In my previous post I introduced you to Molly, my needy Boxer-Pit mix dog. She is a little insecure and absolutely desperate for attention, love and bellyrubs and has many tricks she has learned to get what she needs. It amazes me how much attention she wants and how she always gets it from me, my wife, or my son. She absolutely never goes without because she has learned exactly what to do let us know what she wants and we are happy to oblige. A happy dog makes for a happy home, I guess.
If just standing in my way or getting in my face doesn’t work, she has a sure fire method to let us know she needs something; a loud, sharp bark. The most comical times that this is used is when she must go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW! She will get between me and the TV set or stick her nose on my laptop keyboard, bark and just stare at me, we all know that this means that we have maybe seconds before we will have a little puddle to clean up. She also barks when it’s time for exercise, she will bring me her bone and bark, that’s my cue to throw the bone so she can run and go get it. Her bark is a fantastic way to let me know that she needs me to do something.
Similarly, you need to develop ways to “bark” at your readers. Something that is used infrequently to highlight the very best posts or at least the ones that you think your readers really need to pay attention to. Let me tell you some of the ways Dian developed her “bark” for her site, GroceryShopForFREE.com.
Formatting – Every time the word “Free” is used on her site it is all caps, bolded, and pink. Her frequent readers recognize this as a cue that she is going to talk about something that’s free in that post and nothing grabs people’s attention like free! You might take a look at your site and if there is one subject in particular that seems to grab your readers’ attention more than other subjects, try to develop a particular “formatting brand” for that information. Maybe that post starts with a certain word or phrase, or something is underlined, or a different color, or whatever. You re just trying to develop a short-hand way to “bark” and draw people’s attention to something.
Texting - Twitter has a very simple method for your customers to receive your tweets directly on their phones in the form of a text message. Instruct your customers to text “follow (your Twitter name)” to 40404 and they will get whatever you tweet on that account to their phones. That’s a great way to cut through all the noise and get your info to your customer in a way that can’t be ignored. One word of caution, consider creating a separate Twitter account so they don’t get everything, just the cream of the crop.
FaceBook - This one is pretty obvious but I want to include it anyway. (Mainly so there are three things in this list!) Most people have a FaceBook tab open in their browser all day long so getting your info into their stream is a great way to “bark”.
Just like Molly barks to let me know she wants something from me, you should take the time to develop ways to bark at your readers to let them know you want their attention. It should be something that cuts through all the distractions and grabs their eyeballs and refuses to be ignored. What are some ways you have developed to bark at your customers? Let me know at my BlogFrog page.
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