There are principles behind what makes a given subject viral …and it’s not all about geography-whiz babies and talking animals. Here’s some easy ways to make your blog get more of that kind of traffic. It might not be viral in the strict, YouTube sense of the word, but it can definitely give your ratings a boost. If your blog was your own TV show, here’s how to take on Sweeps Week.

• #1: Happy Customer = Free Testimonial
  Post photos of your customers using your product(s) – the happier the better. Encourage your customers to leave feedback and photos of themselves as they enjoy your product. If you have a brick-and-morter office, offer free Wifi in exchange for a short testimonial or vidbite.
• #2: Let Your Readers Write For You
  Ask an insightful question, then let your readers write a post for you – via their comments. If you have enough readers, pop a question you know will get more than a few responses; leave the question open-ended and don’t make it the “yes or no” sort. Could you also get in touch with a few other professionals and have them answer a question? Turn their responses into a feature article.
• #3: Don’t Beat Them, Join Them
  Create a Business “Meme”: Make a list of 5, 6, or however many things people may not know about your business – then ask other bloggers and similar businesses to join in. If they are in business in your local area, publish the results in the local paper, or ask the newspaper to cover the story. Local media outlets often offer a low or no-cost “businesses of the area” feature.
• #4: Pay It Forward
  Highlight how you’re giving back to your community. Or, perhaps highlight how your industry gives back – if you blog for a living, why not show how to blog on behalf of local non-profit groups? Put together a simple, free e-book or video presentation and offer to host an event at the next local Chamber of Commerce meeting or local library – free of charge.
• #5: Give Something Away
  Hold a contest for customers to win one of your products by answering a question in a post; Offer additional “entries” for a chance to win if they share it on Facebook or retweet it on Twitter. Perhaps partner with another business or blog in the giveaway; this way you might be able to offer a pricier item while at the same time building a good relationship with readers… and fellow bloggers.
• #6: Answer Questions from the Comments
  Answer reader and customer questions. Address reader questions directly and precisely. If you need to, write a whole article about it and post it on your blog or as a guest post somewhere else. Or, make it the topic of a “talking head” video. If you address a specific question from a specific reader and it becomes a regular post, mention in the post that he asked the question and you want to answer it publicly to help everyone.
• #7: Show Your Digs
  Give a tour/virtual tour of your office. Take photos of where you work, where you play, or maybe the view from your office window. Keep it personal and friendly, highlighting any specific ways you’ve incorporated stuff like Feng Shui into the place. The point is to open up a bit and let your readers and customers know there’s a real, live human behind the website. People are more likely to buy and visit if they can relate to you personally.
• #8: Link Love is Lovely
  Spread some link love to blogs you read and companies with which you do business. Exchange links with related blogs or businesses using a “Recommended Reading” or “Visit Our Friends” sidebar widget. As you leave positive comments on other blogs, link back to your own publication. Keep a keen eye open for topics you can use on your own blog (don’t steal articles, though); Keep a peeled eye for any unanswered questions and use them to your advantage, like I mentioned in #6 above.

Did I miss any? What’s worked for your blog to get more social buzz and traffic? Leave a shout in the comments (and don’t forget to leave a link back to your own blog while you’re at it).

Have fun, be sociable, and keep it friendly!

It’s Called “Social” for a reason

Every blog worth it’s salt has a twitterfeed or facebook feed where they post links, share content, keep in touch and probably most importantly drive traffic (we’re being candid here). It’s kind of amusing when you see the same article twittered and tweeted so many times, but even this can be explained in the context of social: You have a design blog, people read it because they like it, they follow you on Twitter because they like it, and some don’t subscribe to the other blogs so the information you tweet is new to them. This is good; you find cool information, and you share it. It’s what Twitter is all about… and social networking itself, really.

There is a balance, though. If you see something cool posted on Smashing Magazine, chances are everybody’s already read it, seen it tweeted, seen it retweeted. The chances are pretty dang good, in fact.

Courtesy #1: Don’t Flood Your Followers’ timelines with very popular, common items unless you have a witty, pithy something to add.

When People Retweet You, Thank Them.

I learned this from Terri Nakamura — who is very respected and well liked on Twitter. When you retweet something from Terri, she thanks you, even if it’s your handle in a list of other Twitterers who RT’d the same link, you still get recognized and thanked. It shows appreciation. Occasionally, magically, you’ll attract RT bots. Do you have to thank them every time? No. They aren’t human they’re simply grabbing your link and broadcasting it. Maybe you catch up and thank everyone twice a week, but make sure you do it within a day or two at most.

And it’s okay if you thank several twitterers at once; you don’t have to shout out each one personally. Shouting a big “thanks!” to a few at a time is accepted and perfectly polite. Otherwise, you might risk falling victim to Courtesy #1 (above).

Courtesy #2: Shout out and thank the ones who retweet your links, especially if they’ve added a comment of their own.

Address Criticisms Quickly & Try To Understand

A while back I made a simple, late-night tweet about a writer whose tone I personally didn’t like. Now, I didn’t at all get nasty or personal (not my style) I simply stated I didn’t care for the tone of writing. You may have heard of this chap: Anil Dash. Although I hadn’t attached any hashtag or @ to my tweet (ergo, he had to search Twitter for occurrences of his name) he responded within a couple hours in a friendly way and acknowledged my thought and expressed his concern. It was personal, it was friendly, and it was very professional. While I still don’t care for his tone of writing, I nonetheless have a much higher regard for Anil and what he has to say about a given topic (and as a result of his response, you are now reading about how professionally he takes his writing). This is the type of “good press” you can’t buy. If you find someone has a gripe with the way you do things, go to him or her personally and try to resolve it or at least smooth it over.

Now, I qualify that: You can tell if someone has a legitimate concern or if they’re just flaming, so make your response appropriately.

Courtesy #3: Acknowledge criticism and complaints, publicly if you have to, and resolve them in a friendly, personal manner.

There’s a minor point here about searching Twitter for your name or for Twitter handle, which we’ll discuss a bit later. Well, right now in fact…

Search Periodically for Your Name or Blog Title

This might seem very minor, but in keeping with our “be polite and say thank you” mantra, it’s fitting to mention this.

Every so often, do a search for occurrences of your Twitter handle or blog name. You’ll be surprised at how many you turn up. My blog isn’t that popular at all and it surprises me at times. In this way, you keep on top of the whole social thing and have a better grasp for how well read your blog is.
This is especially the case in resolving the criticisms that otherwise go undetected. Anil wouldn’t have known my criticism if he hadn’t searched. You likewise could miss an opportunity to keep a reader happy and get some good press.

Courtesy #4: Search out & acknowledge tweets from those who don’t shout you out directly.

Encourages Input About Design, Errors & New Features

Being up on the social (read: being friendly and interactive) can really help out when it comes to successfully implementing a new look, a new feature or subsection, and encouraging feedback about bugs with your site.

Experience: Two weeks ago — no, seriously, two weeks ago — I sent off a friendly tweet to the publisher of a very well respected and established design blog (not Creative Overflow) informing him of a glitch I found with his index page but only the logo and primary navigation loaded; no content, at all. I was able to duplicate this major problem consistently. Being as he has recently redesigned the blog, I thought he’d like to know. I took a screen grab, shortened the URL, and tweeted to him the image along with my system stats so he could troubleshoot. The problem was fixed within half an hour, and… and I never got a word back. This is more than simply not being polite, it’s downright rude. In the meantime, given the redesign, I’ve noticed other issues (significantly less significant, at best) with his website, but have no compunction to tell him.

Contrast this to Brian Hoff at The Design Cubicle. I caught a slight bug (to me, at least) and he responded, friendly, and took note of the problem. It was fixed a while later. Again, by being polite and friendly we as publishers maintain a social equilibrium with our readers. We publish what they like, but without feedback we can lose track of where to go and what to do next, let alone when we encounter bugs and problems that our readers can alert us to quickly.

Courtesy #5: DO especially take time to consider reports of bugs and errors from your readers.

Being Social Builds Community & Encourages Followers

Being polite and interactive with your readers also gets them involved in the site itself. It let’s them feel like they’re a part of it — and they are, if you let them.

In case you hadn’t noticed, more followers means more traffic to your publication (we’re being candid, again). More happy readers who share means more traffic to your publication. All this could be nullified by forgoing common courtesies as you continue publishing. By being socially involved, talking back with readers, and affording everyone the same politeness you encourage your readers to be supportive, willing to help promote, and more likely to comment and add interest to an article. This can all be just about flushed if you don’t build rapport and community with your readers.

Courtesy #6: Don’t hesitate to be social and outgoing with your readers. If they posted a tweet or a comment you like, get involved.

You Get Back What You Give Out — We’re Talking Karma

And I don’t mean Karma in the weird, esoteric, fuzzy sense. You truly do attract more people if you’re more polite and courteous. Kind of like a Pay It Forward type of thing, if you’re outgoing and friendly to others, it comes back to you in the form of politeness, link-ability, and buzz. Even if nothing comes of it, you feel better about what you do and this has a direct influence on the things you publish and the way you run your blog. It allows you to take the high road, so to speak, and affords your readers respect and appreciation.

This doesn’t mean you have to chant a weird mantra and light up the incense before you respond; just be polite about how you run the everyday stuff. It’s kind of like keeping the phones lines clear or keeping the ice off a two way street. The street is still there, but it’s easier to pass and more likely to have traffic.

Courtesy #7: Even if you’re busy, or it’s a minor complaint, afford your readers dignity and contribute to overall good energy in the design blog business (is it a business…?).

The Basics Are Basic for a Reason

Any benefit you receive as the result of being polite, friendly and courteous is a perk of how you, personally, are contributing to a society & education in an positive up building way.

Most importantly, doing these things — just being polite — is the right thing to do. It’s a basic courtesy that, sadly, can set you apart in the world.

1. Contrast

If something has strong contrast, it means it stands out better from the page, or from other items on the page. In a nutshell, contrast works something like this:

As you can see illustrated above, the most common way to increase contrast is through colour (black on white works better than light grey on white, for example), through size, or through other treatments. But it can also be done visually by reducing the number of items that compete for attention and putting the primary focus on the main stuff although this might apply a bit more to websites or ad pages that have many items, or where the ‘real estate’ is more valuable and more information is presented at one time.

It can also be applied to type treatments, the size of the item in question, and even something as small as line thicknesses.

A good rule of thumb is that if they are not the same, make them markedly different.

However, there should always be a measure of consistency with what contrasts you use for certain areas on the page — simply, don’t jumble up your contrasts to such an extreme that some content is harder to read or it hurts your viewers’ eyes, and keep contrasts the same (or very similar) in given sections of a page.

Contrast is key to differentiating among sections of your website, as illustrated:

2. Repetition

Repetition aids in the understanding of content (visual or written) through organization. Repeating these elements not only helps the viewer to understand their relationship to each other but also to the page as a whole (and subsequently understanding relative importance within the page) as well as its importance within the site. Knowing what importance to put on key areas helps the viewer organize the content in his mind.

Defining key elements through repetition makes the experience coherent and unified — whether the experience is browsing your website, reading a brochure or looking at a business card.

For example, if we were to style all copy on the page at the same font size and weight, we’d certainly have repetition but there would be no sense of importance on key areas. (see Contrast, above as well) We’ve learned to style redundant items like navigation, footers, etc., to be a certain size and weight and other areas to be ‘heavier,’ visually. This marked consistency in the former areas comforts the viewer by telling his brain that these items are unchanging and reliable (important for navigational elements) and the content can have his attention without needing to re-examine each page every time it loads. In this example, we use repetition to our benefit and it aids in navigation and understanding. It wouldn’t work that way if every single item looked the same. (unless, of course, our site, by design, needs to be this way — in which case we find other, more subtle ways to inform the viewer of primary and redundant areas) The greater the similarity between or among elements, (typically) the more gravity is given to subtleties, as shown below:

These subtleties would be lost on a busier, more graphically intense site but work well on these sites that are already a bit minimal to begin with. For example, on Amazon.com these subtleties in main navigation would be missed more often than not and that would result in a drop in sales volume and revenue for the company. Individual elements of good design, as illustrated, compliment itself as a whole.

Example

Notice how the Amazon index page breaks up information and content sections using good use repetition for each component or type of item:

3. Alignment

Each item or element on the page should not just be placed at random. This doesn’t mean that every single item must be aligned with every thing else, or even aligned with something else — but should contribute to the coherence of the whole. What you’re looking for is a visual connection between or among the elements on the page.

Alignment can help increase an item’s visual weight on the page, and therefore the importance the viewer puts on it.

This can be used to increase contrast as well — pull quotes are a great example of how bumping out of regular alignment can draw attention without throwing the user’s train of thought. By aligning more strictly most items on the page (or redundant items like navigation) and letting a main feature pop out of this alignment, we are contrasting that item with the others on the page, and thereby increase it’s visual weight and the importance the viewer puts on it.

Example

Take a look at how Amazon accomplishes this on their product info pages (I pulled up Simple Minds “Graffiti Soul” album):

4. Proximity

It goes without saying that if we have two related elements on a page (eg: a picture that accompanies an article) we want to keep it close by it’s article, and preferably close by the part of the article it relates to specifically.

Proximity is one of the key ways we determine relationships and organize information.

For example, some business cards have both a business name & number and a personal name & number. Nowhere on the card does it specifically say that the number under the business name applies to the person, and the number under the person is the generic business number. We know, by their proximity, that if we dial the first number we’ll reach the front desk and if we dial the second we’ll reach the person whose name is on the card.

Example

Take a look at Amazon.com again. Notice the bottom links and screen size information for the two Kindle models:

We wouldn’t think for a second that the screen sizes would apply to anything other than the Kindle models they are shown under, respectively. The power of proximity is one of suggestion. Without actually saying two pieces of information are connected, you are able to reduce visual clutter and present material more intuitively.

Items placed closer to the primary content on a site we know are related to the primary content or are at least of greater relational importance to that content. Relevancy is implied by the proximity of one item to another: We increase the likelihood of a relationship the closer these items become.

It’s Design Theory

It’s important to understand that these are principles of design theory — common sense, if you will. They aren’t hard and fast rules, and sometimes we can bend a principle a bit more on one project than we do on another. It’s all in the design at hand. That said, it’s really about common sense although sometimes having a good eye for this type of stuff can make a big difference.

These four principles are a good starting point to break down any design and see if it needs to be tweaked or worked with a bit. And it’s easy to remember (work out the acronym for yourself :D)

Here they are again, simply:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Practice & Have Fun

With each of these four principles in mind, grab a small notebook and spot areas in common visual designs that can be tweaked or worked with – whether they’re your projects or not – and write down ways they can be improved. After a little while, it’ll be like second nature looking at things this way and you’ll also notice an upgrade in your own design work.

Guarantee Pass 1z0-047 exam with help of 000-085 practice questions and 000-974 test engine.

Have fun!