Less than a month after I launched my blog, one of my posts got featured on freshly pressed - home page of Wordpress.com where each day of the week, ten positions are chosen from among approximately 450,000 new blog posts.
I not even knew what freshly squeezed meant until I saw an email from one of WordPress publishers welcome features.
As you can imagine, the results of traffic were enormous. During the next day, I received over 12,000 hits, 150 comments and 200 new subscribers. I fell near my chair as my Inbox filled with hundreds of "Please moderate" and "New Subscriber" messages.
In the next six months, my blog has been presented again and again - a total of three times for only eight positions that I had been writing since I started the blog. It appeared that I was doing something good.
Before sharing the reasons why my posts were selected for freshly squeezed, there are a few things to note.
First of all, I am still relatively new to blogging and have not all "connections" in the blogosphere. I never asked a favour, had my tweets approved by a celebrity, pay a single dime for the marketing of my blog, or even guest blog (in fact, this post you read as early as now is the first guest post, I have never written).
Second, the title of this post must really say why I believe that I have done on freshly squeezed. I not solicit or receive comments from editors WordPress explaining why they chose to my posts, for the following reasons are only my own assumptions.
I write an average of a blog after a month, in part because I have a very busy schedule, but mostly because I don't want to publish something on my blog that does not add value. You are probably sick of reading "content is King,"but I took these tips seriously."" Given that I'm a slow writer, it took me a good 10 to 18 hours to research and write a single post. I could publish certainly much more frequently, but the quality of my content would definitely suffer. I flooded my blog with low quality posts, those of good quality would have been lost in the crowd, and I could have fallen off the radar of WordPress publishers. If you are a part-time blogger like me, then you will probably have to choose between the quality or quantity - and my vote will always quality.
Here are the titles of the three posts which made the freshly squeezed.
The only thing that is common to all is that they are messages from the list (which have a number of list items in the post). I think that people like to read these types of posts because they have a structure more than those of free-form. They are also much easier to navigate for readers who do not have much time to read. If you look at the top viral articles on sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Delicious, you will probably find several messages from the list on their first pages, therefore they get shared most frequently among readers.
It should be noted that not all selections freshly pressed were messages from the list (in fact, the majority of those who have been selected with mine does was not), so it is not really a rule of thumb, but it has certainly worked for me.
I am a very visual person, and I like images to illustrate my ideas. Most bloggers (including the A-listers) use photos of stock image in their posts to break a text and support content. Using stock photos is much more attractive than use pitch photos at all, I think that you need to differentiate yourself masses with custom images.
For my blog, I use an illustration or image that create me - and I have not need to use a sophisticated software to do. For illustrations in these positions, I hand-sketched them using ordinary paper and colored pencils and then their scanned in my PC. For photos, I use plain old Microsoft Paint to twist and type some text on them. Course, it takes a little more time and effort to create custom, images but, apparently, is charged.
Therefore, this sounds counterintuitive, I will explain. My blog is to increase productivity and save time while working at home, so I focused on a niche that professional targets who work remotely.
However, for the positions that have selected freshly squeezed, I did not focus exclusively on this single niche. Instead, I allowed some flexibility in targeting a wider audience. For example, my post on the creation of a productive Home Office primarily helps business owners and managers who telecommute, but it also allows a larger demographic, including regular office workers and students of the College, the Organization of their workspaces. By targeting a mass audience while keeping my niche in mind, I increased my chances of being selected.
Another advantage, these four reasons has also helped increase my base Subscriber because they made my blog more "sticky". When I analyzed the statistics of the site after each increase in traffic, I noticed that there was a relatively high rate of clicks to my other posts. This means that visitors did not directly leave after reading a post, but they were paste to read other posts and finally agreed. So even if you get featured on freshly pressed, these tips should develop your blog!
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