Darren Rowse

There are only 45 days until Christmas! It’s that time of year: the silly season is almost upon us: there’s only 15 days until Black Friday and 18 days until Cyber Monday. If you start preparing your blog for Christmas in December you’re probably too late. The Christmas rush starts ...more

If you’ve ever read a post, book or eBook, or listened to a webinar or conference session on the topic of ‘finding readers for your blog’ you’ll have heard the advice: ‘Leave comments on other blogs‘ It was the first piece of advice I remember reading about building readership and ...more

Only 1 out of every 100 Readers Comment on your Blog A Jakob Nielsen study once found that 90% of online community users are lurkers (read or observe without contributing) with only 9% of users contributing ‘a little’ and 1% actively contributing. Are only 1% of your blog’s users are ...more

I had an email this morning from a blogger who has built a great loyal readership to their blog and who has been attempting to monetize that readership lately by doing some affiliate promotions on that blog. The problem – nobody is buying anything that they promote. I spent a ...more

“What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?” – question submitted by @monedays using the #pbquestions hashtag on Twitter. Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers – but let me give you a few basic first steps: 1. Content is King ...more

“What’s the biggest mistake you see aspiring bloggers making?” This is a question I’m asked a fair bit on panels or in interviews, and it’s one that I suspect the people asking the question would like a technical answer to. The reality is that the biggest mistakes I see bloggers ...more

You’re a blogger, so hopefully you feel confident working with words. But words alone aren’t enough. Even if you haven’t been blogging for long (or are yet to start), you’ve probably noticed numbers coming up a lot in other people’s posts. You often find numbers in post titles such as: ...more

Question: How do people read online? Answer: They don’t read, they scan. In research on how people read websites it’s been found that 79% of users first scanned any new page they came across and only 16% read word-by-word. Knowing this, how should bloggers who want to reach an audience ...more

Have you ever experienced being very connected to a blogger? For me, there’s been several times over the years where it’s felt like a blogger is talking directly to me through their writing and/or podcasting. Some content creators just seem to have that sense of who is on the other ...more