Conrad Hees’ Blog

This post will be a little more of a free-flowing stream of thought on a topic that has been heavy on my mind recently, and one that many of my readers (most of whom are beginner bloggers as well) will find interesting.

As some of you may have noticed, I have not posted an article in about 8 days.  The reason for this is that I have decided…that I will start a new blog!

I know how funny that sounds, but actually it makes perfect sense to me, and I know that it is the right decision.  After spending a lot of time writing and setting up this site, I hate to just shift my focus like this.  But the point of me starting a new blog is to get a fresh start with a great concept that I know will catch on really well.

I do plan on keeping conradhees.com active and still posting my personal progress and any articles that I want to write that may be off-topic with my new blog.  I plan on posting here about once a week…I really hope that you all will stay with me.

Lessons of a Beginner Blogger

Although I have just started, I did have a few things that I was not happy with concerning this blog.  Starting a new blog will help me to quickly take advantage of some of the lessons that I have learned so far, as well as allowing me to correct certain mistakes I have made in the past.

Here are a few of the beginner mistakes that I have made with ConradHees.com, and how I have learned from them:

-  I am unhappy with ConradHees.com’s theme.  I paid $114 for this simple, average theme, simply because I did not want to put the time and effort into looking for a good, quality, free theme. 

I will not say the name of the site or the person from whom I purchased this theme (it is not hard to tell if you want to find out), but I will say that they are fairly prominent in the theme design industry, and I am puzzled as to why.  They decided to take advantage of me by charging me an extra $35 for a change that literally took 30 seconds to make, and were disorganized and unprofessional. 

I purchased this theme because it looked pretty good compared to other free themes I had seen, and I believed that no really good looking themes were free.

I was wrong.  I have since learned that with a little surfing around the web, it is possible to find entire lists of great, free themes.  For my new blog, I will get a free theme that looks much better than the one I am currently using. 

If you are a new blogger, do not buy an ‘exclusive’ or ‘premium’ theme!  Put in some time, and you will definitely find a great, free theme that fits your purposes.

-  I did not like blogging under the domain name ConradHees.com.  Although I am definitely an advocate for getting your own name as a domain, I also quickly realized that differentiating myself from the literally millions of bloggers who blog under their own names would be difficult.

If you want to have a popular blog one day, writing under your own name is a mistake.  There are simply too many other people doing it, and many are mediocre writers.  If you want to have a successful blog, think of a good, unique name that is relevant to your topic.  That is the only surefire way to differentiate yourself from the get-go.

My new blog will have a pretty cool, unique name that is relevant to my topic.  I think that it will work very well and separate me from the pack.  I will reveal it soon, once I announce the launch of my new blog in an upcoming post.

-  I did not like the diverse nature of the content on this site.  Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my articles on here, and I have gotten a great response from them, but the content was not focused enough.

As I describe briefly in My Story, I started off wanting to write about personal development, then wanted to mix it with marketing, then went to marketing only, and now for my new blog, I have picked a specific niche of marketing that I believe is exciting, interesting, and will provide for some very useful, powerful, valuable content. 

The point is that in order to have a popular blog that really meets its potential, it is very important to tighten up the focus of the blog, and make sure that you are not trying to cover too many bases. 

It has been shown time and again that people gravitate towards content that is very targeted on a specific topic.  That is how you gain a passionate audience that keeps coming back for more.  Write on too many subjects, and you will have a lot of people who don’t feel particularly strongly about more than one or two posts on your blog, and the result is…no subscribers, and little recurring traffic.

My new blog will be very focused, and I am sure that I will hit a nerve with a very passionate audience when I launch it.

Those are the three main problems that I had with my blog, and the lessons that I learned from having those problems.  I know that they are issues that many beginner bloggers go through, and I urge you to quickly resolve them if you are experiencing those same problems.

Final Thoughts (and LinkLove)

I hope that that little breakdown was beneficial for you.  I truly hope that everyone here will follow me on my blogging journey and help me get my new blog off to a rockin’ start by visitng and subscribing.  Remember, I am not really leaving this site behind, I am simply continuing my posting on another blog.

With all of that said, I thought that I would give you some links to some pretty cool stuff I have found this week on the web.  These are all links to some of my new friends I have met recently online, and they are great writers with a lot of cool stuff to say.  I hope that you will visit at least one of these sites…I promise they are a good read.  Thanks for visiting and leave any comments you may have below!

Here are the links:

My good friend Brad Spencer, SEO extraordinaire’, has started a great new blog on quick, daily SEO tips for the everyman.  Check it out here.

The ever-incredible and always remarkable Christine O’Kelly, aka Self Made Chick, is definitely the blog that you should be reading if you aren’t yet.

My friend Hunter Nuttall wrote a great post this week about the readability of blogs…definitely an interesting read.

My friend JEMi has written a great post all about the touchy subject of money and your family and friends; read here to see her suggestions. 

What do you think about getting your own name as a domain?  If you have a comment or story, please add it in the comments section! We’d love to hear from you!    

The other day, as I was pondering the mechanics of a really good blog, a question arose in my head that was so fascinating that I could not seem to shake it. The question was:

Is there a formula to figure out exactly what your readers want you to write?

Wouldn’t that be absolutely great? If you could figure out exactly what your readers wanted you to write, you could have hordes of raving fans coming back over and over again, devouring your latest articles and subscribing like crazy, couldn’t you?

Well, I have good news and bad news for you.

After deliberating on the question for quite some time, I determined the answer:

No.

Not quite what you were expecting from such an ambitious title, was it?

Well, I apologize if I mislead you. There is good news, though. Fortunately, while there is no exact formula for figuring out exactly what your readers want you to write about, there are several different factors that we can examine and use to formulate an educated guess about exactly what type of content your typical reader would like to read, as well as what type of article format (how-to, list, case study, etc.) they would like you to put it in. A pretty damn good educated guess, too, I might add.

This article is will outline and explain my tips for using certain factors to determine how to give your readers exactly what they want, time after time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered exactly what thought process a new visitor goes through when deciding whether or not to subscribe to a blog?

As I clicked around the blogosphere recently, looking for a few new sites to add to my feedreader, I noticed a mental pattern showing up that was happening in my mind effortlessly each time I arrived at a new site. 

I noticed that as I looked at a new blog, there were several questions that I would ask myself automatically as I pondered whether to subscribe or not.  As I became aware of this series of questions, it occurred to me that every other reader was likely asking themselves the same exact things when deciding if they were willing to subscribe to a new blog.

Then, it suddenly came to me: if I can identify exactly what questions a new reader asks themselves when deciding to subscribe, and then give them the ‘answer’ that they want from me, I will be able to convert a much higher percentage of new visitors into subscribers.  Then, I naturally wanted to help my readers do the same, so I decided to write a post about it.

The purpose of this post is to help you understand exactly what a new visitor is asking themselves when deciding if they should subscribe to your blog, and how to answer those questions in a way that will help them decide in your favor.

The Burning Question

As bloggers and marketers, almost nothing can be more important to us than figuring out exactly how to get new visitors to commit to a relationship with our blogs.

Since it is free to subscribe to a blog feed, it should be relatively easy to get new subscribers, right?

Wrong.

The truth is that it is not free to subscribe to a new blog feed.  In fact, it is far from it.

The reality is that each time we subscribe to a new feed, we are making an investment of our time and attention.  And as smart and productive people, we expect a return on our investment.

In the new Attention Age, we are so flooded with information, that we must be more and more discerning about what content we choose to invest our time and attention in. 

Therefore, the main question that precedes all others in a potential subscriber’s mind is:  Read the rest of this entry »