How To Make your Blog more less Appealing to your Readers, Part I: Breaking Trust
How To Make your Blog more less Appealing to your Readers is a 3-part series on making your blog more appealing to your readers. Part I details how to reinforce trust with your readers. Part II covers usability principles for your blog and why you should worry about them. Part III is a summary of the series with final thoughts and responses to your comments and questions.
I believe that sometimes it’s good to go against the flow and do everything backwards. You know, like a rebellious kid breaking parents’ rules. It’s not only fun but also can give you a wider range of vision of things since you would be able to see new, hidden angles you’d miss otherwise.
Now, I could write a new blog post titled “How To Make your Blog more Appealing to your Readers” -which is a great headline, don’t you dare to steal it from me!- Instead, I’m writing this entry. Why? I think it’s best to know what can harm your blog badly so you can keep yourself from doing anything that could drive your readers away from you. Hence, this post.
Break Your Readers’ Trust
Trust is, in my opinion, the hardest single thing to earn. Yet, it is very easy to lose. It’s like a house of cards - break it, and it’ll take you ages to rebuild it. (more…)
Sex and Viral Marketing
Posted on October 15, 2008, under Advertisement, Marketing by Ikki.
It’s a known fact that advertisement uses sex to sell their products. Why? Because it WORKS. Sex is appealing. They take advantage of our horny nature to make their products appeal to us.
Richard F. Taflinger, writer of the book “Taking ADvantage - You and Me, Babe: Sex in Advertisement”, said:
Sex is the second strongest of the psychological appeals, right behind self-preservation. Its strength is biological and instinctive, the genetic imperative of reproduction. However, its effectiveness and application are gender linked. The differences in male and female psychobiology cause different approaches to and perceptions of sex, both the act and its outcome. [...] How does all this work in practice? Obviously, it depends on the product [...] advertisers aim products and services at a specific audience, a target, those most likely to buy the product or service. Since many products or services are intended for one gender or the other, the use of sex appeal varies.
Today, I found a couple of proof-of-concept materials by Diesel that exploits our human biological in a very explicit way:
Diesel xXx
Diesel Underwear Spot
I don’t know about you but I felt quite disturbed while seeing them 
Funny, huh?
Yet Another Brick in The Wall
Can’t help this feeling. I bet you have felt it, too. Whenever I visit any blog -be it new or known to me- I feel that creativity and genuine blogging are losing grounds to procrastination and dishonesty. All I see are rehashed blog posts everywhere - there are barely any new topics to discuss over with other fellow bloggers and readers out there. Originality is losing ground to laziness.
There are literally millions of blogs in the blogosphere but only a small portion of them can deliver quality, valuable contents to their readership while the rest remain to be just empty shells that look good on the outside but on the inside contain nothing but emptiness. No real discussions going on - just some passive interactions between readers and bloggers. That’s not what blogosphere is meant to be.
I know only a few bloggers who I can really click with. Reading their blogs makes me feel inspired and motivates me to continue writing and sharing everything I know - you guys know who you are 
Because of this, I’ve got a question for all of you: are you another brick in the wall?
Clicking With People
What makes a blog unique? Is it its layout? It helps but it’s not an important factor here. Is it its contents? Definitely important, but that’s just half of the story. What really spices your blog and makes it stand out from the crowd is not your theme, or what widgets are displayed on your sidebar. It’s you. You are the secret ingredient that makes the meal exquisite. (more…)
A Few Announcements!
Posted on October 9, 2008, under Internet, Web Development by Ikki.
Hi guys!
As you might have already noticed, there are a few changes around here 
Rauru.com changes its looks!
A few weeks ago, I ran a poll regarding the previous theme that was being used at this blog (Zeke - Solostream.com). The question was “What do you think of our new look?”. Over 40% of the voters said that they didn’t like it, and some of them even suggested me to go back to the previous theme. Seeing all this, I decided that it was time to get a better theme.
I don’t know about you guys, but I can be a very picky person sometimes. I’ve seen around 3000+ themes -I found somewhere a .zip file containing around 2400+ !- and didn’t like most of them. There were some nicely crafted ones but there was always some tiny detail that my unforgiving eye couldn’t stand to see. No matter how much I liked it, it always ended up being trashed.
Luckily, one of these themes captivated my heart and now it constitutes the new face of Rauru.com 
What do you think? Do you like it?
Wordpress Popular Posts Plugin is out there!
Well… not really xD For some time, I’ve been wanting to develop a Wordpress plugin just for fun. Drived by this desire of mine, I wrote a plugin that allows me now to display a list of the most popular posts here at my blog.
Wordpress Popular Posts Plugin is highly configurable. With it, I can:
- Set a custom title to the list or use the default one (”Popular Posts”).
- Set how many items I want to display on the list.
- Show / hide comments count of each post.
- Show only an excerpt of titles / Show full text of titles.
- If the Excerpt option is enabled, I can set a limit of maximum characters to be displayed by the excerpt.
Why did I write this plugin, anyway? Well, I checked a couple of similar plugins at Wordpress.org but none of them seemed to be as flexible as I wanted - so I ended up coding my own.
I’m not planning to release this plugin to the public, at least not yet. I might, however, release a private version for my subscribers. I’ll decide on that later.
Anyways, that’s all for the time being. Please remember to leave your comments about the new layout of Rauru.com! Your feedback would be highly appreciated and is important for me :)
Why You Should Write Your Headings First
Picture this: Inspiration strikes you like a tsunami, turning you into a beacon of light and wisdom. Then, you sit down and write all these great ideas you’re so eagerly wanting to see published on your site. You just can’t wait to see your readers’ reaction. By the time you’re done with the writing, you realize that you can’t find an engaging headline for your blog post. Now you have this feeling that your creative juices have dried up.
Ever since I’ve been blogging -about a year now-, I have faced this issue several times. And I’m not the only one, I know I’m not.
Why start by writing your headline first
I’ve been analyzing this problem for some time now and I’ve come to think that when it comes to writing, headlines should be dealt with first. (more…)
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