Lately I have been reading many blogs and I have noticed that a few blogs have figured out the perfect way to interact with their readers through their blog. The kind of post we all want. A post that draws readers, creates subscribers, and gets a massive amount of comments & social media love. I decided to dissect a post and share my findings with my fellow readers and create a list of questions that you should ask yourself before you hit the big ‘Publish’ button.

Simplicity

It seems the pro bloggers have figured out a whole new language that they write in. Its a simple and understandable way of writing that has a nice flow. This means that you should provide the information you are giving your readers in the clearest manner with as few words as possible. There is no need for useless sentences or re-interpretations, they are only truly after your information so give them just that.

Timeless

Is the information you are posting timeless? Will the information or advice you are sharing going to be relevant in 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years? While dissecting the posts it seems that most of them were published months ago, yet there were comments from only a couple days ago. This will help build readers as well as build trust. So when writing a new post give your reader a nice timeless piece of information they can go back to and reference from.

Broken Down Visibly

Did you ever wonder why it was so hard to read your college text books? Seeing that wall of text is intimidating and you can’t easily pull information from it. The world is on a 5 second attention span and if your not careful with your posting you may have some killer content, but it will go unnoticed if not broken down properly. This information is nothing new, you want your post to be scan-able. Do this by breaking down your content with:

• Use lists like this one.
• Headers that define the following paragraphs.
• Graphics relevant to your content.
• Bolding the most important sentence in a paragraph.

Guide & Reward the Reader

This last information is the most important. Does it guide the reader in anyway? You want the reader to physically or mentally make an action based off of your post, not just be done with the information and start randomly clicking in your website, or even worse, hit the X to close the browser.

You want to reward your readers. Reward them with knowledge they can share, with a good feeling they can relate to. You can even give them an actual reward, many websites have e-books that are rewards for becoming a subscriber. Other websites will reward them with links on their main page. There is a stronger bond between a blog and its readers when rewards are used.

5 questions to ask before you post.

So we’ve talked about the anatomy of a great blog post. Here is a list of questions to ask yourself before you hit that publish button:

• Is my post simple and easily understood?
• Can I pick out the major points and information of the article in under 5 seconds?
• Will the information I am sharing be relevant in 3 days? Weeks? Months?
• Does it effectively guide the reader to take action?
• Is there a reward for reading my post?

Did I miss any key components to a great blog post? What do you think makes a great blog post? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Reader Suggestions:

Lis Sowerbutts : “I rarely post now without doing some keyword research – I like to know what my post is trying to rank for.”
Jason : “Put you’re most relevant information in the first sentence of a paragraph.”
Niall Harbison : “I find the key to get lots of “loving” on social media is…1.Really good title | 2.Easy scannable content | 3.Something that is useful to your readers”

Jacob Cass interview on IncomeDiary.com

Jacob Cass is one of the authority figures in the Logo & Branding world. He began his blog in 2007 which is Just Creative Design and uses his blog as a guide to help him obtain design work. With currently over 21,000 subscribers and counting Jacob has become quite the internet celebrity in the design world. His interview focuses on advice to new bloggers and how to get the ball rolling for your niche site. He explains not to give up:

What advice would you give to people just starting out with an online business?

Don’t give up. The first 3-4 months are the hardest but stick with it, it does pay off in the end. Remember the snowball effect (1 tells another, that person tells another, etc).

If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started, what advice would you give yourself regarding making money online?

Do your research, learn more before going straight in, it will save you a lot of time. I recommend Problogger for blogging tips.

Check out the Jacob Cass Interview

Alborz Fallah – A Million Dollar Blogger

This next interview comes in PDF form or MP3. Alborz Fallah created an automobile blog called CarAdvice.com.auand with adsense alone was making over $5,000 a month and then got some corporate ads which boosted his income to $20,000 a month. Its a rather lengthy interview (totaling 18 pages) but is a wealth of information on what he did to become a million dollar blogger. He talks about different keys to success and explains how his niche blog was able to make big money online:

Yaro: What’s that translating to in terms of revenue at the moment?

Alborz: It’s a bit of a different model. We started, obviously, with Adsense. It was always the best to start with and we got up to around $5000 a month U.S. dollars, but it wasn’t sufficient to pay for what we do. We have dedicated server hosting now, we have four full-time staff and two part-time staff. We managed to get ourselves signed up to an advertising agency which pretty much pays us 10 cents per unique browse that we deliver.

On an average day, we get about 16,000 unique browses. You can put that into dollars, I suppose. It’s not too bad. It generates a fair bit of income every month. It would average out about $20 grand a month, but that’s just for the advertising. We get other sponsors and things and other stuff like that. Google is still running on the site which gives us another couple of grand a month, but we are always improving advertising. The more visitors we do, the more money we get. That’s how it works.

Download & listen to the Alborz Fallah interview

Mr. Rajaie Alkorani new blogger interview

Rajaie Alkorani is a young (under 20) blogger who has a top blog in making money online niche. In his interview he talks about SEO work and a few effective and not so effective strategies of online blogging :

What tools can be used to select a profitable niche to blog about?

I don’t have much experience in this area, but from what I’ve read, keyword research is probably one of the most important steps you should keep in mind when starting a niche site. SEOBook.com have a lot of awesome search engine optimization tools that will definitely help anyone starting out make a good choice. I would also recommend reading sites that give valuable information regarding keyword research, one of the most notable being the Keyword Academy.

Any specific advice for New-web-business.com and our readers?

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci,Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

Check out the Rajaie Alkorani Interview

Expert Advice: Creating A Successful Blog

The 4th and final interview (wait you said 5!) is an interview that went down over at GraphicDesignTwist and they did an interview with 5 top blog owners: Collis Ta’eed of FreelanceSwitch, Walter Apai of Web Designer Deopt, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks, Brian Hoff of Design Cubicle and Christ Spooner of Spoon Graphics. So total your getting 9 interviews including the 4 above! On this set of interviews Graphic Design Twist picks the brains of these top blog owners of how they got their blogs to the top levels of the blogging world:

Question #2 – How long did it take to start making a profit from advertising?

Chris Spooner – A good income wasn’t received until I decided to place direct advertising in the form of 125px ad spots in the sidebar of Blog.SpoonGraphics. Beforehand I received the odd few dollars from Google Adsense and a couple of affiliates programs. Now the advertising income has reached a level where it’s higher than my wage from my previous job, which has allowed me to spend more time crafting blog posts and work on developing the blog on a daily basis.

Chris Coyier – Maybe 9 months? I think in the really really early days I tried AdSense but I have come to despise AdSense (in a nutshell, it’s ugly, it doesn’t give enough control, and it doesn’t pay well enough). After I got rid of that, I just did nothing until eventually advertisers approached me. I sold it manually for a while, which was alright but became too much work. Now I sell through BuySellAds.

Walter – It took about a month or so.

Collis – Profitability took a long time, close to a year in fact. This was in large part however because we were constantly pushing new projects. In the first year we ran a survey of 3000 freelancers, subsites for calculating your rates, earning passive income and applying the 80/20 rule, launched a podcast and pursued a number of other ideas, some of which never made it out. All this was a bit expensive to do and was a constant drain on the finances. By early in 2008 we’d eased back and were focusing on just posting and the site hit profitability.

Brian – Although there is a few ads and sponsors throughout the Design Cubicle, the money gained through Google Adsense and my sponsors goes right back into TDC and my readers. With TDC being under 4 months old, I have only recently started accepting sponsorship and advertising on my site within the past month.

Check out the Expert Advice Interview

That is it for our list of interviews, be sure to read these if you are planning on starting a new blog to help make some residual income, these interviews will definitely start you off on the right foot!