rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Beth Kanter points to Skelliewag's post with a hype-filled title: "How To Get 1,050 Subscribers in 3 Months":

1. Work out who your target audience is and write your content exclusively for them.

2. Pack your articles with as much value as possible. If time is a problem, post less.

3. Source out your target audience by getting or making links and writing for social media.

I'd also add a 4th point or perhaps add something to point 2.  Find a unique view on your topic.  I learned about this from a personal branding session at BlogHer I attended this summer.

I'd add a fifth point: Offer full-post feeds. A lot of people get worked up with the idea that if they withhold their post content from their feeds, those feeds can drive traffic to their site. But I don't think it works that way.

If you don't offer up your whole post, then you are making the feed less relevant to the reader. I am much less likely to visit a site if everything in the feed consists of a headline and little teaser. Sorry, but a tease is not a happy user experience!

Give me content. Get me interested. Hook me on your ideas. Feed me your thoughts!

And if you're interested, I'll happily do the same.

P.S. - And if you're really interested in making your site linkable by bloggers, forget Feedburner and other services like that. I often write blog posts from my feed reader, and it really is annoying when my links end up pointing to a feed URI. Yes, it leads to the same post, but the Google juice doesn't follow. Wouldn't you rather have more people linking to your domain instead of Feedburner?

About the author

Laura Scott is a web designer and developer.