blog Traffic.

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Daily Deals Proliferating: What’s in Your Digital Wallet? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Daily deals services such as Groupon and LivingSocial are proliferating, with more than 650 providers serving 26 million customers so far. The market is growing so quickly, it’s hard to get a handle on who’s using these products and what they’re using them for.

That’s where this infographic can help. It’ll show you the major players, the types of deals offered and who’s buying these deals. Beyond that, you’ll find fascinating facts about the quickly developing secondary deal marketplace.

Just in time for the last week of National Coupon Month (who knew?), here’s a comprehensive set of graphical data gathered from the users of CityPockets, a secondary daily deals marketplace whose digital wallet helps you consolidate all those vouchers and daily deals. Keep in mind that CityPockets admits its survey respondents tend to be slightly heavier daily deals users.

Take a look at this infographic, and let us know in the comments how you’re using daily deals.

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Facebook’s New Features Get Animated [VIDEO]

The Taiwanese are at it again! This time the humorists at Next Media Animation (NMA) have turned their computer-animation reenactment efforts to the latest Facebook changes.

NMA takes on the latest updates from the f8 conference including the new Timeline and music features.

As usual, NMA nails it.

Check out some images from the event below.

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News360 Aggregates & Personalizes the News Reading Experience

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: News360

Quick Pitch: A news personalization and aggregation service.

Genius Idea: Launching on seven different platforms in its first year and integrating information from several social networks, including Google+, into its personalization engine.

The idea of a personalized news reader is almost a cliche at this point — AOL Editions, Zite, Flipboard and News.Me are just a few startup services with their own takes. News360 joined the crowd last October with a product solely focused on news aggregation, rather than personalization. While it used (and still uses) a unique semantic algorithm to decide what the most meaningful stories are in broad categories like Business, World, Food and Fashion, it was not strikingly different from a user perspective.

What stood out about its approach was that it quickly released versions compatible with the iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry Playbook, Andorid and the web.

“Our thinking is that we want to give inside the experience wherever you are,” says News360 CEO Roman Karachinsky. “People have different use cases whether reading on their phones, desktops or laptops, but we want to be on every device that they have — let them have their interest graph, have their saved articles, on any platforms that they want to use.”

The app has extended the same “be everywhere” attitude towards a personalization feature that launched in August. It pulls in user behavior and interest from Twitter, Facebook, Evernote and Google Reader in order to help determine a reader’s interests. Where some other apps rely on behavior you demonstrate while using them, News360 takes information from the profiles you connect — your bio, where you comment, like, star, share and save — in order to construct and populate categories.

News360 told Mashable it will add Google+ behavior cues to its options for personalize user news feeds Friday — which is impressive, considering Google+ just released it’s first APIs last week.

“We don’t want to collect 1,000 articles before you make the decision,” Karachinsky says, “which is why we try to look at as many profiles as you can right off the bat.”

By aiming broad, in both its spectrum of devices and its range of information, News360 has attracted more than 750,000 downloads. While the startup won’t get specific about how many of those are active users, a spokespeson did say active users grew 27% May to June; 21% June to July; and 135% July to August. About 4.5 million articles are read using the app each month.

That’s traction. But is it enough to unseat established startups like Flipboard and big names like AOL that are entering the space? Using multiple news aggregators at once somewhat defeats the purpose of using one in the first place.

Will News360 be the one you choose? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, fotosipsak

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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Action! Can Our Hollywood Experiment Help You Make Money Blogging?

This is a guest post by Joke and Biagio of JokeAndBiagio.com

Setting: a busy production office in Hollywood, California. Joke stares at her husband Biagio in disbelief.

Joke: You bought another book from Darren Rowse?

Biagio: Well, uh, no…this one’s actually by the Web Marketing Ninja…

Her face goes blank.

Joke: Did you just say…Ninja?

ProBlogger, Joke and Biagio

That kind of back-and-forth’s been typical ever since we tip-toed into blogging in 2009.

Sure, it’s always fun to think about monetizing the blog or read about ways to get big traffic.

But realistically, our blog for filmmakers who want to break into Hollywood has been more of a fun distraction than a tool to make us money.

Maybe you’ve felt the same about your own blog? Wondered if banging away on your laptop at 2am would have any (positive) effect on your business? Questioned if the “standard” ways to make money blogging were right for you?

We’ve had those doubts over the past few years.

An idea struck. A new approach to cashing in on our blog that seemed obvious and frightening all at once.

In fact, just saying it out loud freaked out our friends and colleagues.

But we really believe this idea is a win-win scenario for both our readers and our company. It’s a concept that just might work for you, too.

More on that in a minute. First, some background…

As working producers and directors in Los Angeles, blogging was not high on our “to do” checklist for Hollywood success. But we had a personal reason for writing: to create the film and TV blog we wished existed when we were starting out.

You know, back when we were banging our heads against Hollywood’s closed doors, trying to get noticed by anyone in “the game.”

Two-hundred posts and 2500 Twitter followers later, we found ourselves with a small but engaged group of readers who wanted to succeed in film and TV.

And no idea how we were going to monetize our blog.

Other than a few affiliate banners and the occasional Adword, we never embraced “selling” to a community largely made up of struggling artists (an accurate description of us just a few years ago.)

And, since blogging will never be our main income stream (we make a decent living in film and TV) the thought of turning our filmmaking blog into a six-figure sensation seemed pretty silly.

While the notion of being “top bloggers” was romantic, were we really going to:

create e-books?promote affiliate programs?find joint venture partners?

Or were we gonna’ keep chasing Oscars® and Emmys®?

Then, the crazy idea came along.

The number one rule of a blog is to provide value, right?

We asked ourselves, “What’s the ultimate value we can provide to our readers? What do they want more than anything?”

In our hearts, we knew the answer: the same thing we wanted while living in our shoe-box, one-bedroom apartment not so long ago.

Access to Hollywood.

So after spending two years educating our readers on what it takes to make it in this business, we’re now opening the same doors that were closed to us for so long.

We’ve invited them to pitch TV shows to us.

When we do sell a project with an aspiring filmmaker (like we just did with our upcoming documentary series Caged on MTV) that person will be paid to work on the show, receive a producer credit, and take a giant leap forward in their careers.

Plus, selling just one series with a reader will instantly make us “six-figure bloggers.”

As a bonus for both us and our readers, anyone who submits a show must join our newsletter. We send out tips and tricks on turning ideas into concrete Hollywood pitches, as well as up-to-the-second info about the kinds of shows we think we can sell at any given moment.

When the day comes that we do take a little time off from making film and TV, that list will prove invaluable should we want to write a book or put up speaking events on working in Hollywood.

How about you? Have you spent years educating your readers on a particular topic? Why not tap into the pool of experts you’ve created?

Most bloggers see readers as potential customers. Maybe it’s time to see them as potential partners instead. Are you:

An independent software developer kicking out posts on the Objective-C language? How about taking pitches from up-and-coming coders on new iPhone apps?Blogging how-to posts about the furniture you craft by hand? Why not expand your line by accepting product concepts from your most accomplished readers?Writing about designing and selling great widgets? Let your fans bring you valuable ideas for better widgets.

Just think: one great idea from a reader could be worth a lot more than your commission on that “weird old trick” affiliate product you’ve been eyeing.

Of course, we had to have our lawyer draw up a proper submission agreement, and anyone wishing to pitch TV show ideas to us will have to go through a formal process. Before you open yourself up to pitches, make sure you’re not open to potential lawsuits. Consult your lawyer.

Biagio: Not bad, right?

Joke nods. Her expression…a glimmer of hope?

Joke: Does this mean you’ll stop shopping at ProBlogger now?

Biagio: Well, uh, no…

Joke sighs.

Joke: Better sell some more shows quick!

Joke and Biagio are a married filmmaking team (Joke’s the wife, Biagio’s the hubby.) Their goal is to help aspiring filmmakers and TV producers break in to Hollywood by providing real-world filmmaking advice and taking TV show pitches from talented, hard-working dreamers. Their current film Dying to do Letterman has been invited by the International Documentary Association to qualify for 2012 Academy Award® Consideration, and they have numerous unscripted TV shows to their credit. Keep in touch with them on Facebook and Twitter.

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3 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rates and Increase Conversions

This guest post is by Gregory Ciotti of sparringmind.com.

One of the many tough obstacles that newer bloggers have to deal with is the fact that many of their visitors, which they work very hard to get, will often “bounce” away from their pages—they’ll immediately leave the blog after landing on the homepage.

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This “bounce rate” can have a drastic effect on your blog’s success at any stage, but especially in the beginning. It’s very important to be able to keep the interest of your earliest visitors in order to build the loyal following that’s the essential foundation of any great blog.

So, what can you do to keep people around your blog long enough to explore its great content?

As a blogger, you’re probably very familiar with (and even have) a navigation bar on your blog, and you likely recognize its importance in helping readers get to your content.

However, many people do not take full advantage of this above-the-fold navigation bar, which inevitably draws a lot of clicks. After all, your nav bar really stands out on your site, and people are very familiar with how these menus work.

You can get more out of your navigation bar by having it link to pages that are much more than just a sequential list of posts in separate categories (as most bloggers do). I’d like to show you how by teaching you about a tactic that I call “super pages” that will direct readers to your best content.

Instead of just listing those categories up on your navigation bar, you can create separate blog pages that accomplish many useful goals, including pages that turn into SEO powerhouses and are incredibly shareable (linkbait), pages that convert new visitors, and pages that help you establish trust with people coming across your blog for the first time.

First things first, one super page to include in your navigation bar would be a Start Here page, where you can include a lot of elements that could be beneficial for first-time readers, and boost your subscriber count.

This page will reduce your bounce rate, guaranteed, as readers who may otherwise have been confused and left your site now have somewhere to begin. In fact, on many of my blogs, it is the most clicked link on my navigation bar.

Secondly, the Start Here page gives visitors a chance to see what your site is really about. You can also make this a little About Me page, putting a trustworthy face on a formerly anonymous website, and letting visitors know that your blog is run by a real person looking to offer great content.

Third, if the above two things weren’t enough: you can use this opportunity (after a descriptive About Me section and great Getting Started guide on your page) to offer visitors a way to get email updates, and if they like what they’ve seen thus far, they will opt in.

So not only will you be reducing bounce rates, you’ll be gaining more subscribers who might otherwise have slipped away after visiting your Getting Started page.

The other way to use super pages effectively is illustrated by Copyblogger. You’ll notice the navigation on that site includes topics that the site posts about, such as landing pages, email marketing, and keyword research. However, these links on the nav bar do not take you to a categorical list of posts.

Rather, they take you to a super page that presents a long description of the topic, including useful insight into getting started in that category, with plenty of links to the best posts on Copyblogger on that specific topic.

So, for instance, on the Email Marketing page on Copyblogger, an intro on the topic and its effectiveness is given, followed by links to great Copyblogger content, followed by a link to the Copyblogger newsletter specifically on email marketing (which people are obviously interested in). This is followed at last by an opt-in form that states that Copyblogger is a great place to learn about email marketing.

Anyone clicking to this page will be interested in email marketing, so now they have a list of links to great posts that is easily shareable (you’ll find that super pages are some of the most shareable pages on your site), a way to opt in to get updates, and a great descriptor of the topic at hand.

Much better than just a list of archived blog posts, wouldn’t you say?

One strategy that is implemented on almost all successful WordPress blogs is the giving away of freebies. These are almost always digital products, so that it doesn’t cost the blogger anything to give these products away.

This strategy works so well because people are much more likely to follow your blog if they see free and valuable content coming their way: they won’t want to miss out on anything in the future.

One of the best ways to do this is to create an autoresponder to send out a freebie if people sign up for your blog’s updates. I’ve found an extremely useful tool on MailChimp for doing this, which is described in detail on MailChimp’s blog.

If that sounds a bit too complicated, don’t worry! Freebies by themselves work as great promoters for people to follow you, so even by sharing a few freebies you are bound to gain more subscribers.

However, there is a way to greatly leverage your freebies: make people share your website in order to get them!

You may have heard of the service PayWithATweet, but there is a much better option that I’d like to show you called CloudFlood. What this service allows you to do is share anything you’d like to give away for free, but your viewers have to send out a tweet (that you generate) in order to gain access to it.

So if I’m sharing a new pack of icons for web design, and I want to give it away for free, I can set up my CloudFlood button and whenever someone wants to access the free download, all they have to do is send out the automatic tweet that I made, and they get instant access.

I could make the tweet link back to my username on Twitter, and have it say something like “Free icon pack for web designers up for grabs, download it now! bit.ly/SomeLinkHere.”

So, I get to give away free content that is useful to people, and they share my website to their Twitter followers … sounds like a win-win!

If there is one thing you should take away from any place giving blog advice, it’s this: your blog is nothing without loyal subscribers or followers.

Thus, it is very important to convert people from the get-go, and making it easy to follow your blog is something that is of utmost importance.

Creattica has some great, free pre-made PSD buttons that are easily edited (you don’t need to be a designer, it’s very simple) so you can add whatever text you want. You can also get some great buttons at Graphic River, such as these.

The link above takes you to an example button that you can edit if you have the PSD files (which are included on the Creattica buttons as well as on Graphic River). So you could easily edit the text to say something like “Follow Me For Updates” or “Get Updates From My Blog” or whatever you think will encourage your subscribers to click on the button.

Eye-catching buttons that stand out and complement your blog are guaranteed to make those who come across your content more likely to subscribe. Copywriters and bloggers alike know that big, beautiful buttons are just calling to be clicked. Are there any on your page?

As you can see there are a lot of things that you can do (for free!) to reduce your blog’s bounce rate, and in the end, grow your blog’s subscribers.

Even if you only drop your bounce rate by a few percentage points, think about how many visitors that will mean in the long run, over your blog’s life.

Capturing a visitor when they land is the starting point for any visitor to become a new subscriber to your blog. You need to do all you can to make sure things start off on the right foot.

How do you plan on dropping your blog’s bounce rate?

Gregory is an avid blogger and marketer, and loves improving and measuring his blogs. You can find him discussing effective WordPress strategies, and even talking about the hot topic of tumblelogs and lifestreaming on his blog I Love Tumblr.

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My Secret Formula for Creating Super-engaging Blog Content

This guest post is by Kiesha of WeBlogBetter.

Many of my readers have asked how in the world I come up with such creative ideas for my blog content.

If you’ve read:

“The Walmart Guide to Increasing Time spent on your Site,”“Can your blog Pass the Salad Test?”“Attract Readers to your blog like Mosquitos“What the Sims Taught me About Social Media”“How to Solve the Blogging Puzzle” (a post that compares blogging to a jigsaw puzzle)

…then you’ve probably figured out by now that there are no limits to the subjects I’ll squeeze a blog post out of.

I often challenge myself to find the most unlikely subject and see what blogging lessons I can squeeze out of it. While some things are a complete stretch and really won’t work, there are some surprising lessons you can pull from just about anything, if you’re creative enough.

I’m going to be honest: I’m using the phrase “creative enough,” but really what I mean is this. If you have a brain that has the capacity to think deeply enough to write a coherent paragraph or two, then you’ve got “enough creativity” to pull this off.

I’ll tell you how, but first let me tell you about a book that I read that really informs how I write today. It’s called The Medici Effect. This book talks about how it’s not completely new ideas, but the intersection of two seemingly unrelated ideas, that make a real difference in innovation.

I’m really simplifying the complexity, so you’re going to have to check this one out yourself to really get this and fully grasp the secret to creating meaningful and engaging content.

Here’s my secret formula for creating those zany analogies and surprising comparisons that I write about.

Every good writer is so because they pay attention to the details of life around them. They use those details and describe them with words that evoke the five senses: sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch.

Being able to describe an experience is key to hooking readers and keeping them engaged.

This is a direct extension of step one—if you’re paying attention your environment, you’ll discover that life’s lessons are everywhere. Blogging, like Kung Fu, is in everything!

You can pull lessons from any subject and then think about the ways they are similar to your blog topic.

This is easier if you make a list. For example, think of all the ways your experience in college is similar to your blogging experience. If I were to list mine I’d say:

Both were baffling at first.Both required time studying alone.Both required commitment and dedication to a schedule.Both required one to stretch his or her thinking beyond the ordinary.

This list could go on and on. I might start with a really long list, but then I would narrow it down to the most important points, since only so much can go into a blog post if it’s to remain engaging.

This step is extremely important. If you’re sitting there worrying about how crazy people will think you are or how much someone might think your analogy sucks, you’re not going to be able to do much writing. When you kick your inner critic to the curb and decide to just have fun with writing, it will come through in your writing. Confidence or lack thereof can be sensed and can weaken your credibility and authority.

If you’ve selected an interesting topic, then half of the work is done for you. At this point you just need to think of ways you can capitalize on those phrases that people love and that are also search engine friendly.

This works best if I’ve allowed the post to sit for a couple of days. This gives me fresh eyes and since the mental load of revision is far less than writing, it also allows me to think of ways to inject humor, think of details I’ve left out, choose better words and also consider ways to extend the post if possible.

Randomly pick two items and think of ways they are similar and can complement each. Then boldly consider ways you could use the combination to your advantage. You may need to try this exercise a few times before you arrive at something you believe to be true genius that you can passionately use to separate yourself from your competitors.

It was the combining of seemingly random, unrelated ideas that sparked the idea to change up the blog contest game and do something different. I suddenly got the idea that I should host a reality blog contest where bloggers will team up and work together while simulaneously competing for a Grand Prize. I got that idea while reading The Medici Effect, specifically a passage that talked about what makes a good contest. It discussed the evolution of the game show over the years until it eventually turned into reality contests and shows—that immediately sparked a eureka moment for me!

That’s what combining unusual ideas should do for you and your readers. It will help you create super-engaging content that your readers won’t be able to resist.

Kiesha blogs at WeBlogBetter, offering writing, social media and blogging tips. She’s currently holding an exciting new type of contest on her blog—the first ever reality blogging contest called “Surviving the Blog”. Visit her blog for details.

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Israeli Prime Minister Extends Olive Branch Over Twitter

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has reached out to Palestinian officials through Twitter. The official account of Netanyahu, @IsraeliPM, tweeted: “We’re in the same city, in the same building, Let’s meet here today. I extend my hand in peace,” on Friday afternoon.

The tweet came after several attempts from Netanyahu to reach the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas through Twitter, including advising: “The Palestinians must first reach #peace with Israel and then get their state. Then Israel will be the 1st to recognize them. #back2talks” and attempts at peace: “I continue to hope that President Abbas will be my partner for peace. Let’s get on with it and negotiate #peace. #back2talks.” Netanyahu’s account is run by Dr. Eitan Eliram, the Prime Minister’s new media director.

The tweets follow a week of controversy as the Palestinian leader prepared to submit a proposal to the UN Security Council Friday, seeking full recognition of a Palestinian state. The plan was submitted Friday morning despite significant pressure from the U.S to hold off the proposal.

The tweets from Netanyahu followed Abbas’ speech to the General Assembly. Netanyahu insisted peace could not be decided through the UN alone and reached out to the Palestinian leader, reports the L.A. Times. “I extend my hand to the Palestinian people,” Netanyahu told the General Assembly after Abbas submitted a request for full UN membership for the Palestinians. “We’ve both just flown thousands of miles to New York … We’re in the same building, so let’s meet today.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, TalkMediaNews

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