Methods for Effectively Announcing Changes on your Blog

There comes a time in all of our blogs lives where we add some­thing to it that makes such a dif­fer­ence that we want the world to know about it. But what is the best way to send out your mes­sage to your blog readers?

The Prob­lems

When you do some­thing like redesign your blog, or add a new fea­ture to your blog, it’s nat­ural instinct to write a blog post about it. But there are prob­lems with these announce­ment posts believe it or not. The fol­low­ing will be addressed all through­out this post.

1. You ded­i­cate a whole post to your own blog instead of try­ing to help others
2. The announce­ment is not effec­tive enough, and becomes a waste of space for the most part
3. You announce some­thing that may not need to be announced

Deter­min­ing What Should Be Announced

As blog­gers, we always look for ways to improve our blog. Every­day, I think I make some kind of change to Blo­gus­sion. What­ever change that may be, it’s impor­tant to define the line between what should and should not be announced.

When you make changes onto your blog and think if you should ded­i­cate an entire post to describ­ing it, ask your­self these questions:

1. How big of an impact would this make in my community?
2. How eas­ily can peo­ple see it/get to it with­out me announc­ing it?
3. Is this change worth ded­i­cat­ing a whole post to?
4. Is it more impor­tant for my read­ers to read about what changed now, or is it more impor­tant for them to read a reg­u­lar article?

Cre­at­ing Inter­est With an Announce­ment Beforehand

The goal with announc­ing future plans before they are actu­ally imple­mented is to cre­ate a hype. You want to try to get your com­mu­nity riled up and excited for these changes. So that’s why you can announce what’s going on before you do any­thing on your blog.

Take Blo­gus­sion for exam­ple! Before I revised the blog design here, I wrote a post about it with plenty of infor­ma­tion in it. I will describe every­thing I did below. Check out that post.

1. A brief descrip­tion of the new theme

Because I have not yet released the new theme at this point, I do not want to give too much away. So I briefly went over what to expect with­out giv­ing much new detail.

2. Sneak Peaks; “Teasers”

As you can see, because the change I was mak­ing was a design, I posted tiny screen­shots of what was new from the old ver­sion. You can take this idea and make it work for any­thing you do.

If you are going to release an Ebook for exam­ple, show off a cou­ple pages before­hand and get that cri­tiqued. This method is one of the best hype builders I can think of.

3. Ask for opinions!

While you have your com­mu­nity inter­ested in the update you are going to make to your blog, you should get their opin­ions on what they want to have. The change you make is sup­posed to be in your read­ers best inter­est, so what­ever feed­back you can get from them the better.

Mis­cel­la­neous Tips

• Don’t give too much away in the announce­ment. Don’t kill the sur­prise, and don’t reveal too much!
• Sep­a­rate the before­hand and after­ward announce­ment with a few reg­u­lar arti­cles. You don’t want to give up too many days of not writ­ing reg­u­lar arti­cles (even though it sounds nice sometimes).
• Don’t dis­ap­point! This is blog­ging, not pol­i­tics, so what­ever you say you’re going to do you bet­ter do!

Rein­forc­ing that Inter­est Afterwards

After the hype is built up, it’s impor­tant to keep the hype there for the launch period. It may seem a lit­tle much to do two announce­ments, but if the change you are mak­ing to your blog is big enough, then it’s impor­tant to cre­ate aware­ness. Even if it means sac­ri­fic­ing a cou­ple of reg­u­larly sched­uled articles.

Keep­ing my exam­ple alive, after I launched the revised Blo­gus­sion design, I announced it and got a great response from it. I did a vari­ety of new things in this announce­ment, and extended other things I did in the first one.

1. Cre­ate a catchy title

Like any reg­u­lar post, you should shoot for a catchy arti­cle title. It will draw peo­ple in and will increase the chance of get­ting your announce­ment read. I feel like the title I cre­ated was fairly cre­ative, and that’s why it still pulls in hits today.

2. Com­pletely described the new changes

I cre­ated a multi-leveled list with what exactly changed. I kept the items in the list short and sweet, but made it as com­pre­hen­sive as pos­si­ble. At this point, you want to describe every­thing new with­out leav­ing out much detail.

3. Added a con­tact form to report any errors

I decided to be less open with this and instead of hav­ing peo­ple report errors through the com­ment form, I made it a lit­tle more cre­ative and inter­ac­tive by adding a con­tact form onto the page. I read emails faster than com­ments, so it was for the best.

The con­tact form I use and rec­om­mend is Con­tact Form 7.

4. Get more feedback!

It’s never too late to keep get­ting feed­back on the changes you make on your blog. Still, ask for feed­back on the final release of the new addi­tion to your blog. It gets your com­mu­nity involved, and can help you make some­thing great even better.

5. Release Plans for the Future; Restart the cycle

Basi­cally, I made mini announce­ments at the end of the post with some things I was going to do after the launch of the design. In a sense, I started the announce­ment cycle over again by telling my read­ers what to expect. Obvi­ously the plans I made at the end of the post weren’t ideal to ded­i­cate a whole post to.

Mis­cel­la­neous Tips

1. If you are updat­ing some­thing (like a design or a page on your blog), a before and after screen­shot is always great for com­par­i­son of new and old features.
2. Keep any com­ments you get about the change in mind. What­ever you do for the com­mu­nity should be in their favor, and their opin­ions mat­ter the most in any announcement.
3. You should be will­ing to answer any ques­tions your read­ers may have, and be sure to keep up with these ques­tions even after a long period of time.

I hope you enjoyed this post. It is a rel­a­tively small topic, but it is impor­tant to do right as well! Let me know what you think of this idea, and do you think that two announce­ment posts for one change is necessary?

Photo by Natali Fisher

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