The Mad Scientist’s Guide To Blogging Success

Welcome, my nubile apprentices, to my lab.

Looking around you’ll see my experiments (some successes and some failures) and you’ll also see my testing stations. My subjects are those willing to lend their eyes and minds for a time to my creations as we careen on this spinning rock and survive together through the many trials of life.

But I digress…

Speaking of trials, you’re probably wondering why you’ve all appeared in my lab today.

Well, as I work to understand the paradox of the space-time continuum and unravel the mysteries entwined within string theory, I know there are certain other mysteries baffling folks that I can interpret and explain and I wanted to give you, my worthy pupils, a crash course in exploring the depths of your content wells and harnessing the powers of mind and emotion control on your own subjects.

Are you interested? Of course you are, you’ve been inhaling my extremely potent submissive gas since you walked in.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Lesson 1: Clean All Your Equipment

No mad scientist can function without the right tools. Most scientists use beakers, burners, weights, liquids and lab coats, but in your experiments you’ll be using your blog, social channels and email lists.

The first step for any mad scientist worth their snuff if to make sure that the tools you are using are the right ones for the experiments you’re about to perform.

• Have you cleaned out your blog’s back-end recently?
• Do you have all the necessary/helpful plugins installed that you need?
• What about your blog’s domain, do you own that?

We scientists may be mad, but we aren’t stupid.

If you’re expecting to get the results you want (even if those results involve complete world domination), you have to make sure everything is in working order before you start or you’re likely to end up with hydrofluoric acid on your face (our version of egg on your face, but much more deadly).

Lesson 2: It’s Called Experimentation For A Reason

You’ve all heard the colloquialisms regarding Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison failing a whole bunch of times before they got it right, so I’m not going to waste your time by repeating those here. But, scientists, more than almost anyone else, truly understand the value of a good failure.

That may seem odd to you normies (scientists’ term for non-scientists), but the truth is that in science failure can be a very good thing because it allows you to learn and see where improvements need to be made.

In your blogging, you should be constantly experimenting because you never know when you will stumble upon the perfect mixture of chemical elements that causes the exact reaction you’re hoping for and, unlike in mad scientists’ labs, if you do run into a failure, it’s less likely to cause your assistant to lose his eyebrows for the rest of his life (sorry about that, Murdock).

Try placing the call to action in different places in your posts.

Play around with paragraph structure. Use no images. Use ALL images. Create a video blog entry. Come straight out and ask for enewsletter signups. Hide your enewsletter signup in a humorous link. A/B test certain post topics and headlines with tweets to see which get the best responses.

Mad scientists use this acronym: ABEL. It stands for Always Be Experimenting, Leroy (The guy who came up with it had named his test gerbil Leroy and at the end had gone quite mad and regularly talked to it and gave it scholarly advice).

Your name might not be Leroy, but it’s good advice nonetheless. Always be experimenting.

Lesson 3: Measure Correctly

The scientific method requires that a successful experiment be able to be recreated with similar results. If you aren’t keeping some sort of chart or Excel document of what you’ve tried and what works, you’re not truly experimenting because nothing that succeeds for you can be recreated.

Play around with your site’s Google Analytics (if you haven’t already set up Google Analytics on your blog, you shouldn’t be in my lab) and become very familiar with what it can teach you.

A great scientist I listen to in regards to how Google Analytics works is Avinash Kaushik, follow and study his wisdom.

Measure which posts increase traffic and which ones correspond with drops in visitors. Were the environmental or cultural reasons for those drops or were they based off your content? Do you have goals set up to measure? All of these metrics should have at least a faint place in your planning and understanding of your blog.

Another good reason to measure is that without measurements, your mixtures may ignite into horrible creations that destroy what yo’ve worked to create.

Make sure you understand what results your actions bring forth and act accordingly.

Class Dismissed

You’ve learned a lot today and quite frankly I have to get back to work on my Death Ra……….I mean Happy Puppy Love Potion. Take what you have learned here and build your own labs, conduct your own experiments and measure to find the domination you dream of.

What experiments have you tried recently? Were they successful? What did you learn from them either way?

Thoughts?