Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

Great Titles Help

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

Graphics Don’t Hurt

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Brevity Is the Game

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

Share Your Blog

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

Subscriptions or No?

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Guest Posts

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

Consistency

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

Market Your Blog

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

How Do You Grow Traffic To Your Blog?

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

Mocha frappuccino and soy latte lovers rejoice: Starbucks is rolling out its Starbucks Card Mobile App for BlackBerry tomorrow, September 2.

In September 2009, Starbucks introduced its Starbucks Card Mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, enabling the owners of those devices to reload their Starbucks payment cards, monitor their rewards cards and even pay for their purchases at 16 stores in Seattle and the Silicon Valley region. In June, the coffee company extended its mobile payment system to 1,000 Target stores in addition to the roster of Starbucks venues.

Now all of this functionality has been adapted — and, in some respects, improved — for BlackBerry Bold, Curve, Storm and Tour users. For instance, BlackBerry owners can use the app’s store locator to identify all Starbucks and Target venues where Starbucks is sold, not just the ones that support mobile payments.

In an interview with Mashable, Chuck Davidson, the category manager for innovation on the Starbucks Card team, described the group’s painstaking efforts to optimize the app experience for BlackBerry users. “We didn’t just want to put an iPhone app on a BlackBerry, which would have shocked BlackBerry users,” Davidson explained. “We had to get inside a BlackBerry head and use the right workflow.”

Thus, instead of embedding rich graphics and video for navigation, the team utilized the menu key, resulting in a much more intuitive experience for BlackBerry users.

With the addition of BlackBerry support, Davidson said that roughly three-fourths of its customers now have access to the Starbucks Card Mobile app. While he didn’t confirm that an Android app was in the works, he did say it was the third-most requested app after the iPhone and BlackBerry.

To get the Starbucks Card Mobile BlackBerry app, text the word “GO” to 70845 or visit the Starbucks mobile site.

More About: Android App, App, blackberry, blackberry app, iphone app, starbucks

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

A special edition of the linklog today. If you were at the 1st Datajournalism Meetup in Berlin this afternoon where I was talking about datajournalism at The Guardian and The Observer, then here is a list of some of the things that I mentioned. If you weren't, then consider this a sneak preview of some of the things I'll be writing about when I publish the longform version of the talk...

• guardian.co.uk: The Afghanistan War Logs.
• guardian.co.uk: Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs - how our datajournalism operation worked - Simon Rogers with a behind-the-scenes look at processing the Wikileaks data.
• Nieman Journalism Lab: How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools - interview with Guardian DataBlog editor Simon Rogers
• Guardian DataBlog.
• DataBlog: British dead and wounded in Afghanistan - month by month statistics, up until August 2010.
• Datablog: Florence Nightingale - datajournalist - a look at some of the data visualisations she made in her notes and diaries.
• BBC: Doctor Who - official website for the long running British science fiction/fantasy show.
• Datablog: Every Doctor Who villain since 1963.
• guardian.co.uk: How Doctor Who's enemies took over my life - Simon Rogers blogs about the success of the DataBlog Doctor Who posts.
• Datablog: Doctor Who - Every single journey through time detailed by Information is Beautiful - an attempt to map every hop, skip and jump through time by the TARDIS.
• guardian.co.uk: Investigate your MPs expenses - the first version of the crowd-sourcing exercise.
• guardian.co.uk: Investigate your MPs expenses 2 - the second version of the crowd-sourcing exercise using improved 'game mechanics'.
• guardian.co.uk: Help us solve the mystery of Tony Blair's finances - a crowd-sourced investigation into the financial affairs of the UK's former Prime Minister.
• guardian.co.uk: World Cup Twitter replay.
• Inside Guardian.co.uk: World Cup instant Twitter replay - how we did it - Alistair Dant explains the technology behind the replay.
• Guardian Open Platform
• guardian.co.uk: What is the Open Platform - a video explaining what the API is, from lead technical architect Mat Wall.
• Open Platform Content API Explorer - a search interface onto The Guardian's content API.
• guardian.co.uk: World Government Data store - an interface into a collection of civic and state datasets from the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and US.
• guardian.co.uk: The IA behind the World Government Datastore - my blog post about the development process of the World Government Datastore tool.
• guardian.co.uk: Coins Data Explorer - an interface onto the UK Government's spending database.
• guardian.co.uk: Coins Data Explorer manual - blog post with instructions on how to use the Coins Data Explorer including some scary lines like 'and we can add a JSONP callback' etc etc...
• guardian.co.uk: What is Information Architecture? - my attempt to explain my job to The Guardian's audience.

Today Apple launched their new music social network Ping (basically a clone of Last.fm), and in Apple’s promotional image for the new feature, they very obviously removed a thread of Tweets from Lady Gaga’s timeline where she clearly spoke out celebrating being pro-gay, about California’s anti-gay marriage legislation, Prop 8.

Seriously.

Apple, we see you.

::pause for the scream of WTF on loop in my head thinking about my gay friends who work at Apple.

Those of us who live in the SF Bay Area know that when Lady Gaga was in town for her San Jose shows, she paid a visit to Apple Headquarters and got a tour. Everyone around here wondered why. This was likely when it was discussed, pre-launch, that they would use her for the Ping page example. She shot a video there for them, it was in the Apple keynote. So either she knew her messages of tolerance (which sell quite well, by the way) were going to be censored, or Apple did not tell her. I wonder which it was.

Here’s the Daily Swarm with the story (thedailyswarm.com).

BUT — I screencapped her timeline just now so you can see what Apple removed. Apple’s version for Ping launch:

Her *actual* timeline:

Good design is simple, reducing complex tasks to straightforward sequences of elegant interactions, making sure that there is no unnecessary step in the way.

The big design challenge for the next version of iPlayer was how to create this simplicity in light of more features and functionality without overwhelming our audience.

Let's consider the two basic tasks: find and play. The goal is to minimise our audience's time spent on the first task while maximising their time spent on the second one; ultimately discovery is just a means to enable people to watch their favourite show, which is why they come to the iPlayer in the first place.

Thus, the primary design challenge was to elegantly weave the new functionality and features into the iPlayer fabric while keeping the user interface simple. The following four design strategies informed our solution framework:

Navigation

We recognised that watching TV and listening to the radio are two different activities that respond to different user needs. The previous version of iPlayer mixed radio and TV content on each page. However, user data showed that very few people used the iPlayer for both at the same time. Radio and TV iPlayer use peaked at different times of the day and had little overlap. (Table 1 most likely overstates the overlap as the number reflect hardware not users).

In other words, very few people are indifferent to whether they watch TV or listen to the radio when they come to the iPlayer. This makes sense as watching TV and listening to radio are not perfect substitutes; TV is an immersive experience that tends to get the audience's undivided attention while listening to the radio tends to complement other activities and is a less immersive experience. People come to the iPlayer to either watch TV or listen to the radio.

Therefore, we decided to make TV and radio the top navigational choice. The two pages, however, are identical in terms functionality and look and feel; it's only the content that differs. The TV page is the home page as more people come to the iPlayer to watch TV than listen to the radio. As a matter of fact TV and radio are the only two top navigational choices down from five in the previous version.

This reduces V3 to three key pages: TV, Radio and media player. Fewer pages imply less navigation between pages and therefore less clicks to find content. The radical simplification of top-level navigation implies, however, that most of the navigation has to take place in context and in page which poses different challenges which will be discussed next.

Browsing

Collapsing Home, TV Channels, Radio Stations, Categories and A to Z into one page required us to rethink how content is accessed and bundled. Our design guidance came from considering the three primary discovery modes that we identified: browsing content, finding missed shows and exploring content of a certain type. The design of the TV and Radio page therefore consists of three parts that directly respond to the three user needs: the drawers on top of the page allows users to discover shows that they might not know about; the EPG on the lower left half of the page allows users to find what they missed; and the categories module on the lower right hand corner enables users to browse content by type.

The drawers enable all scanning behaviours, combining four different sources for content discovery: Featured (editorially selected), For You, Most Popular and Friends. Each of them has a different flavour that might appeal to different users at different times. As it is impossible to know beforehand what might be of interest to the users, they can easily switch between the different sources. Upon arrival the drawers are partially open to reveal the available options. As soon as they interact with any of the drawers, the chosen one expands to show more content. As soon as another drawer is selected, the focus shifts accordingly.

The drawers are a playful and efficient way to surface content, making the best use of the limited screen real estate. Earlier design treatments considered having four different modules, each containing one of the sources. However, it became clear that that solution would break the simplicity of the navigation.

The EPG and the categories module, on the other hand, are more utilitarian by nature. The users know what they are looking for; the primary design challenge is to enable users to navigate the EPG or the categories and to get them to the searched item as quickly as possible.

Personalisation

V3 personalisation features consist of For You, My Categories and Favourites. The different features are revealed over time as users engage with the content rather than all at once potentially overwhelming them. Favourites accompany the users throughout their iPlayer experience giving them universal access to their favourite shows at all times. Like a shopping cart it is pervasively accessible on top of the page connecting discovery - where shows are added - and watching - where they are consumed.

My Categories are woven into the categories browsing module, in essence bookmarking the ones of interest to the users. Once users have chosen their favourite shows and categories and new content gets surfaced in the For You drawer, discovery requires less active engagement: users will always be only one click away from accessing their favourite BBC shows. Less time spent discovering means more time enjoying.

Look and Feel

The new carbon fibre look and feel of V3 replaced the shiny look of V2 while keeping the distinct and iconic black and pink of the iPlayer. The new "materiality" of the interface gives the interface depth and texture that adds dynamic to animated components such as the drawer.

To underline the selected state in the top navigation a visual element inspired by the old radio dial was introduced while a streamlined font and color hierarchy was created to maintain a simple user interface.

In a nutshell V3 offers new functionality in a new user interface that aims to make it easier for our audience to find what they want to watch or listen to. Streamlined navigation, new functionality and a new taxonomy will enable our audience to find more quicker giving them more time to enjoy the content.

So what's next? We keep working to improve the experience with the goal to enable our audience to spend less time looking and more time enjoying on all platforms. The new iPlayer on mobile devices with Favourites launched recently and will soon launch on the other platforms as well.

Fabian Birgfeld is Head of Product Planning, BBC FM&T

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.


Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

Social-network giant Facebook is getting into the gift card business with Facebook Credits cards sold through Target.

…as I said, “more to come”.

You may have heard of the Double Rainbow Video. The guy who filmed this, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, lives in Yosemite and in the past month has gotten huge traffic for his ‘vivid’ reaction to that double rainbow. We hooked up with Bear to learn more about him & show him how to capture a full on double rainbow with Windows Live Photo Gallery using our panorama stitch feature. It’s so intense!

Some more background…

When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous “Double Rainbow” video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day…they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm.

I called him and gave him the lowdown on the project and asked if he would do a “Double Rainbow” redux. He was ecstatic! So we jumped right on it. He flew to Seattle and we had an absolute blast. After a 10 hour shoot we shared stories, ate delicious Vietnamese food (his favorite), and hung out with the crew.

 

Photo Caption: Bear and our crew. From left to right: Connor Lanman, Max Lanman, Adam Collins, Matt Garrett, Bear, Austin Chick, Michael Fishman, Andrew Sobey, & Shawn Anderson not pictured: Tommy Yacoe & Brendan Schlagel

We did a second video called “Meet Bear” where talks about his experience posting “Double Rainbow” and his love for sharing photos and videos with the world using Windows Live Essentials – video coming soon (will update post when its up). UPDATE: You can check out the second video called “Meet Bear” by clicking here!

Bear is something special. He’s entered the world of social media in hopes to share laughs, smiles, and insights. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people. It’s about the viewers, the users, it’s about you. And more importantly this project also shows how powerful sharing photos and videos can be. If tools like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn’t exist, Bear and I wouldn’t have met.

People can now share their lives with everyone and anyone, and can influence each other’s lives in a positive way. That’s what is so cool about Bear’s story.

Till next time,

-Connor

From the behind-the-scenes photoshoot from Rolling Stone, Core77 plucked these incongruous shots of Mad Men's actors using modern tech. More »

Travelers and city adventurers looking for a better way to harness geolocation data for their own amusement, get ready: Gowalla is releasing a brand new beta feature designed to crowdsource the best a city has to offer.

Gowalla Highlights is a web-based product that currently consists of 18 place-based questions that query members about their favorite date night locales, watering holes, spots for people watching or celebrity sightings, etc.

The power of the product is in the aggregate. Gowalla users will be able to discover the best places in town, as determined by popular vote, and easily find new coffee spots or bars to try out when visiting a foreign city.

The feature itself is both simple and enjoyable to use. Gowalla users will find the Highlights section accessible from their profile page. From here, they can respond to unique prompts and share the places where big and small life moments took place. From the Highlights page, users can then check out the places that matter to their friends and view the most popular among all members.

Highlights is essentially a way to surface the best places for any given city.

“We were inspired to create Highlights when we started building Gowalla for iPad. It got us thinking about how we could visualize places in interesting ways,” said CEO and Co-Founder Josh Williams.

Williams also believes that Highlights will power insightful trends around places, settle local taco shop wars and have important ramifications for businesses.

He also indicates that Highlights functionality and data will trickle down to the iPhone and Android apps in about a month. The idea will be to help expose members to nearby popular places — with popular determined by the number of enjoyable experiences users have had rather than total checkins. Developers can also expect Highlights data to eventually make its way inside the API.

By turning on Highlights, Gowalla is tapping its current user base of 450,000 users to tell place-based stories in a way that could really drive home the utility of the mobile location-based service.

Images courtesy of Flickr, brutha nick

More About: geolocation, gowalla, gowalla highlights, places

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Today, we’re announcing that the Mozilla Labs project codenamed “Bespin” is now called Mozilla Skywriter. It remains a Labs experiment to see how great coding in the browser can be by making a powerful, customizable HTML5 text editor. We’re also announcing a move to GitHub.

We’ve had many compliments and complaints about the “Bespin” codename ever since we first introduced the project. You can’t please everyone, especially when it comes to naming. The Bespin codename, derived from the awesome “cloud city” in The Empire Strikes Back, was a fun name to use for an editor that enables “coding in the cloud”.

Since the initial release in February 2009, the Bespin has come a long way. The project has changed focus and expanded its reach. The “Bespin Embedded” releases have been showing up more and more including several entries in the recent “Node Knockout” competition: Nodify, Inflatable Churn, and Wrath. Other recent development environments on the web have also chosen to use Bespin, including ShiftEdit, jGate and Mozilla’s own Add-On Builder (aka FlightDeck).

As we approach a 1.0 release, it was clear that it was time to shed Bespin’s code name and give it a real, lasting project name. We’re happy to announce that that name is Mozilla Skywriter. I think that Mozilla Skywriter fits the “coding in the cloud” theme very well indeed.

Skywriter is becoming an end-to-end JavaScript-based system. Camilo Aguilar, a new contributor to the project, has been working on porting “dryice”, our build tool, to node.js. Once that’s done, we’ll be creating a XULRunner-based desktop version of Skywriter and a new customizable server version based on node.js. It’s actually pretty amazing how many different uses for our editor we’ll be able to target with a single codebase.

Many people who have worked on Skywriter have expressed a desire to fork it on GitHub. There have been unofficial mirrors and plenty of people installing Mercurial just to use Bespin. In order to make things easier for our community, we’re moving the official repository for Skywriter over to GitHub: http://github.com/mozilla/skywriter.

A note about the repositories: that shiny new repository holds the “all JavaScript” version of Skywriter. As I write this, that repository needs a lot of work (in other words, it’s broken!). All of the “bespin” names have changed to “skywriter” and the build tooling is still in the process of being rebuilt. The existing bespinclient repository remains available for people wanting to work with something that works today. That repository is effectively a branch of the code prior to the start of the JavaScript work. For the most part, we should be able to migrate changes made to that repository over to the new Skywriter repository pretty easily. We’re just changing the tooling to JavaScript, we’re not really changing Bespin’s core plugins at all.

One final note about the Bespin to Skywriter transition: the Bespin name appears in many places and it will take some time to fully migrate over. The Mozilla Skywriter home page will always have up to date links to project resources and is the best place to look if you’re having trouble finding something.

You can follow the Skywriter project (MozSkywriter) on Twitter and ask us questions in #skywriter on irc.mozilla.org.

Finally, a big thanks to Julian Viereck who is off to university in Zürich. Julian has been a huge help to the Skywriter project since the beginning and we wish him good luck in the coming years!

– Kevin Dangoor on behalf of the Mozilla Skywriter team

Google and AOL have signed a deal that extends the search and advertising partnership between the two companies for another five years. The agreement also includes mobile search and adds a content sharing partnership with YouTube.

In a statement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said that, “After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

The extension of the deal wasn’t a given by any means; the $1 billion investment Google made in AOL back in 2005 proved to be disastrous financially. Further, Microsoft has been aggressively making deals to grow marketshare for Bing, most notably with Yahoo, which now sees Bing powering Yahoo search and its related advertising.

With the renewed AOL deal, Google locks up about 2.3% of the search market according to the most recent numbers from comScore. Google currently has 65.8% of the market, while Microsoft has 27.1% between Bing and Yahoo.

Beyond web search, today’s deal also broadens Google’s reach on mobile and gets additional premium content onto YouTube – both of which are currently high priorities for the company, as CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his statement on the deal. “It’s particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users’ online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses,” he said.

More About: aol, Google, Search

For more Business coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Business channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad