Continuing on with the lessons from BlogMastermind, we’re on to lesson three which is all about RSS, social proof and plugins.  Lesson three is still focused on blog design and structure with the main aims being to optimise it for the search engines and to promote RSS subscriptions.  If you’re not sure what RSS is, click the link to read all about it.

Why is RSS so important?  It provides social proof that your blog is popular.

One way to monetise your blog is to have advertisers purchase ad spots – pretty similar to the way companies buy pages in magazines to advertise their products.  To decide whether to purchase an ad placement on your blog, an advertiser wants to know how many people their ad will reach.  Having a high RSS subscription count gives the blog owner the power to convince advertisers that their ad would at least reach, at the minimum, the number of people that subscribe to that blog.

RSS subscription counts can also convince other readers to subscribe to the blog because of the herd mentality.  For instance, while I was shopping one day, I saw a shop with a long queue outside.  I asked one person why they were queuing up and he replied, “I don’t know, but there were so many others in line I figured there has to be something worth checking out.”  Conversely, having a low RSS subscription count can also provide negative social proof so the general advice on RSS subscription counts is not to put up your count chicklet until you have at least 50 subscribers.

At the time of writing this, Babylicious had about 40 subscribers.  It was interesting to note that it was really easy to get the first 30 or so subscribers, but bumping it up to over 50 seems to be the really tough part.  After hovering around 40 subscribers for the longest time and still struggling to get it up higher, I did a bit of internet surfing and discovered that there are a lot of tips out there on how you can go about it.  Most are covered by the BlogMastermind course but I just thought I’d take a look anyway.

The most common suggestion is an obvious one – make your RSS subscription button easy to see and to ask for subscribers.  Common locations are to ask for subscriptions at the bottom of your blog post and to place a big button at the top of your side bar.  An interesting suggestion I discovered (which I can’t remember which blog I saw it on now), is that you re-word your request to subscribe.  To readers unfamiliar with blog terms and blogs, the term subscribe gives the impression that you have to pay money to subscribe.  Not an unreasonable assumption since we pay money to subscribe to magazines, clubs, etc.  So instead of asking your readers to subscribe, offer them free updates.  I’m still not very sure on the best way to suggest it, but the gist of it is to offer your RSS subscription without using the word “subscribe”.

Another way to create social proof is through blog comments.  If there are a lot of commentors on your blog, a new blog visitor will assume your blog is popular because it should other readers that there are people who read your blog.  Not only that but it also shows that your blog is engaging enough for other readers to make comments.  Additionally, frequent comments add new content to your blog on a regular basis which is attractive to the search engines.  Hence, encouraging readers to comment on your blog comes highly recommended.  A couple of ways to encourage comments is to ask for them and to post questions on your blog.

Search Engine Optimisation in really simple terms refers to the things you can do to your blog to make it easier for the search engines to list your blog in their searches.  I won’t go into detail on this as there are whole courses devoted to this topic so I doubt I would be able to do it any justice at all.  Given the secret nature of search engine algorithms, it is difficult to say what works and what doesn’t, although many of the internet gurus have their theories which generally point in the right direction.

What I have learned is that there are things you can do to the internal structure of your blog that facilitate SEO and with a self-hosted WordPress blog, this is very easy to do given the vast array of plugins available online.  I’ll talk about which plugins I use in a later post.

Other SEO tactics you can employ include Tags and Ping (which is simply a method of notifying other websites about the content on your blog), internal tagging (how you link internally to other content within your blog), and having permalinks for each individual blog post you write (in other words, there is a dedicated url to each blog post – for instance, the permalink to this blog post is http://internet-homebusinesses.com/articles/pro-blogger-project-lesson-3/) which is supposed to help improve your search engine rankings.

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