Are You Playing Games with Your Readers?

What are your goals as a blogger?

Are you interested in getting a lot of readers? Are you hoping for a lot of comments? Are you looking for people to click on your ads? Do you have a product you want to sell? Are you hoping to meet people in a similar situation as you? Do you have a cause you want to promote?

Regardless of your motivation for starting a public blog, you probably need for people to come to your blog in large numbers to accomplish your goals.

My suggestion to you is to stop making your readers play Hide 'n Seek to help you.

If you want repeat visitors, follow them to their blogs and comment there, too. Respond to every comment, if possible. Make it a conversation.

If you want votes, or ads to be clicked, or products to be sold, etc., then make that clear to your readership.

Design your template so that it is attractive, easy to navigate, and it's easy to find all the important links.

Some Villagers have the BLOG VILLAGE voting link hidden behind a drop down list. Others have the lower case text link buried in a long list of miscellaneous links. Even if a reader wants to help you out, they will probably give up looking!

Want visitors to return regularly? Then you need to post regularly. People will get tired of coming back to a blog, if they keep finding the same old post at the top, time after time.

Having a blog with a large readership does not come without hard work and time. Take a look at the blogs at the top of the BLOG VILLAGE TopList. See what they are doing that you can use on your blog. Put the effort into it, and stop making your readers play guessing games and hide and seek games with you.


Interested in joining BLOG VILLAGE?

Start HERE.

BLOG VILLAGE, surfing, blogs, readers, family friendly


BLOG VILLAGE was established on May 23, 2006

What Happened to All My VOTES?????

Some of our Villagers may be new to TopLists, and if they are, they may be wondering what happened to all their votes last night!!!

The answer is ... last night was the time for the monthly re-rank, which sets everybody back to zero.

Down at the very bottom of the TopList page there are some times listed. They show when the next Refresh will be (when new votes will show up) and when the next Re-Rank will be (when it zeroes out to give new members a chance at being higher ranked). It is set to re-rank once a month right now.

When I first started BLOG VILLAGE, it re-ranked every week, but now that the list is somewhat stable, once a month seemed more appropriate.

TopLists that get a lot of voting activity, such as Blog Advance Top Blogs, often re-rank daily. I would love for us to be able to do that, but that requires members to

1. Place the voting banner prominently.

2. Become more involved in promoting BLOG VILLAGE on each of their blogs.

3. Ask for votes, and vote for themselves consistently every day.

If you don't care enough to vote for your own blog, why should anyone else go to the trouble to vote for you??

Ask yourself:

Do they know they are supposed to vote?

Can they find the voting link easily?

Promoting BLOG VILLAGE helps each blogger in the long run, because it builds a community of loyal readers and commenters, who return frequently.


Interested in joining BLOG VILLAGE?

Start HERE.

BLOG VILLAGE, surfing, blogs, blog rank, family friendly

BLOG VILLAGE was established on May 23, 2006

Search Engine Optimization, Page Rank, & BLOG VILLAGE

One of the advantages that you can derive from joining a TopList, such as BLOG VILLAGE, is the likelihood of adding some really good links to your blog. Our TopList has a community feel to it, and the Villagers are willing to help each other out.

If you see a blog or two on BV that's similar in some way to your own blog topic, don't hesitate to ask them to swap links with you. It will help both of you, as such links are one of the things that Google and other Search Engines look for in determining Page Rank. It's generally NOT a good idea to swap links with sites that are totally unrelated to your own site, however.

And why, you're saying, should I care about Page Rank? If you are strictly blogging for the fun of it, maybe you shouldn't care, but if your blog is in any way related to your business interests, or you are trying to use the blog to earn Adsense dollars, the Page Rank is very important. The higher your PR, the more likely your blog will be to get hits from Search Engine searches. If they can't find you, they won't read you. If they don't read you, you won't earn any money!


Interested in joining BLOG VILLAGE?

Start HERE.

BLOG VILLAGE, surfing, blogs, SEO, family friendly
search engine, page rank

BLOG VILLAGE was established on May 23, 2006

I've Been PLAYING - Can't You Tell??

We're up to 145 members as of today! The rate of new members being added has begun to slow down, as one might expect, considering how fast we have grown, so I decided to play with the look of the BLOG VILLAGE TopList site itself, now that I had some time.

Hopefully, I haven't made any decorative changes that bother any of you, and please let me know if I've done anything to make it harder to navigate or use easily. If you have any suggestions for how to improve the look or functionality of BLOG VILLAGE, by all means express your ideas. That's what this blog is for, anyway, right?

Pssssst Don't forget to vote for yourself each day ... If you don't think enough of your own blog to vote for yourself, why should anyone else spend their time voting for you??

Interested in joining BLOG VILLAGE?

Start HERE.

BLOG VILLAGE, surfing, blogs, family friendly

BLOG VILLAGE was established on May 23, 2006