Will Marlow

If you really want to get more subscribers to your blog, you need to keep two lists: (1) a list of blogs, forums and Twitter accounts that occupy your space where you plan on regularly leaving high quality comments.  Commenting makes you part of the discussion, and high quality contents will drive traffic back to your own site.  And (2) you need to keep a list of blogs that you want to submit guest posts to.  If you want to build a blog subscriber list, you aren't just looking for people who like your content.  You're looking for blog subscribers who like your content.  Not everyone uses Google Reader to subscribe to blogs.  Not everyone subscribes to blogs period. 

This means that if you want more subscribers to your blog, you are better off writing a guest post on another blog that has 100,000 likeminded subscribers than you are writing an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, which has 1 million subscribers.

Why?  Lots of people will read the Wall Street Journal, but they aren't the type of people necessarily who will subscribe to your blog.  (Note: if the Wall Street Journal wants to publish your Op-Ed, say YES and THANK YOU.  Sometimes there are more important things than subscribers.)

But back to the point of this post: these two lists (first, a list of places to comment, and second, a list of places to submit guest posts) are crucial to growing your online community.  Right now I am practicing what I preach on both counts, and I'll let you know how things go.  By following an aggressive guest posting strategy, I may end up posting less frequently on this blog, but I expect to maintain a pace of one or two posts a week here. 

For me, the two blogs at the top of my list for where I would like to submit guest posts are ProBlogger and CopyBlogger, because I think my posts and topic are most relevant to those audiences.  Right now I'm working on a guest post that I plan to submit to ProBlogger or CopyBlogger about how you can build an enduring blogging empire by following the lessons laid out in the Godfather Trilogy.

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-founder of  AlumniFidelity, which was the first Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

I write this blog in order to help non-technical people who want to understand technical things.  I do this because in the last five years, the line that separates technical and nontechnical roles has blurred for lots of people.  Take journalists for example.  Journalists shouldn't just write a story anymore.  They should write a story AND promote it online to make sure that even if they're fired from their newspaper, they'll have an online readership that may follow them to their next assignment.  That's a valuable asset.  

If you want to take your blogging to a high level, you should make sure you have a blog that is customized to help you advance your specific goals.  My top priorities for this blog are: (1) delivering useful, clear content to my readers, and (2) making it easy for readers to subscribe to my blog.  These may be simple goals, but pursuing them ruthlessly means you need to remove all distracting elements from the blog, and making sure that all elements that remain serve a purpose.  When you have a minimalist style, any dumb parts will stand out like a sore thumb.  

As you know, I started with the default Posterous settings, which are excellent, and made the following customizations:

1. Rather than keeping the "login" navigation at the top right of the page (above the fold), I moved it to the bottom right, below the fold (which is the same thing that @guykawasaki does with his Alltop page. 
2. I increased the size of the header by 2x.
3. I posted a hidden "About me" page, and posted a link to that page to serve as a replacement for the default Posterous "profile" page, which I hid from view.  Posterous's default profile page is great for the social networking aspects of the platform, but it is a huge distraction and source of confusion to most of my readers, who don't care that I happen to use Posterous's platform.
4. I removed the faint text that said, "Contributors," along the right side of the page, because I'm the sole writer of this blog.
5. In addition to letting readers subscribe via Posterous's default subscription path, I added a Twitter button AND a Feedburner email field.  For some reason it was tricky to get all these options to display consistently whether you were reading from a specific post OR just reading from the blog homepage, but I eventually figured out how to get it right, which is important because for my blog this is part of the "anchor" section, which readers rely on to navigate the site. 
6. I posted a hidden "Most popular posts" page and put the link beneath the "About me" page.  These are the two "informational anchors" on the site.  Beneath these two links, you have the three "engagement anchors," which include a Twitter button for people to subscribe via Twitter, a Feedburner email subscription field, and the default Posterous subscription button, for fellow users of Posterous.  (Note: I wanted to keep a link that said "Follow me on Posterous" because that is one of the few nods to Posterous on the blog, and I want to give the platform credit for powering this site.)
7. I purchased a custom domain name (www.willmarlow.com)
8. When you view a blog post, rather than seeing the view count and the number of times the post has been "Favorited" in the top part of the page, I moved that information down lower, because I needed that prime real estate for the anchor section (and because the importance of that information is debatable).
9. I removed the Posterous tag from the top of the page.

I will continue to optimize the blog by making minor changes designed to make the blog more readable and user friendly, and I'm appreciative of any feedback you may have for things I'm doing right and things I'm doing wrong.  Please don't hesitate to let me know what you think.  And if you share my goals, I'm happy to send you what you need to use my optimized blog template as your Posterous "theme." 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

I once heard a great story about someone who accidentally sent an email containing embarrassing personal information to the wrong recipient.  The information in the email was potentially embarrassing to the sender, but it wasn't John Edwards-scale traumatizing, and the sender decided to use an interesting tactic to deal with the error.  Rather than contact the recipient and explain the error, or ask that the recipient to delete the email without reading it, she simply sent the recipient 20 more identical emails - with the embarrassing sections omitted, of course.  This way, the recipient read the most recent email and assumed they were all identical, and deleted the rest without ever noticing that the first email contained a unique section.

Here is the most helpful advice I've received so far on blogging.  Some points seem to contradict other points, but I've found it all helpful when taken together.

I was having a discussion with a journalist the other day about what combination of skills/traits are desirable in a journalist today.

We came up with some interesting thoughts.

According to us, the ideal journalist (without the support of a staff) should:

1. Be a great photographer.
2. Be a great videographer.
3. Be very well-versed in Photoshop and Vegas, not to manipulate images, but to build mashups of photos and videos to supplement stories.
4. Be a near-daily blogger to keep the most loyal readers updated on what she's doing.
5. Be an active "Twitterer," Tweeting both her own stories and the stories she wishes she wrote (that is, for creation and curation).
6. Use "bit.ly" links to track how many people click on her stories, so she could talk about how many readers she brings with her to whichever company she writes for.
7. Use Google Analytics or some other tracking software in her blog so she understands which of her story formats were most popular and successful, and she improve her presentation over time.
8. Be comfortable responding to readers in comment fields all across the web, and would setup various alerts to notify her when a reader was talking to her or mentioning one of her stories.
9. Have an online bio where she lays out her modus operandi, her standards, her skills, her background, and what readers should expect of her.
10. Have good grammar.

Personally, I think the only journalists who will have any job security or steady work in the years to come will be those who have a strong personal connection to their most loyal readers.  And to do that they need to understand how to produce stories that are optimized for the Web, not optimized for paper.

PS - If a journalist can do all this, and they manage to build a daily traffic of 2,500 unique visitors, a rough estimate for how much revenue they would get from advertising would be $60,000 a year.  That would be cool, especially because if you're smart enough to build that level of traffic, you're probably smart enough to develop other streams of revenue to supplement it.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.  

Back in America pre-1995, this was the communication landscape:

• 9,000 commercial radio stations
• 1,100 television stations
• 11,000 periodicals
• 11,000 newspapers.

I have two separate blogs.  This (www.willmarlow.com) is my personal blog, and my posts here stem from my role as a co-founder of AlumniFidelity, and my experience operating a technology startup company.  

Before posting to this blog, I try to ask the following questions:

1. Would someone else who is working at a startup, a university, a nonprofit, or a boring corporation potentially find the information useful?
2. Is this something that I wish someone else had already written about? 
3. Is this post interesting enough that I would regret forgetting it?

The three questions above don't tell me what to write about, however.  They only tell me when I'm finished writing a post.