Blogging Pointers

I don’t normally link to two posts from one blog in a single post but these two posts really spoke to me today, as I was reviewing my feeds from the last few days. (I do not spend hours every day reading feeds, and I don’t recommend it as a productive practice to anyone. But more on that in a later post.)

DoshDosh is one of those blogs that just makes you wonder whether more than one person is really writing it. Except for the unique and consistent voice, it just seems impossible that one person could come up with so much good stuff, so consistently. And yet, there you are - Maki delivers, time and again.

The first post is “The ‘Free’ Business Model: A Strategy for Attention, Traffic, and Profits.” With very little effort, Maki could expand on this and produce an excellent e-book that would make him quite comfortable, I feel sure! Here, he speaks of one of the most confusing aspects of web-based money making - the concept of the business model. It trips up so many of us who don’t understand that “free” is great, but it has to GO somewhere in order to make it worth your while. Maki gets that, of course, and shows you how to go from “free” to “paid.” Excellent post. Particularly worthwhile: the last few paragraphs …

When it comes to blogging, you often want to grab hold of the first-time user who arrives at your site. You want him or her to track your blog by subscribing to it. You do this by giving quality information away for free. Don’t be afraid to share your ‘secret techniques‘. So what if you give it all away for free? Be generous with links and publicity. Make your readers feel grateful and happy. Grab them by the throat and never let them go. Build attention for your ventures consistently by progressively catering to your audience’s needs. The more you share useful content and appear to be genuine, the more loyal your readers you will be and the easier for you to acquire support for your future projects. Never forget that people are transferable assets and crucial factors in word of mouth marketing. Listen to them. Let them tell you how they feel. You don’t have to soft sell or hard sell anything to initially make some money from your blog. You don’t even have to put any ads up at all. It’s more about attention, loyalty, connections and leverage.

The second post is more “audience participation” if you will, and I’ve already raised my hand to participate. I hope a lot of my readers will as well! The post is titled “Creating a Definitive Blueprint for a Profitable Blog: A Community Ebook Idea,” and it’s picking up steam in the comments section. Maki’s idea is for a community-written (although individually-pieced) ebook that will be available for free download. Each author would of course be fully credited and retain all rights in his/her work. (Although there’s some talk about allowing affiliate links to permit the authors to make a little cash for their troubles.)

I hope you’ll go check out both posts and if the spirit moves you, sign up to participate in the ebook!

It’s Wednesday and you know what that means! Time to pick the best of the best in our weekly Blog Watch metablogging roundup! So circle the wagons and light the campfires, cowboys and cowgirls - let’s git bloggin’! (OK, that was way too far, even for me . . . )

Put Me In, Coach. . .

Better Blogging With Michael Martine: Learn to Blog Better, Faster, and with Fewer Mistakes - Michael, as I think I might have mentioned before, is one of the meta-bloggers who really gets it - whatever “it” really is - when it comes to blogging. His recent entry into the consulting business hasn’t seemed to negatively impact his own blogging productivity one whit. This post explains why you should think about hiring a blog coach. (As a blog coach myself, I have to say this is a pretty great explanation of what we do - or what I do, anyway - and how we can help you get better at blogging, no matter what purpose your blog serves for you.)

It’s Easier To Ask Permission After All . . .

Lorelle VanFossen at Blog Herald: Newsletter to Blog: Quoting, Referencing, Citing and Not Copyright Violating - Lorelle’s breadth of expertise is just amazing to me. I don’t know how she does it - but “do it” she does. This post, covering the process of transforming a newsletter to a blog format and specifically, how to avoid unwittingly plagiarizing your newsletter’s content when you publish it in blog form on the World Wide Web.

Object Lessons

Binary Moon: Top 10 Tips for driving traffic AWAY from your website - I’m not sure I agree with all of these entries, honestly. For one, I couldn’t care less if you put Digg or deli.cio.us buttons in your feed, and I’m not sure why he does. (Then again, I don’t get why some folks don’t think you should “digg” yourself - I’m not allowed to like my own writing? But reasonable minds differ, so I don’t press the point too much. And I won’t here, either.) However, the post is very helpful especially to new bloggers and points out the value in thinking critically about your blog as a whole and as an experience in itself.

One Stumble You WANT To Take

DoshDosh: StumbleUpon Networking: How to Easily Share Content and Build Relationships - Maki gives us an incredibly detailed and content-rich primer on StumbleUpon - what it is, how to use it, and why you should. I learned a lot I didn’t know from this post, and I was already familiar with SU. There’s really nothing more to say about this post - it speaks for itself and you should read it, period.

That’s it for this week, folks - enjoy the best of the meta-bloggers!

Beginner bloggers, beware the category trap!

It’s all too easy to start going a little crazy with those categories after a few posts. Usually, the first several posts are all assigned to one of only a few categories, but then something happens. It’s almost as if the blogger’s plug gets yanked, and suddenly it seems that the posts in the blogger’s head need ever more discrete and finely tuned categories. And the result? Almost always unhappy - way too many categories, categories that are ill-defined and duplicative, or categories that are way too narrowly drawn.

Spend some time at the outset thinking about your categories. How many do you really need? I would suggest starting with no more than ten. Craft them carefully; think ahead about your posts and your subject matter.

One approach is to create a broad-stroke outline of your subject matter. If you were writing a book, what would your chapter titles be? Write them down on paper, or in a text file. Play with them a bit. Aim for a little bit of parallelism (though strict symmetry certainly isn’t required).

Whatever you do, try to avoid what usually happens to beginner bloggers - call it putting the cart before the horse: draft a post, then write a category title. That way madness and haphazard categorization lie.

Finally, don’t confuse categories with tags! Use plugins like The Ultimate Tag Warrior to define and label your posts in more narrow ways; let your categories serve their purpose which is to group them according to subtopic.

Liz Strauss has a great post up at her blog today titled “The Secret To Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming.” It’s trademark Liz - highly readable, common sense applied in a brand new way, and very good advice. Essentially, she says, it all comes down to saying a proper “Thank you!” to the person or persons who started the snowball rolling. (See, your kindergarten teacher was right - everything you need to know in life …)

One thing though … it’s the title of her post. Is saying “thank you” to the originators (as excellent an idea as it is) really the secret to massive Digg/SU traffic? Or is it the secret to return visitors? I don’t see most users spreading the word that “this blogger said thank you and that’s so cool!”, so I’m not sure how the word would get out to prompt others to do the same for you. And expecting one person to Digg/Stumble you over and over isn’t really realistic.

But Liz makes one suggestion that I’d never thought of and just love:

While your story is still popular, link to your champion’s profile from your story. Place your link at the top of the story. That shows your thanks in a highly visible way. That link back also might send a ton of Digg/SU Users to your recommender’s profile. Chances are that will increase your his or her number of fans. You can bet a “thank you�? like that will be noticed. Even LifeHacker takes time to thank their Digg friends.

How brilliant is that?

No, it’s not a gift-giving season (unless you count candy next month as a gift - and I do). But your readers deserve a gift every single time you post, and it’s the gift of your authenticity.

You can really tell when bloggers get this - and when they don’t. Trying to emulate another blogger, or adopting a controversial stance you don’t really believe in merely to draw traffic . . . these things might work in the short term but don’t your readers deserve something better from you? Like honesty?

This is why wholesale copy and paste jobs just don’t cut it if you’re after solid long-term blog growth. Your thoughts are worth sharing. Offer your own unique contribution, even if you feel uncertain of its worth, and even if you think someone else said it better. Besides, I can tell you from experience, the best way to develop a better sense of confidence is to pretend you already have it. That’s true of life, and it’s true of blogging.

Remember: blogging is a conversation, aimed at developing real relationships between you and your readers. How can you have an authentic relationship if you’re pretending to be someone else, or too fearful to let your reader know who you really are? Have some faith and jump in!

In the Wednesday Blog Watch, I’m going to select the three to five best posts about blogging from other blogs across the Internet in the past week. I’m doing this for two reasons:

• To help readers improve their blogging by giving them the very best advice available
• To demonstrate two key blog traffic improvement tips simultaneously - one: send your readers away, paradoxically, if you want them to come back to stay, and two: blog readers love lists!

So, without further ado, here’s last week’s best of the blogs Blog Watch - it’s metatastic!

Michael Martine, who recently announced his entry into the blog consulting business, offers up some wholesome goodness fresh from the blog garden with “How to Manage Your Blog For the Long Term - Think Like A Gardener.”

At The Blog Herald, Valeria Maltoni asks us “What Is Your Blog’s Best Pick-Up Line?” This post contains great advice for thinking about your blog branding.

At Copyblogger, Brian Clark offers us “How To Write Remarkably Creative Content.” Great advice for keeping your blog content fresh and uniquely yours.

That’s it for this edition!

If there’s one piece of advice beginning bloggers hear over and over, ad nauseam, it’s got to be ‘Find your niche!’ I wonder if it’s being touted so pervasively that we risk beginners defining their scopes so narrowly that their blogs begin to cave in on them?

Let’s take my most recent independent venture, Fibro Follies, as an example. I could have narrowed the site’s theme - “thriving with fibromyalgia” - even further, of course. I could have targeted alternative therapies for the illness. I could have focused strictly on women over 40 who’ve recently been diagnosed. I could have even narrowed it down to “women over 40, recently diagnosed, who want to combine conservative and alternative therapies and are looking for productivity and energy management tips.”

Phew.

But I kept it pretty open - “people with fibromyalgia who want to do more than just survive, and who want a higher quality of life.” The reason is simple: I’m sick of fibro advocates creating this picture in the public’s mind of those of us with fibro as bedridden and incompetent women who must be cared for. I know the aim was, initially, to show people that it was a real disease. The pendulum swung too far over, however, and this blog is my attempt to bring some hope back to the “fibromite” who wants more out of life and isn’t ready to take to her or his bed yet.

By keeping this blog’s focus fairly open, I’ve created a wide world of potential topics. I can write about alternative therapies, new treatments, medical trials, coping and healing tips, psychological and self-improvement programs, journaling, relationships, nutrition - but all as related to improving quality of life for a fibro patient. This is a scope that isn’t likely to cave in on me and suffocate the blog in its infancy.

Consider what might have happened had I selected a narrower niche - let’s say “alternative therapies.” Well, right away I’m turning away the 30% or so of patients who only consider traditional medicine (that’s a number based strictly on personal anecdotes and experience - which is to say, completely made up - but, still, there are some folks like that, and they wouldn’t read a blog devoted to alternative therapies). I’m also locking myself in; what happens when I’ve exhausted the scope of alternative therapies? I’ll need to resurrect old topics, or find new twists. That’s completely do-able, mind you, but - and this is my point - why make things harder on myself?

The single biggest ingredient for a successful blog isn’t content, as some would have you believe - it’s blogger passion. With that passion, you’ll find the content, you’ll do the work necessary to make the traffic find you, and you’ll keep posting daily as you know you need to. But it’s hard to maintain the passion when you’re so narrowly boxed in to a topic that you run through it in a month or two. Keep the passion alive for your blog the same way you would for your spouse or partner - by finding new things to love!

For all the Mac bloggers out there (and that should be most of you - and if not, just hang on, I’ve got something special in the works for you PC users! Linux folks - you’re excused from reeducation, of course): MarsEdit is a handy offline application that allows you to compose your blog posts whenever, and wherever, you like for posting at any time.

I’m three days into a 30-day trial of MarsEdit but all indications are go for a purchase at the end of the trial; at almost $30, it’s not exactly an impulse purchase of software but it’s certainly in the range of most pro bloggers. And that’s who, I believe, will benefit most from MarsEdit’s tools and approach.

Why blog offline, you might ask? Well, as the Red Sweater site points out, most browser-blogging interfaces are notoriously slow and finicky. (Can I just mention here how many times I’ve lost a post in WordPress’s dashboard? ScribeFire, while somewhat better, isn’t a vast improvement either.)

Also, sometimes you’re not near an accessible network. How would you like to blog from the local Starbucks without spending the $6 a day for access? Simply use MarsEdit, draft your posts while you sip your latte, and then send to your blog when you’re back home and hooked up to your own network.

The Mac-based interface is simple, intuitive, and pretty easy to manipulate. It’s an uncluttered approach that threw me at first, but once I figured out the “Markup” pull-down menu, all I could think was “Genius! Why isn’t WordPress or ScribeFire this easy?”

According to the site, MarsEdit also integrates and plays well with the usual suspect text editors - BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, TextWrangler. (No Smultron?)

Some of the toys I haven’t played with yet. There’s AppleScript support to add features at whim, and macros to save time with markups used frequently. Heck, just the sheer and simple beauty of writing all my blogs with so little manipulation is worth the $30 for me.

Definitely a BP Keeper.

I somehow missed this post from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger the first time (August 23rd of this year) but judging from the number of comments it received, this post spoke to others just as loudly as it did to me.

Darren’s post starts with a story - two friends talking to a third who’s interested in starting a blog:

My blogging friend was dispensing a few words of wisdom on how to start out (the usually kind of beginner blogging tips) when he said something out of the blue which made me take note because of the wisdom of it. He said: “In the early days you’ll feel like you’re talking to yourself
(actually in the very beginning you probably are) - but don’t give up
because it’s a feeling that will subside. The key is to keep blogging
through that awkward beginning because if you do you’ll find people
will begin to find you and the memory of talking to yourself will be a
distant memory.�?  I really appreciated my friend’s words. They reminded me a lot of my
own beginnings in blogging when I felt quite foolish about pouring out
what was on my mind for everyone (and nobody) to read).

Darren then goes on to relate an analogous experience from his past - preparing a sermon in an empty church - to how those early days of blogging seem to a new blogger.

Well, I’ve got news for the new bloggers: it happens to “old pros” like me, too. I’ve been blogging for over four years now, but whenever I start a new blog - especially in a brand new subject area, as I just did with The Fibro Follies, it seems in many ways as if I’m just beginning all over again - as if I’m the one in that empty church.

The difference, perhaps, for me as someone who’s “been there, done that, got the arthritic fingers” is that I know it’s a temporary feeling, and it’s one that serves a vital purpose. That feeling of “preaching to an empty room” pushes me on to keep blogging, stay on point, keep delivering good content, and keep reaching out to others in that blogging community. It’s a powerful motivator!

Blogging is an amazing conversation,when you think about it. It has the ultimate power to change the conversation completely - to impact other’s lives in direct and immediate ways. It’s absolutely worth the early anguish you’ll go through. Keep asking those questions if you want (”is there anyone out there?” “am I getting through?” “Is this thing on?”) but always, always come back to the content - and keep blogging.

Technorati Tags: beginning bloggers

Blogging productively (which just happens to be the name of a new category here on Blogging Pointers) is paramount for professional bloggers, especially those who have more than one blog, or more than one author on a particular blog. Readers of Blog News Watch might be familiar with my “SCANTS” system, blogged about here. Basically, that was a “blog fodder” management system I hacked together using ScribeFire and Stikkit. That system works, mind you, but it lacked a certain elegance. So, I moved on to Notebook, which was elegant, and robust (not to mention it allowed for more substantive note-taking), but it was hard-drive-housed, so when I changed computers, I no longer had access to my trusty “blog book.”

Now, I think I’ve found the Holy Grail - an elegant, online, free, and robust solution that allows for multiple blogs, a self-designed folder management system, active hotlinks, and task management functionality. It’s called RustyBudget, and it’s a new online tool designed specifically to help bloggers keep an organized handle on their blogs, by managing upcoming topics, tasks and authors. Even better - it’s free for up to two authors (a fee applies for third author addition).

Here’s how it works:

1. You sign up for a free account.
2. Once registered and logged in, you create budgets - these would normally be the name of your site, but if you have a very complex site, you might want to create separate budgets for separate areas - one for articles, perhaps, and one for your blog. My budgets are each titled after my blogs, respectively so my budgets are The Inspired Solo, Blogging Pointers, Blog News Watch, The Fibro Follies, etc.
3. Now, you’ll set up folders for each of your budgets. If you have more than one author, you might want to create a folder for each blogger. Or one per category, or group of categories. Perhaps you’ll want one for series ideas, or one per major series. In addition to creating folders for series and for pillar content, I also created one folder in each budget called “Grab Bag.” (I’ll explain that in a moment.)
4. Once your folders are established (with their own permission levels and color-coding), you can start to add notes to each budget’s folder as you wish. For instance, I’m planning to create and host a carnival at Fibro Follies, so I added a “Carnival” folder to that budget in my account. Then I created several notes, outlining the next steps - create a submission form at blogcarnival.com, post about the carnival at my blog, collect submissions, etc. I can add notes and URLs, and later check the item as completed, too.
5. Now the really handy part: bookmarklets. You can create a bookmarklet for any folder in any budget, drag it to your link bar, and voila! Just drag a URL to your bookmarklet and it’s automatically added in as a topic. I created bookmarklets for each budget’s “grab bag” folder, and now adding topic ideas couldn’t be easier. Just drag and drop - and when I’m ready to organize and make notes, I simply go to the budget page, and process the new tasks as a group.

You can see some short, well-made demos of the RustyBudget process and features at the site, and a list of budget features as well.

So far, RustyBudget definitely fills the need. I’ll keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: RustyBudget, managing multiple blogs, blog productivity