31DBBB Day 11: Solve a Problem for your Reader
This is Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project we are doing together in an attempt to improve our blogs and help each other become better bloggers. You can read more about it and still sign-up to participate here. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated on the project.
Today we are going to spend some time writing a post that solves a problem for your readers. Thank you to all of you who participated on the two weeks of assignments, we are gone through about half of the curriculum and are getting some good discussion back and forth as I initially hoped. Let’s keep up the effort and I hope everyone is having a good time while taking steps to improve their blogging.
- Week 1: Read about the first week of 31DBBB
- Week 2: The second week of 31DBBB
- Day 11 (Monday): Solve a Problem for your Reader
- Day 12 (Tuesday): Watch a First Time Reader Use your Blog
- Day 13 (Wednesday): Creating a Sneeze Page for your Blog
- Day 14 (Thursday): Write an Opinion Post on your Blog
- Day 15 (Friday): Leave Comments on Other Blogs
Solving problems for your readers is arguably the most effective way of attracting and retaining readers. By solving issues people may have, you are directly impacting your reader’s lives, making them much more likely to return to your blog and spread it to other people.
How to Identify Problems for your Readers?
- Solve a problem you personally experience: If you have a problem, then more than likely other people are having and will have the same problem. For example, as a blogger, you may issues getting comments on your blog. This is a common problem and if you have resolved it, why not share how you addressed the issue.
- Analyze how people get to your blog: By looking at the keywords people use to get to your blog, you can find out potential problems they are trying to solve. Did they find what they were looking for? If not, then you may have a potential problem to solve
- Look for Questions in your comments/Ask your Readers: Simple enough assuming that you have some readers.
- Browse forums and other sites related to niche for common problems people have: If you ever participate in forums, then you know the same question always pop up. By answering some of those question on your blog, you are effectively capturing some of that audience
Example of AM posts that solved problems
Assignment
Write a post that solves a problem for your readers. As always come back and post a link in the comments as well as tell us what you learned from today’s assignment.
Discussion
- Have you written problem-solving posts in the past? If so, have they proven to be a popular type of post?
- Which of the ways for discovering readers’ problems mentioned in today’s lesson or this post resonates most with you? Which have you found most effective?
- What problem-solving posts might you write in the future?
27 Comments
This one personally speaks to me, especially when considering upgrading or changing templates. My main concern is making everything user friendly and easily accessible. I’ve been blustered twice and volunteered to get blustered on the LAMBcast with hopes to even further improve the site. The only way to grow is to ask questions, take suggestions (of course we don’t have to take them all), and learn from past mistakes.
Great topic I’ll really try to improve in this area.
My hand hit my mouse and for some reason erased everything I just typed, must be Monday! Well, what I said is the main problem I want to solve for my readers is them trusting that I’m a good source for what to watch, read or listen to. In order for them to trust me, they would have to come back on a regular basis. So my challenge is how to attract readers and keep them coming back for more. Thanks Castor for linking those articles. I’ll read them when I get home from work. I’m working a side job all this week in addition to my day job, so I’m going to have some late nights. I’ll be participating though!
Interesting! Never thought about that!
This isn’t particularly relevant to this article specifically, but more the build a better blog theme in general, but I found this on CHUD and found it to be right on the money:
Reviewing Film Reviews: The Validity of Film Criticism
* By Ryan Mason
* Published 08/3/2010
Ryan Mason
Listen: odds are you couldn’t care less about where I live, how many dogs I have, what I do when I’m not writing reviews, or what kind of snack I prefer when watching movies.
Too bad: Venice, CA; zero; blogging about politics, religion, the media and anything else that gets me really riled up; and, Sour Patch Kids. Always Sour Patch Kids.
Nothing I can tell you will make you love a movie when you have already decided that you hate it.
Not to say that my powers of persuasion are ineffective (although, you can be the judge of that), rather that when it comes to something as subjective as enjoying or not enjoying a film, the rational mind doesn’t matter much.
If that’s the case, then, what’s the point of reviewing movies? Why does one particular person’s view matter more than another’s when, in the end, it all comes down to each individual’s personal opinion?
Because a good film review can be a standalone piece of art. You can read a critique without having seen the movie and be thoroughly entertained by that person’s dissection of the film. Even if you have little to no interest in a movie, you should still be entertained by the review itself, by the reviewer’s style of writing, just like you can be by short stories, magazine articles, or newspaper columns.
Just like any other form of creative writing or art in general, there will be good reviews and garbage reviews. The good ones will transcend the movie and be something worthwhile completely on its own.
And if they convince you to see an amazing movie that you may have otherwise written off… well, that’s the perfect review.
Awesome awesome piece, thanks for sharing Heather! Puts things in perspective doesn’t it?
It does. It felt really inspiring and was such a down to earth perspective. I know a lot of us taking our blogging seriously, obviously we devote an insane amount of our lives and time to our sites, but at the end of the day, I think most of us find just what we’re doing to be gratifying enough, even without Indy’s fortune and glory. Although you and Red here are kind of famous in the blogsphere.
Awesome info. Really great to read this..At least I get some enough purpose to run a Movie blog. Thanks to Heather for sharing this
Hi I also read this today about film criticism from Roger Ebert. It is old and I am sure folks here have seen it but especially from a journalistic standpoint, I think that it is sage advice:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/eberts_little_rule_book.html
Thanks for sharing
Well, I gotta tell you. Figuring out what my readers’ problems are get tricky with just keywords. However, I have one “problem solving post” that seemed to be sort of popular. A problem that happened to me ;P Like when I updated to WP 2.6, and got a bunch of errors.
Not much feedback, but I’ve seen some people talking about it ;P
In a less technological talk, people found that my posting of the lyrics to the Olympics song very useful. Link was posted in different forums from around the world, blogs, and even Yahoo answers xD I should find a way to embed a new track though.
This has been a key focus of mine as of late. I had a poll on our site for the last little while about the Captcha form for comments, and whether that’s a promblem for readers trying to leave comments. I told myself that as soon as I had 5 respondents I’d take action… but maybe 4 people complaining about it is enough to take it down – Akismet does a sufficient job of catching spam anyway.
It gets a little tricky figuring out what works and doesn’t work about the site, because those who have a problem with things will just move onto the next blog. I try to think like a visitor and figure out what I like about the flow of other blogs.
Not sure if that’s on topic or not…
Ahaha, to be honest Steve. Not really
In any case, I think your Capcha spam verification is useless since Akismet already does an outstanding job catching 99% of the spam.
When I first got going in this game, I was doing a lot of research into SEO and getting my site noticed by Google. I think I wound up talking about that stuff more on radio than anything, but over time I found that trying too hard to chase the google page rank wound up leaving me feeling more like a link farm and less like a blog about ideas related to movies. Still, there are plenty of great resources out there and much of the advice can be pared down to some simple rules of thumb.
Perhaps a post that whittles down some of the SEO techniques into simple blogging habits is in order?
And so long Captcha form!
The nice thing with mine is I’m always evolving and growing into something better than it was before. Like I said in my response to Castor’s blog review, I’m not very talented with HTML or computer programmings. I don’t know web design and I certainly don’t know art (hence why somebody made my banner for me).
But thanks to the LAMB blustering I added a more colorful background image instead of just black. Thanks to the blustering I created that review/article page (which I’m working on to get all the links in)and thanks to the blustering I started doing more than reviews like interviews, television things, comic things and the FMV reviews.
And thanks to Scott from He Shot Cyrus I got rid of CAPTCHA’S
And thanks to Castor’s blog tips thing I started adding pictures and not just having blocks of text for the most part.
And thanks to the blog review on here I made my sidebar more interesting with share this, recent posts, RSS feeds, archive, subscribe and even added a search bar at the top making it more accessible. I still need to make the footer better but I’m still working on that. I also shrunk down the banner at the top
And thanks to the e-mails I get from some of my older readers I made the typing a little bigger and easier to see.
So I’m constantly evolving and the more I learn, the more I change. I need to learn and change or I get stuck in a rut.
But as far as gauging reader problems I mostly just check what’s the most popular articles and what’s the least and why that is and figure out how to change that. And on my facebook page I have asked questions in the past (although I may try twitter soon) and asked what I could add or change but I never really get a response.
I think there is some confusion as to what today’s lesson is about. “Solve a problem for your reader” does not really mean solve a problem that is on your blog for your reader. Instead, it means solve a problem that some of your readers may have in general.
For example, a few months ago I made a post called “MPAA: Who Goes to the Movies”. A very simple post where I simply present and then make a brief comment on the broader content of the yearly document the MPAA releases. This post has actually been quite popular and does receive a fair amount of hits because it solves a problem: People want to know who go to the movies but there isn’t all that many content about it on the internet
Another example: One day, I wondered what the true seasonal patterns at the box office were. Are summer and November/December truly the most profitable at the box office. Is September really that bad for business or is it all a myth? After some searching on the internet, I realized there was actually nothing about it in terms of facts. This is a good example of a personal problem that may apply to other people who may be looking for the same information. So what I did was fire up Excel and go over the last decade of weekly box office intake and voila: a post that solve a problem.
Or you do a post about Boxofficemojo =)
But I’m with you fram assignment standpoint it is really interesting to see what searches bring people to the site especially if you have this view on it.
Well, jeez, that sounds way more practical – and makes way more sense. I think my posts of that kind wind up being “observational humour” that also hope to bring insight about certain filmmaking habits, or industry procedures. MPAA ratings is a great one – considering that it’s a mystery without a definite answer you can find.
I had one that was accidental in that it garners a lot of google searching, which was whether there’s was a real connection between two TV shows with similar themes. I wrote that post over a year ago and it still brings in most of my blog’s traffic. I think the trick to is find original questions to answer, ’cause the big sites tend to hog the more common questions.
One lame article about The Rock is bringing in a lot of google visitors on a daily basis for me so I think you can get traffic from more general interests too.
Other google searches that generate visitors
Al Pacinos Best speeches
Dennis Hopper Memorial/tribute
Similar to Joel’s, my actor spotting for Carey Mulligan is bringing the most traffic, even if written a while back. And since the release of Inception, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s entry for The 20 to Watch ;P
Oh, I think it’s good to have posts on movies/shows/actors people don’t often blog about. If you google said keyword, and don’t find anything on it… chances are that your post about them will be placed #1 when they do a search.
Most of my friends and blog readers ask me again and again that “How to choose some good movies to watch?”. This question have been in my mind for long time. I think this is the right time to express my thoughts about their doubts. Finally, I come with this post http://www.moviescrunch.com/2010/08/how-to-choose-good-movie-to-watch.html Hope it might useful for all of us. Today assignment helps me to think about my blog readers problem. There are lot of problems like Sound system, disturbing environment etc..for a movie fan. In future, I try to give more useful tips for Movie fans to make them so comfort to watch movies.
Till now I concentrate only in Content..Once I reach enough content, then I try to concentrate in SEO process. But I am mostly engaged in Social media sites like Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc. They really helps me a lot to reach specific readers.
I wrote a post last fall because I’d heard of all these costumes my friends’ kids would be wearing so I created a post of ideas for movies characters that little girls could wear that were age appropriate and fun. It gets a lot of traffic. I guess that would solve a problem for random people and brought in readers searching for Halloween costumes. Maybe I’ll solve more holiday based problems.
This is a hard one for me, since I have a particularly small niche of readers. One of the ways I help solve a reader’s problem is by finding chick flicks like Timer, or Penelope, that they may not have seen.
One of the first posts I wrote was about why men like movies like Scarface, etc. http://justchickflicks.com/2009/03/chick-flicks-vs-man-movies/ . I received my first comment (from someone who wasn’t a personal friend). I am thinking of doing a monthly post about Action Flicks for women who have to watch them with their boyfriends and husbands.
To round out my site, I wanted to add TV programs. I wrote a post called 5 Reasons to Watch Mad Men. [http://justchickflicks.com/2009/08/5-reasons-to-should-watch-mad-men/] It has been one of my most popular posts. Now I do a weekly recap called Mad Men Mondays.
Do you have other ideas for me?
unfortunately i had a hard time with this assignment. but the more i thought about it it dawned on me that my post that was a list of girlfriend (read “chick”) flicks a group of friends could solve the problem/puzzle of what film to watch for a “Girls’ Night In.”
I’m working on a post that would fit this perfectly. After seeing this post, I’ll move it up on my priortiy list.
I did this a while ago when I was experiencing a lot of frustration with the new IMDB layout. A quick search online and on Twitter resulted in finding a lot of other people having this frustration. I wrote a post about how to change it and it has been one of my most visited blog posts and a simple one to write.
http://myfilmviews.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/how-to-get-the-old-imdb-layout-back/
Great choice. I actually have a similiar IMDB post in my draft section on my blog. I’ll post it when yours gotten colder. =)
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