Jon Acuff: a Man of His Word

In case you don’t know, Jon Acuff is a well-known blogger/author who is responsible for the popular blog and book, Stuff Christians Like and the book, Gazelles, Baby Steps And 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me About Debt.

Back last November he wrote a blog post, ‘Can I help you with your blog?‘, and I responded thinking it would be great if he did help but I’d understand if he didn’t. I can’t imagine the amount of email and requests Jon gets. It has to be a lot when you consider he’s reached over 2 million people with his blog and has tens of thousands of twitter followers.

Why am I writing this post? Well, I have two reasons…

1. To serve as a reminder for me to follow Jon’s suggestions.
2. To let everyone know that Jon Acuff is a man of his word and of great character.

The Evidence

Hi Jon,

I purchased your book last week and read your post today (http://stuffchristianslike.net/2010/11/can-i-help-you-with-your-blog/ ).

Hook me up. 🙂

/

Josh

Josh

Thank you so much for buying my second book! I really appreciate that. I am reviewing blogs right now and just came to yours. I love it! Here are a few thoughts I had:

1. I’d love to see you creating more content. Set a goal to write one post a week for 90 days. That’s 12 posts. Then write a handful of 3 posts really quickly. Write short posts. Just 200 words or so. Then, once you’re done, sit on them for a few days. Come back later when you’re not in love with them. You need to have an editor’s eye and if you try to edit the same day you write, you will miss things.
2. I’d like to see you do a couple of posts with lists in them. Blog readers really love to have short, easy to digest content and I personally have really seen community grow with posts that allow specific, list based things to react to. Your post about hostgator would have been a perfect post for a list.
3. On the community tip, the best way I grew my community on SCL was by joining other communities first. For a year before I launched my site I plugged into other blogging communities and would regularly post comments. Becoming known for generously leaving comments is a great way to encourage people to comment on your blog. (The times people commented you did an awesome job writing great responses to them.)
4. Think about creating more “exits and entrances” for your posts. Readers need visual entrances they can use to start reading. Sometimes it’s tempting to have long run on paragraphs, but readers sometimes feel intimidated by big “walls” of text. Try to break up some of your posts into smaller chunks and give readers the chance to “enter and exit” ideas easily.
5. I’d love to see you take greater “visual credit” for the Transchild theme. I think it looks great and it would be fun to have some sort of visual preview represented on your main page.

Hope that helps. Thanks for buying the book!

Jon

Make a good decision today by following @JonAcuff on Twitter and checking out his blog, JonAcuff.com. You can thank me later.