Comments and traffic: crack for bloggers. All blogs have their share of “lurkers” (those folks who read and never comment) and then there’s the segment of regular readers who never actually visit your blog on your site because they get your content in their reader or via email. Convenience is a conundrum for bloggers looking to increase interaction and traffic figures. Unfortunately, there’s no Easy Bake Oven for blogging success – but I can give you tips on how to get people out of their readers and inboxes and back INTO your blog…and garner new readers in the process.

Entice Them

Why would anyone want to come out of their warm RSS reader womb and back into your blog? Because you’re offering something for their time. Step 1: Think of where you’re spending your marketing dollars and time. Step 2: Consider what your readers are worth to you. I write for a living, so my readers are the heart and soul of my day to day. How do I thank them for their time? A reward.

Readers: This week, there is a $25 iTunes Gift Card up for grabs. Just leave a comment with a verifiable email address (required) and in that comment, give me a link to a site you frequent that runs a kickass promotion for its readers. It can be ANY site – you are my eyes and ears. Tell me what other people are doing and WHY you like it. Next Friday, I’ll announce the winner. It’s the WHY you like it that will win you the gift card. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

Do Your Homework

When’s the last time you actually looked at your blog subscriber email list? Get off your ass and get your nose in a book – your blog’s Little Black Book. It’s amazing what you can learn by doing a little homework. Pay attention to the people who Retweet, consistently comment and Stumble or bookmark your content. THANK THEM. Interact with them. Engage. Why would anyone leave a comment on a blog where the blogger doesn’t bother to interact? There’s an old adage in the writing world that goes something to the effect of “If you don’t read, you have no business writing.” I stand by that 100%. When you begin to consider your blog as a classroom, your readers as students and yourself as the teacher, it becomes evident that your class can’t go on autopilot. You need to interact and give them a reason for showing up.

Run an RSS Subscriber Contest

When the new RedheadWriting.com site goes live in February, you’ll see a sexy little RSS Subscriber contest come online. I’ll run it for 30 days and then pick a grand prize winner and 4 additional winners. But how the hell am I going to track who truly subscribes? This great post about tracking RSS contest subscribers from Weblog Tools Collection has it down to a science. Be sure to read through the comments as well – a gem of a find and thanks to Thaya Kareeson for a kickass post that is actionable and on-task for the blogger looking to grow their reach. And a tip about running contests: give away something with a high perceived value. The last contest I ran, I gave away an iPod Touch as the grand prize. It’s why I use iTunes gift cards as weekly prizes. I’m not giving away an mp3 player – I’m giving away an iPod. Whether you’re an Apple fan or not, the iPod/Apple brand carries weight with a large audience. Don’t give away shit people don’t want. It’s like forcing people into a crappy white elephant gift exchange and all you’re going to get for your time is a used tea cozy.

Tonight’s Special Guest

If you’re looking for traffic, look for guest blogging opportunities. I’m a paid contributor for my weekly Dear Redhead column at ToyWithMe.com. I love it! It’s another reason to do your homework – leverage your network to offer your services for a guest blog post. While paid opportunities are difficult to come by and usually require you have a fair-sized following to back up your case, look at it this way: an hour of your time twice a month for unpaid guest blogging opportunities on other blogs gives you exposure to new audiences and the opportunity to build your brand affinity outside your own readership. This gets people out of their reader and into your blog (or your GUEST blog on another site). A few tips on how to make the most of this:

• When you have a guest post, create a post on YOUR blog that gives a lead-in and link to the other blog. Your readers have no choice but to click through and check it out!
• Request that the guest blog link back to your home page or a particular related article on your blog. This encourages NEW readers on that blog to click through to YOUR site.
• Better yet, embed links in your guest post (without being a spammy asshat, mind you) that link back to your blog. It’s best to discuss this in advance with the blog owner. Don’t kick someone in the balls for giving you a chance to grow your readership.
• Offer a reciprocal guest post on your blog in exchange!

A note about requesting guest blog opportunities: When you contact a blog for the opportunity, give them reasons to say YES. List your Twitter following, current subscribers, other key audience factors and how you’ll promote the piece. Many sites have submission guidelines – be sure to follow these. Can’t find anything? First, be sure that they accept guest bloggers. Secondly, send an email through their Contact page. And spell check, for the love of all that’s holy. Spell check.

I sat down this weekend and said to myself: “Self, where will Redhead Writing go in 2010?” After we crossed Tahiti off the list, the more important question came to mind: “How will I know when we get to where we’re going?” Since there’s no GPS for blogging to get you from where you are to where you want to be, the best I figured I could do is put together a set of metrics as a move-forward tactic for Redhead Writing. Hell, I do it for my clients. Time to sack-up and start doing it for myself.

Metric 1: Blog Subscribers

Subscribers come in two formats and a few iterations: email and RSS feed. RSS feed can be broken down further into Google Reader subscribers (easily tracked), other readers and pure RSS feed.  You need to monitor all three of these to establish move-forward metrics for measuring blog growth and success.

Email subscribers: I burn my feed with Feedburner. It has a robust set of marketing and subscription tools and also tracks email subscribers to your blog for you. To view this information, just go to Publicize/Email Subscriptions and scroll down until you see View Subscriber Details. They even let you export your subscriber list as a .csv file. Booyah.

Google Reader subscribers: Just go to Google Reader and click the “Add a Subscription” button in the top left corner. Enter the name of your blog (or anyone’s for that matter) and you’ll see how many people subscribe to your blog via Google Reader. Note that this number does NOT include other reader types. As everything Google, it’s an island. I have boatloads more RSS subscribers than Google Reader subscribers and I have to track each independently.

RSS subscribers: Since I use Feedburner to administer my RSS feed, I can just log into Feedburner and check my growth stats regularly. Doing this monthly (along with the other tracking above) will keep me apprised of what’s hot, what sucks and what I should emulate moving forward.

Metric 2: Tease and Tweet

It’s not dirty, so stop it. If you have a blog and you’re not using Twitter…umm…what? I’m not even going to discuss it. You need to track a few things to measure blogging success: teaser headlines and retweets.

Teaser Headlines: How do you lead in a link to a blog post? People are curious by nature but they want to be enticed to click on something. That’s where headlines come in. I track not only the headlines I attach to a link but the blog link itself. I will generally tweet a blog post morning and afternoon during prime reading times and use a different headline each time. Make yourself a spreadsheet to track your headlines and be sure to use a trackable URL shortening service like bit.ly for all links to your own domain. (Why you shouldn’t use Ow.ly for links to your domain….)

Retweets: If you’re running a self-hosted WordPress installation, there are many plugins out there that will track your retweets. I personally use Digg Digg, and you’ll see the Digg and Tweet icons at the top of this post underneath my SocioFluid social bookmarking bar. You can encourage people to retweet directly from the post, or if they retweet through Twitter, the plugin will pick up those pings and add them to your count. Go through your posts on a monthly basis and see what’s hot. Your URL shortening service will also help you track most clicked and shared content through the system’s built-in analytics.

Metric 3: Google Analytics and Lijit

If you don’t have Google Analytics installed for your blog, get thee to Google and get that shit taken care of, yo? There’s a simple WordPress plugin for Google Analytics. Just set up your GA account and plug in your tracking code – and in BAM! You’re tracking stats Emeril-style. I use GA in conjunction with Lijit. WTF is Lijit? One of the coolest tracking tools EVAH. It enables a high-powered search function on your site. Your blog visitors can search your site, your social content and your network’s content for awesome results. It doesn’t replace GA but is a dandy compliment to GA’s stats. Need more info? Well, first of all – it’s FREE. Download and plugin. Secondly, give @tarable a follow on Twitter (one of my lovely co-presenters at the upcoming Chicks Who Click Denver event this coming weekend, 1/23). She’ll be happy to hook you up with answers and the people who can help you make your blog more “Lijit.”

Metric 4: Data, Data, Data

Why do you have a blog if you’re not tracking this stuff? Set goals. I want X number of subscribers by X date. I want to send out email communications X times per year. I will tweet content X times per day. I will bookmark all posts with X social bookmarking services. I track ALL of this information for my clients and yet – I have been lax in doing it for my own business. Well, no more. All of this data is mine for the asking. It takes 1 hour per month to gather your stats, so don’t you owe yourself an hour to grow your reach, audience and brand affinity? Tracking is as simple as an Excel/Numbers spreadsheet. Personally, I’m delighted I am weaning myself off of the hateful Microsoft products since I now own a Mac (applause, please). But I digress. Track your shit, just don’t track it in the house. Wipe those shoes and keep your blog clean, organized and growing.

The bottom line: you can’t track your blog’s success by just looking at Google Analytics or Subscribers. If you see one, you’re missing the other. Never forget that your online community, while seemingly united, is actually highly fragmented. Everyone has their own preferred method of content delivery. You may have 500 RSS subscribers who never EVER click through to your site per month because they’re getting you in their feed or reader. Now the key is: how do you get people to click through and visit your site if they get content in your reader? Tune in Friday, my pets. Tune in Friday.

I’ve shared as of late my likes and dislikes when it comes to the Denver live music and dining scene. I’ve lamented about having been called a cougar by cocksucking “journalists” over at the Denver Post. However,  it seems I have a talent for something: pissing people off. But I also seem to keep all of you coming back for more in the process…curious behavior, my little blog lemmings.

As one of my Tweeps mentioned yesterday: “If @RedheadWriting tweets and there’s no one there to read it, are people still pissed off?”

Touché, mon ami. Touché.

So today, I’m going to teach you how to speak your mind, damn the consequences, and start a little online collection of literary fireballs all your own. And I won’t sell this to you for $199. NO! Not even $49.95.

I’m giving you this advice (are you sitting down?) for FREE! Yes, that’s right. It’s completely free. And if you don’t believe me, you might want to check out I Left My Salvation in Little Johnny’s Pants (also free). You, too, can be an incendiary blogger by following a few simple steps. Learn how to piss of your neighbors, alienate your coworkers, offend religious zealots and pick off humorless drones with a verbal BB gun. I can hardly contain myself…so let’s get started, shall we?

Tips for Becoming an Incendiary Blogger

1. Topic selection is KEY. If you’re going to be a blogger who stirs-up controversy, you aren’t going to get there by talking about pretty flowers or baby smiles. Fuck that. You can be a helluva lot more creative. If you take those pretty flowers and shove them up the ass of the boyfriend who gave them to you as an apology for spending your family savings on blow and poker while in Vegas or attach that smiling baby to a woman so obese that she could don a tan and red shirt and be mistaken for a Southwest flight…you’re on the right track. They key to incendiary blogging is choosing a topic in which you’re emotionally invested – if only for as long as it takes to write the blog. Passion shines through. Just look at the entire Swift Boat movement that killed the Kerry campaign back in 2004. Full of shit? INDEED! Timely? Hell yes. Did they disappear after the election? Like KKK knights at a NAACP rally. As well, topics must have clearly defined sides and room for debate. Screw the grey areas (grey looks like hell on everyone, including blogs). Your readers must be able to agree, disagree, or be the raving, self-indulgent pricks who want to explore those grey areas by posting responses that merit being blog entries themselves. The subjects of your blog must also be specific. Avoid thems and theys and you peoples. Incendiary blogging (and purposeful writing in general) grabs someone by the balls and holds them accountable for a position, opinion, or action.

   TAKEAWAYS FOR TOPIC SELECTION: be passionate about your subject, avoid generalities, and pick a side. You’re not here to make friends – you’re here to put forth your opinion.
   

2. You’re not here to make friends. Blogging, and especially for those who choose to incite debate, isn’t about writing to please the masses. It’s about stating your viewpoint. There’s nothing I hate more than the friend who always agrees with me. For fuck sake – I’m not always right. Challenge me, dammit! If I wanted a pet parrot, I’d have gone to the damn pet store and bought one. The biggest mistake I see with beginning bloggers is that they’re afraid to piss anyone off. Guess what? You don’t live OR BLOG in Disneyland. This ain’t Andalusia and there’s no bevy of magical animals that’s going to make everything alright and everyone love you at the end of each blog entry. Get that out of your head right now. It’s awesome when people get pissed at what you write! It means you evoked a response. If people come to your blog and leave without feeling inspired to cut off your balls or cast a bronze statue in your likeness, you’ve done a mediocre job of presenting your case. If you choose your topics wisely and abandon the fear that not everyone is going to like what you write, I’m sure-shit bettin’ that you’re going to be a lot closer to conveying a powerful message than one that leaves me wishing I had spent 5 minutes diddling myself instead of reading your blog.

   TAKEAWAYS FOR “NO FRIENDS:” It’s not high school and there’s no popularity contest. When you’re passionnate about a subject, your audience will identify itself. Your fans will chime-in with agreement and praise and your enemies will leave you thankful for “comments held for moderation.”

3. Always hold comments for moderation. Since you’re choosing topics that inspire you to call it as you see it and are no longer worried about offending people with your thoughts, it’s time to deal with the comments. The lifeline of a blog and the source of much of my personal joy as a blogger, you’re going to get the fortifying words of praise accompanied by those vehemently opposed to the fact you walk the same planet. And then there’s the occasional comment that must be deleted through moderation because an ex-boyfriend finds your blog and writes some falsehood about how if you gave better head, he wouldn’t have slept with three of your best friends. That’s complete bullshit BTW, but it stands as a good example as to the douchebaggery you have to deal with when it comes to people who disagree with you yet are incapable of crafting an intelligent (or intelligible) retort. My advice? Establish a comments policy. My personal comment policies for all my blogs is REAL email addresses, no personal attacks, and no gratuitous/spammy comments left just for links. To up the “incendiary” factor, I’ve also been known to let comments that were especially inflammatory or opposed to my opinions “stew.” That is, held for moderation for up to a day or two, just to peeve the comment author. It makes me giggle a bit inside. Take note, however: you shouldn’t just publish the comments of those who want to build you a parade float for your intellectually superior thoughts. Keep your blog open to discussion and differences. Hell, I’ve had comment threads that became more interesting than whatever I was writing about.

   TAKEAWAYS FOR COMMENTS: As the lifeline of your blog, treat them with reverence. Welcome the thoughts of those that agree and disagree alike, but have no qualms about squelching non-topical douchebaggery behind the scenes. It’s your blog and you’re entitled to keep it under control through holding all comments for moderation. Comments sections should be harbors for dialogue, not the last bastion for assholes to spew their bloated and ill-substantiated fuckery. As a blogger, you say what you mean and mean what you say, but it doesn’t give others permission to be mean – especially on your forum.
4. Being mean – it’s not funny. Be surprising – that’s funny. Malice. It’s a short word with a flat bed truckload of weight to it. It implies an evil intent and a desire to harm. When you set out to be an incendiary blogger, you can easily take the low-hanging balls and kick them. It’s called being mean. Assholes are mean and there are a lot of asshole bloggers out there. Contrarily, you can take the more evolved approach and attack a person for their actions and inconceivable philosophies without attacking the person. Every person who stumbles upon your blog has a family. Someone they love. Maybe even a dog that shits in the neighbor’s yard. Don’t kick someone’s puppy. Rather, use the puppy to your advantage. Explain how the person’s ill-conceived and misshapen notions of right and wrong are the only plausible excuse for their dog’s behavior. Everyone knows puppies are sweet. Just like children. Ill-behaved puppies and children are the result of bad parenting. Address the parenting problem, not the fact that the parent is a raving prickmonster or the neighborhood whore. It doesn’t matter how true the prickmonstery or whoring may be — what matters is you’ve created a argument based on intellect instead of one that degenerates into one big “yer mama” joke in the parking lot after school.

   TAKEAWAYS FOR FUNNY: Humor stems from truth and there’s no greater truth than being a blogger who can craft a coherent and smart argument directed at the object of your praise/disdain. Keep the schoolyard crap back in third grade where it belongs. No one stole your crayons. Shit, no one even wants your crayons. So don’t revert to “dick mode.” Open your mouth, find your voice, and when it comes to your blog, keep the “dick” out of your mouth.
5. Find your voice and don’t apologize. I’ve never apologized for my affinity for the word fuck (or “linoleum” — I LOVE that word!) or my rampant use of colorful language. Why? Because it’s ME and frankly, I could give 3.5 frog’s fine ass hairs about what people think of ME. If you’re going to blog and have any success with it (incendiary or not) you need to have enough confidence in who you are to know when to use the phrase, “Go fuck yourself.” There are people who think I’m a potty mouth (which I am), that I’m evil (which I am not) and that I hate children (couldn’t be less true). I haven’t the time nor the inclination to care. I have a way of saying things that keeps people coming back because I write about topics that excite me and thus, they’re excited to read them. I understand that the people who like my shit will find me, tell their friends and keep coming back. I accept that not everyone will want to hug me for what I think and feel and am inspired by the challenge of good debate. I actually look forward to the moronic, non-topical personal attacks that line my comment moderation inbox each week, as they’re sometimes more fun than four hours with an old school Qbert machine. And I never kick people’s puppies — but I sure shit have no problem strategizing how to kick those who do kick puppies. I may be pointed, but I’m never mean. It’s The Redhead. My voice. Does it mean you can’t throw me in the shower, dress me up and take me to a gala? Not in the slightest. It does mean, however, that I’ll have no problem dropping the f-bomb wearing a strapless cocktail dress and some Charles David strappy sandals should proper occasion present.

   TAKEAWAYS FOR YOUR UNAPOLOGETIC VOICE: Go back up to the number 5 above and re-read until blue in the face.

********

Here endeth the lesson (in my best Highlander/Sean Connery voice). Now go forth with confidence, wielding your shiny new toolbox of incendiary blogging techniques. And know that I’ve duped you — as everything I’ve said above applies to solid blogging techniques, whether you wish to be one who sparks controversy or not. Gotcha, motherfuckers…