There’s so much information we have to deal with nowadays. It’s hard to keep up with it all. By improving our reading skills we could save a lot of time and spend what we save on things that matter most, like family.

Spreeder can help you.

The interface is very simple as it should be because it’s only designed to accept the text you paste into its window and then shows you that text one word at at time for you to read.

Why one word at a time? The short answer is: subvocalization. It’s when we hear ourselves “speak” the words we read in our head. This results in slowing down our reading. The solution is to be able to recognize the words we read without having to say them in our head. So reading this way trains us to read faster.

When reading a book, the solution is simple: just trace your finger or the eraser-end of a pencil along the words as you read them. Make it go slightly faster than you normally read so you can make your eyes catch up a little.

When reading online try using this bookmarklet. Having this in your browser’s toolbar makes it easy for you to select text on a web page and have those words shown to you in the same fashion described above.

Inspired by zenhabits.

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For those keeping track, we have reached our goal of 150 RSS Subscribers. Not only did our contest help, but so did a few feed exchanges via forums. Not only will I be writing how we got 150 feed subscribers, but I can finally give away our Mini Fridge!

One lucky person will be getting our fridge, just for subscribing to our feed! We are getting some last minute entries thanks to Kumikos great review of our blog, as well as some forum postings. I am also planning a full review of Kumikos review. I hope you take advantage of her reviews, she’s great at them!

I am happy that Blog about your Blog is doing so well and I know it will continue to do so with such great authors. Just wanted to mention that Jennifer’s post about Increasing Blog Traffic by Using HTML in Comments of Other Blogs received 37 diggs and counting! If you haven’t dugg the article yet, please do so.

We are also exploring ways to start paying our authors for certain blog posts, but thats in the works. More on that to come!

With our great success in Feed Subscribers I am looking to add some sponsored links to our feed. You can purchase links at 6$ a month via paypal, or we can exchange advertising. Please use our contact form if you are interested.

Lee hasn’t been able to pick winners for the previous two comment friday’s due to his demanding schedule. Since it’s already Tuesday I won’t be picking any “blogs of the week” but I do want to give out some link love.

Next Friday we will be back on schedule with Comment Friday hosted by me, and the winner will be picked on Saturday.

Last friday we suffered a shortage of comments, but I am sure we will pick it back up to about 30-40 this week!

First I want to notice Jason Spence of Blisslogs. He has been an active Comment Friday participant. Last week he said:

“What’s up with only 15 posts at 8:30PM CDT on Comment Friday? Heres number 16. Lets get this going to get them to their goal for the day.”

Obviously we didn’t reach our goal, but every comment counts! Blisslogs are currently looking for guest bloggers and blogging about the new version of Wordpress.

The previous friday our topic was what song gets stuck in your head. Our first commentor (who hasn’t been featured before) was Snapshots of Life with Cheng Leng. I have never seen them post on comment friday, it’s always nice to get a fresh face around here. Especially a snapshot!

Speaking of new faces it’s also nice to see all of our regulars around here. A previous winner, Windy, never seems to miss comment friday. Blog about your Blog would like to wish her a happy belated bday, and to keep on cooking.

If you would like your blog to be featured, make sure to come by on Friday and leave a good comment. You may just win some link love yourself.

Introduction: Who is Garry Conn?

Hello, my name is Garry Conn. I run a personal blog site titled, Garry Conn dot Com. I help thousands of readers by delivering successful blogging tips. I have been an author here on Blog about Your Blog coming up on a month now. I have been wanting to publish my first post here since the day I registered. But, you know how that goes… wanting to be at multiple places at once. Life just doesn’t work that way, I wish it did!

From the first time I ventured into this community it was really love at first sight. What an opportunity to gain more readers to your site. The concept is simple. Provide excellent content here, which helps this community grow and the content being published here has a direct reflection on yourself. Meaning, if people don’t like what you write here, then it can generally be assumed that the readers won’t like what you write on your main site too. So the incentive to write good quality posts here is extremely high… and it should be! The end result couldn’t be more perfect. You have a handful of highly skilled and creative bloggers who collaborate onto one site where we all create a prefect experience for the blog reader. In my opinion, this is one of the most insightful and creative concepts I have seen in awhile.

It’s Not Always About Traffic:

I have mentioned this on my site many times. While getting traffic to your site definitely is important, what is more important is what you do with the traffic that does come into your site. Meaning, what is your conversion rate? If you have 100 visits per day, how many people do you convert into regular readers? My focus has never been on scoring tons of traffic to my personal blog. I knew that in due time, traffic would naturally increase. Today, there isn’t a day that goes by where another blogger doesn’t mention me on a post or add my site to their blogroll. Why? Because, since day one I have written articles that are intended to help just one person. If I can end the day knowing that I have helped just one person, I feel great. When you read my articles, I am speaking directly to you… the article was written specifically for you. When you are done reading, if I haven’t made you say, “wow!” then I have failed.

So, for me… I would rather have 10 visits per day knowing that I have a 100% conversion. Because in the long haul, I will have more traffic coming into my blog compared to another blog who focuses on volume. In other words, I would rather have 10 visits per day @ 100% conversion compared to having 1000 visits per day @ 1% conversion. The numbers equal the same and far as the total number of regular readers converted… but the difference between the two stats is simple: One site is so in tune with their readers interest, it converts 100% of the traffic into permanent readers while the other is failing because only 1% is being pulled in. 99% of the people come and go… and don’t look back.

How Do I Convert Traffic Into Readers?

• Rule #1 is to be yourself. There are so many people out there that live double lives. Typically after spending about a week on these sites I can start to see right through them. FAKE! The most important thing you can do to be successful blogging and convert traffic into regular readers is to be yourself.
• Rule #2 is to allow people to learn who you are. This can be done by publishing an about me page. An about me page should be a page where you simply put your cards on the table and spill the beans. You should express the things that are important to you, talk about your interests and also explain about what your site is about. If readers don’t know the purpose of your blog, they will have no reason to continue to visit.
• Rule #3 is to interact with your readers. The easiest way to do this is to reply to their comments. If a reader has taken the time to comment on an article that you wrote, be polite and comment back. Also, when you do comment back, try to pick the reader’s brain a little bit… ask for additional thoughts and encourage your new reader to elaborate more on their thoughts. Another way to interact with your readers is to visit their own blog and comment on their articles. Not only doesn’t this encourage the reader to come back to your site, but it also plants seeds for other readers to come over and check your site out. Lastly, having a contact page as well openly accepting blogroll link exchanges are very useful.
• Rule #4 is to be a leader and an expert. The whole foundation of the Internet is information, in the mid 90’s “The Information Super Highway” was a popular coining of the Internet. And still to this day in our wonderful world of Web 2.0, not much as changed. People seek the knowledge of others. And with blogging, people are pulled to leaders and experts. If you author a blog, you are an expert in what you write and talk about. Do not publish weakness about your topic. People expect you to take the lead and follow your advise. If you illustrate to your readers that you are not a strong leader, they will flock away to someone else who can lead them.
• Rule #5 is to reward your readers. Publishing your top commenters high up on your sidebar and offering different ways to help promote your readers gives them incentive to stick around more. Not only do you help your readers by writing quality content but you also help them by sharing the link love and traffic. Don’t be selfish. Give back to your community because without them you would be nothing.

Summary:

To sum things up… having a ton of traffic to your site is important. But converting all your traffic into regular readers is more important. Focus long and hard on keeping the traffic you do get instead of focusing on getting more. If you maintain 10 visits per day and convert 100% everyday, by the end of the year you are looking at having 36,500 visits per day… all of which are regular readers and contributors.

Want to know more about the people who are visiting your blog? You could go through all the traffic data you’re collecting, but it still may not answer why they’re visiting you.

With Quibblo, you can easily create and customize a poll, survey, or quiz to ask them something special. “How’s my blog?” “Why do you come here?” “What would you like to see?” These are just some of the questions that go through my mind when I think about writing my content. With Quibblo, I don’t have to guess any more.

In addition to customizing your poll to suit the color scheme of your blog, you also have the choice of embedding in your blog or site (I put mine in my sidebar), linking to it from your blog or site, as well as making it publicly available on Quibblo for a wider range of responses.

Go ahead and take this poll to see what I mean.

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In honor of Memorial Day I am honoring our soldiers, by putting up a poem I wrote over at my “That Says It All” blog. I ask that you check it out.

Seeing Matt being 21 and happy made me think back to my 21st. I can’t recall the details so it must have been a good night out too.

Mulling over an idea for a blog post, (because if he is out partying he can’t be blogging, right!) I was thinking how lucky he is to be starting a commercial blogger’s life so early on, at least early compared to my first recent footsteps. There is a lot of fun to be had these days, digitizing ideas quicker than ever before, and it is viewed as work! Perfect.

The most appealing aspect of the blogosphere for me is that it is still a bit like the wild west, growing rapidly (120,000 new blogs a day) and expanding into many different avenues. There is loads of lawlessness and experimentation going on, boundaries being formed, opportunities to create your own niche abound… And there is a lot of money involved already, and it can only get more lucrative for players with a foothold online. But is straightforward day-to-day blogging lucrative, or are there other areas to look for long term returns?

I am not going to be one of those bloggers with 3 ideas pulled off the internet and then call myself a money making expert, and I am not a magician either, but I have a good memory and can give some examples of big real world returns that have come from some very strange areas. Maybe the examples can spur some thinking about where to make money on the internet of the future!

There is money in muck.

I know of half a dozen mega rich guys now who got rich by simply picking up other people’s cast offs and selling them on for a profit. There is the obvious antique / bric a brac, buy-today-sell-tomorrow model.

Then there was a guy who bought Aga cast iron ovens in the 70’s when they became “obsolete” to gas cookers. He literally stored them in a field for 20 years under a tarp and then a few years ago when traditional ranges came back in vogue, he sand-blasted them and sold them on for fortunes.

Many other scrap dealers, and car / stamp and even tupperware collectors have all cashed in by buying and holding until the fashion returns.

Online muck

These entrepreneurs took a bet, but a fairly educated bet at that. Everything comes back in fashion, even horrible 70’s color schemes. Look past trying to create the next eBay to sell real world goods or junk, think digital stuff!

Perhaps there is something now that people are casting off, apparently worthless, but you can see would be in demand when the fashion comes back. Domain names is an obvious starting point, but how about whole websites full of content that are lying un-updated? Save them from the scraper sites by taking them off-line and reinvent them later?

Or you can double guess what will be popular in years to come! Try make some predictions and date them and wait till they come true, pronouncing yourself as a prophet!

Keep some of your best posts back and sell them on later in a different format? Like an ebook of content you haven’t ever published.

Get rich now

And if you don’t want to wait, but want to get involved with the on-line content that is in the highest demand now and the shortest supply, possibly forever, get into video production. Something like 1 person is providing content for every 10000 consuming it. If I had money, I would be compiling videoclips. Just an idea.

What do you think is worthless now but will come back in vogue and be in demand? Should we get Matt to send us signed copies of his birthday photos before he is famous?

You can have my autograph when I am famous, but first you will have to read The Pisstakers every day for a couple of years.

Hello! I am Jennifer from The Life of a School Bus Driver. I am a guest contributor appearing here today and maybe some more in the future.

Today, I want to talk with you about gaining blog traffic by commenting on other blogs using available HTML to make your comments stand out among the other comments. When your comments stand out, viewers are drawn to them and tend to click through to your site over the other guys. So, using HTML in comments gives you an advantage in the more popular, highly commented on, sites.

As an example of NOT using any extra code in a comment, take a look at the post It’s Comment Friday with Lee!. As of this writing, that post has 33 comments, including one of mine, without any HTML in it. Go and see if you would pick my site to click on. I bet that you wouldn’t have paid any special attention to mine until now that I have made you look.

Now, go look at this other comment from me. It is comment 11 on 5 Must-read Blogs for Creative Writers. I just used a non-breaking comment like the other one. But this time, I put a link in it and I made two sections bold and another italic. I think you will agree that this comment stands out much more than the others and is likely to get more attention and therefore bring more traffic to my site.

Now, if you know HTML code, you can stop reading here and skip down to the bullet points before you go skipping off, testing your commenting skills, out there in the blogosphere.

For the rest of us, without further ado:

The code for bold is simply n. The code for italics is simply i. The code for underline is, you guessed it, simply u. Each of these codes is used in exactly the same way: <code> before the text you want to alter, and </code> after the text you want to alter.

So, for example if, I want to make my name bold, like this, Jennifer, I simply type “< b>Jennifer < /b>” without those extra spaces, and my name will appear in bold in that spot of the comment.

You would do the same for the italics with < i> or underline with < u>. There are not any blank spaces between the < and the >! I have to type it with those extra spaces here so you can SEE the code, otherwise it would disappear. If you really use spaces in between those pointy brackets then you will end up actually seeing the code instead of the desired effect of the code.

Now, last but not least. If you want to make the name of your site a hyperlink, or any other text, for that matter, click-able this is all you need to do! Type in:

< a href=”http://www.blogaboutyourblog.com/”>Terrific Site< /a>

where URL equals the complete URL you are hyperlinking to; make sure to keep those quote marks. And where Terrific Site is what you want to make click-able. Oh, and make sure to get rid of that extra space before the < > that I had to stick in so the code wouldn’t become invisible to you in this post.

Note: This effect is less likely to be accepted by the blog host than the other techniques and having links in a comment is also more likely to get it into the spam file.

Now, before you get all excited commenting yourself to the top using HTML, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• You shouldn’t make your comments too long.
• You shouldn’t even hint away from the topic of the conversation.
• You shouldn’t just spam the site leaving something like “Great Post”.
• You should think about your comments.

Almost all sites including Wordpress & Blogger will allow the code that makes for bold, italics, & underline. These are simple codes to include in your comments and they will get you results. (By the way, since so little code is actually allowed in comments, even people with only these simple codes under their belts are on an equal footing with those people who know a lot of HTML.)

Okay, that’s it for today: a small technique, bound to give you big results. Try it! I want to hear about what you think and the results that you get using HTML in your comments. Let me know how it goes!

Jennifer from The Life of a School Bus Driver, signing off for the first time, wishing you all the best in your commenting journeys.