BloggingPro » Blogging: How To

Creating a Shared Content Box Across All of Your WordPress Blogs

James Junior — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:40:36 +0000

More than five years ago, I was bit by the Autoblog bug. I don’t build them anymore, but I still build WordPress blogs in large numbers. One of my pet peeves when I was working with 100+ different blogs was that if I wanted to interlink them, or have the exact same links on the sidebar of each blog, I would have to add these links manually to each and every blog every time I built a new blog. For example, if I have 98 blogs, and I want every one of them to have a link to blog #99 that I just created, I would have to add that link to all 98 blogs manually. That is very time-consuming, so I knew there had to be a better way.

Of course, PHP can do just about anything if you know how to tell it to. I thought it would be awesome if I could have a shared links box on the sidebar of each WordPress blog, and have a form online that I could enter in the name and URL to each new blog as I built them, and then have PHP add that link to all 98 blogs instantly. Thankfully, I was able to set this up exactly how I needed it. This is what I am going to show you today, and you can use it however you see fit. One thing I want to remind you of is that even though I am using the shared content box for links, it technically can be used for anything, your imagination is the limit. Let’s get started.

Requirements

WordPress Blog(s)
Hosting with PHP and MySQL Database (this is a common setup, so your host should have it)
PHPMyAdmin Access

Step 1

Download the Samsarin PHP Widget to your WP blog; install and activate it. This plugin lets you create a widget that can execute any PHP code right in the widget. This is crucial for you because it allows you to connect to your PHP database and display the content right there on your blog.

Step 2

Open up your PHPMyAdmin dashboard, and create a new database called links_database. You do this by clicking on the “databases” tab from the PHPMyAdmin home page, then you can specify the name of the database you want to create. If you don’t have enough admin rights to create a database from PHPMyAdmin, then you have to create it from within your hosting panel (CPanel, etc.).

Step 3

Once you have the database created, you need to execute the following SQL code to create the table that will house the links. Do this by clicking on the SQL tab up top and pasting in and running the following SQL code:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `links` ( `site_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(100) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

That SQL code will create a table named links inside the links_database database. Notice that it has two columns/fields: site_name is the anchor text, and url is the URL of the site that the anchor text will point to.

Step 4

Next we are going to create a PHP file named connect.php which will contain the login and password for the specific database that we want to hook up to in our other scripts. Go ahead and create connect.php with your text editor and insert the following code into it (be sure to change the username and password to your own):

# Type="MYSQL" # HTTP="true" $hostname_links = "localhost"; $database_links = "links_database"; $username_links = "DB_USERNAME"; $password_links = "DB_PASSWORD"; $conn = mysql_pconnect($hostname_links, $username_links, $password_links) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); ?>

Step 5

Now we create another simple PHP script called update.php, which will actually update the database every time we create and add a new link. Fill the update.php with the following code:

$site_name = $_POST['site_name']; $url = $_POST['url']; mysql_select_db("links_database", $jim); $query = "INSERT INTO links (site_name,url ) VALUES ('$_POST[site_name]','$_POST[url]')"; if (!mysql_query($query,$conn)) { die('Error: ' . mysql_error()); } echo "1 record added"; ?>

Step 6

Next we are going to create another PHP script called enterblog.php which will serve as the online web form that you will go to every time you want to add a new link to the list. Create enterblog.php with the following code in it:

Enter New Blog


















Enter name of new site:







Enter the url of the site:

Step 7

We now will create another PHP script called displayurls.php which will be the script we call from the widget in WordPress. This script simply pulls all of the rows from the links table in the links_database. Put the following code inside displayurls.php:

// Connects to your Database mysql_connect("localhost", "DB_USERNAME", "DB_PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error()); mysql_select_db("links_database") or die(mysql_error()); $data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM links") or die(mysql_error()); $rt=mysql_query($data); while($nt=mysql_fetch_array($data)){ Print "

";

echo "

";

echo "

";

Print "

echo $nt['url'];
echo "\">";
echo $nt['site_name'];
echo "";
echo "

";

}

?>

Step 8

Okay almost done! Upload all of the PHP files we created here to the root directory of your site. Then change the file permissions on them to 755. Once you are done with that, it is time to bring up the web form and enter in a few links to the database. To do that, just type in the URL to your enterblog.php script, which should be something like http://www.yourblog.com/enterblog.php and you will see a two field web form. Enter in a few sites and URL’s, and hit enter after you type each one. It should tell you that 1 row was added if it went through successfully. Once that is done we can move on to the final step.

Step 9

Go into your WordPress admin and click on the Widgets option under the Appearance menu. In the widget selections you should see a widget titled something like “Samsarin PHP 1″, make sure you drag that widget somewhere onto your visible sidebar. When the widget pops up, enter in the title of the widget which might be something like “Links” and then in the body field type in the following PHP code:

Then hit Save. If you should run into an issue where you cannot see the links, try typing in your Absolute Server Path inside the above PHP include code (so instead of “displayurls.php” you might put something like “/var/www/displayurls.php” but the exact path is different for everyone’s server). You can get the absolute server path from your hosting company. When you bring up your blog, you should see the links box on any site you put that widget on. If you have this widget installed on every blog on your server, you can add a link to them all instantly just by entering the link info once into the web form and hitting enter! Pretty cool huh?!

Just a side note, I am not a PHP programmer. I know enough to modify some things and write simple scripts, but if you are a PHP guru and you see something that can be improved in these scripts, or see something wrong, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments and I will listen to all of your ideas. Good Luck!

How to Give Feedback to Guest Bloggers the Right Way

Amanda DiSilvestro — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:00:05 +0000

As someone who has been a guest blogger on approximately 80 different blogs, I feel as though I’ve seen it all when it comes to feedback. I have been asked to create an outline, articles have been sent back to me full of red and purple markings, articles have been completely ignored, and some of my articles have received nothing but a “no thank you” (no name, not greeting, just those three little words). As a writer, I have personal preferences as to how I think feedback should be handled. However, I also work on the flip side—I run a blog that accepts guests posts and I am constantly in a position to give feedback. Oddly enough, the way I give feedback to guest bloggers as an editor and the way I want to get feedback as a writer are completely different.

As a writer, I like it when an editor just tells me in one sentence why my article doesn’t work for their blog so I can send it somewhere else. I am not interested in seeing the hundreds of little comments an editor makes. If they have an idea about something that could make the article better then that’s great, but in general I am interested in getting my articles posted in a timely fashion. I am not offended (usually) if an editor doesn’t like my article, I will just try better next time.

However, it can be confusing when it comes time to give feedback on a hopeful blog article. There are a variety of things that can go wrong:

The writer completely ignored your guidelines regarding topic, length, and tone
The writer’s article has some good points, but the grammar wasn’t up to par
The article is not developed enough for your blog
The article discusses incorrect information
The article is well written, but is too controversial for your blog

So what is the proper feedback etiquette? Unfortunately, there is no “right way” to give feedback to guest bloggers. As I stated above, I have received feedback in all forms. However, you take different risks with whatever type of feedback you decide to give. Consider some of the ways you can give feedback to bloggers and then consider some of the pros and cons to each before deciding how you want to approach feedback:

Top 3 Ways Editors Give Feedback to Guest Bloggers

1. Mark up their article so it’s just the way you want it.

Pros: Well, you will have an article just the way you want it. You will make sure that the vision of your blog remains intact despite the other voices adding in their two cents. This will also allow you to remain positive when talking with bloggers. Although some writers may get annoyed with the many revision requests, no writer will dislike you or your blog for it. This creates a positive environment overall.

Cons: This often takes a ton of time. The more guest blogs you get the more difficult it will be to keep up with the work. While most editors don’t mind the work if it means there will be a good result, there is always the risk that the writer will look at the revisions and say forget it. You have then spent a great deal of time improving the article of that writer (at least in your eyes), and get nothing in return.

2. Tell them only reasons why you will not be able to use the article.

Pros: This is a good mix between giving a writer a lot of information and getting to the basics. This generally works well if someone ignored your guidelines or was off-topic in any way. They should understand, and you did not spend hours trying to “save” the article.

Cons: You could find yourself with a lot of follow-up emails. A lot of writers try and then fix the article themselves, which can be risky. If the author didn’t understand why you didn’t like the article in the first place, and then you have to turn it down a second time, you’re not going to be much liked. These authors might also continually try to post an article on your site (in some cases just for the link), so you may end up spending more time reading several articles than if you were to edit just one.

3. Be extremely brief, but polite.

Pros: This is the fastest option when giving “feedback.” You get right to the point, and chances are people will not follow-up. If they get back nothing more than a “not right now, thanks,” then nine times out of ten they aren’t going to come crawling back. You get your point across and save time.

Cons: Writers generally do not appreciate this. It can be seen as a brush-off, so they will have no interest in guest posting for you in the future. You could potentially lose a reader if they feel offended, and you could be missing out on some great content that would have otherwise come your way.

The most important thing to remember when giving feedback is to be polite. No matter how much you dislike the article, remember that someone put a lot of effort into writing it for your site. There are ways to be kind and not accepting a guest post. Other than that, it’s entirely up to the editor to weigh the pros and the cons. There are risks that go along with every approach, so it’s up to you to decide what it worth the risk.

Have you ever had to give feedback to a potential guest blogger? How did you handle the situation?

Photo Credit: projectsandpages.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to government small business loans. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business information directory, Business.com.

How to Find More Time for Blogging

Amanda DiSilvestro — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:30:59 +0000

You can love blogging all you want, but if you don’t have the time you don’t have the time. Time passes quickly, and once it’s gone you cannot get it back (obviously Amanda). For this reason, bloggers sometimes feel pressured into using every minute of every day for something productive. Many bloggers have a family and a social life, and some even have a full-time job. Whenever there is a moment of down time, that’s blogging time.

However, frantically running around every minute of every day is not the way to find time for blogging. Follow the steps below to help you stay sane while still finding time to do what you love:

Finding More Time for Blogging Is as Easy as 1, 2, 3

Step #1: Organization and Merging of Information

While some blogs or blog posts are opinion, most offer advice complete with links back to reputable sources. In other words, blogging takes a lot of research. If you’re ever going to write a review about software or technology you have been using, you have to back up your opinion with facts and look at other software in order to create a comparison. All of this research should be in once place so that it’s easy to jump back and forth. Bloggers don’t always get the time to write a great article in one sitting, so consolidation of information is key. Consider using mind-mapping software such as MindMaple to help keep your information organized. It may take a bit of time to get used to mind-mapping software, but once you do I think you’ll find that it will save you a ton of time in the end. The following is an example of a mind-map:

Step #2: Avoid Repetition

As a blogger, I understand that the job is easy to turn into something repetitive. I think that many writers struggle with writers’ block, so writers are often visiting the same sites or the same paragraph over and over again. I know that when I have writers’ block I continually click back to my email inbox or check my phone. Whatever it is that you do, this is a huge waste of time and will not help you in your quest to find more time for blogging. Try avoiding these repetitive habits by using Google “bookmarks.” Google bookmarks allow you to save shortcuts to certain webpages to your Google Account. This allows you to access them on any computer (huge time saver) and also allows you to create labels and makes lists to help keep these pages organized. I think this works much better than the standard browser bookmarks because it is more convenient. You first must download the Google Toolbar, and then you can set this up on the Google bookmarks website in minutes. A screenshot of Google bookmarks is shown below:

Step #3: Utilizing Guest Posting Inquiries

What some rookies do not realize is that blogging isn’t just about writing a post and uploading it onto a blog. Blogging can also encompass the editor’s point of view. Part of blogging is managing the blog by responding to comments, sharing posts on social networks, writing blog posts, responding to business proposals, and editing blog content. Part of making time for blogging is making time for it all. One easy way to do this is to allow guest posts on your blog. Although you will still need to find the time to edit and upload the post, it is generally a much faster process than writing an article on your own. Learn to balance your blog out with guest posts and editor posts to help spread out the work. Some blogs that are strictly guest posts are successful, but the general rule of thumb is two days guest posting three days editor posting per week.

What This Means for You and Your Blog

Because blogging can be so time consuming, many blogs were started and either never finished or never maintained. People often don’t realize the amount of time and energy that goes into blogging, and if you aren’t prepared to work efficiently it can be extremely difficult. If you follow the steps above, hopefully you can find time for your blog and your other job and your family and your friends. And who knows, you may even get to sleep for more than five hours.

Photo Credit: dreamstime.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to criminal background check. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

Finding the Right Keywords for Your Blog in 5 Easy Steps

Amanda DiSilvestro — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:00:12 +0000

Whether youâ€™re starting a small business blog or simply looking to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, think keywords. Actually, think specific keywords. Many bloggers donâ€™t realize that finding the right keywords is the key to getting on the top of that search engine page. If you are hoping that when people search for the word â€œclothingâ€ they are going to see your website at the top of Google, think again. When you type in â€œclothingâ€ to Google, 1,970,000,000 results pop up. In other words, even if youâ€™re trying your hardest, youâ€™re not going to make it to page one unless you have a few years to spare.

When thinking about search engine optimization, your time is best spent coming up with the right keywords to target. This may seem easy at first, but there are actually quite a few steps a blog should take before putting all of their resources into one keyword.

Finding the Right Keywords for Your Blog

Keyword research has typically been utilized by large corporations and business websites, but bloggers can also get in on the action. Google does not say that only businesses are allowed to be on the top of search engine pages, so itâ€™s important your blog makes an effort for the top spot. Consider a few of the steps needed to help you understand keyword research:

Step #1: Target Audience

The first questions you need to ask yourself deals with your target audience. Itâ€™s extremely important that you think like your target audience as opposed to thinking like yourself when finding the right keywords for your blog. You must first know who your target audience actually is, and then you need to think like they doâ€”consider different ways to say the same thing, consider geographical related searches, etc.

Step #2: Head Terms vs. Tail Terms

Itâ€™s important to understand the difference between head and tail terms. Head terms are usually only one or two words (ex: clothing), yield a high search volume, but are more difficult to rank. Tail terms are completely the opposite. They usually consist of three or more words (ex: womenâ€™s plus size clothing stores in Atlanta), yield lower search volumes, but are less competitive. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but in general companies should choose two-thirds tail terms and one-third head terms. People who are ready to buy are usually typing in tail terms, so in the end youâ€™re more likely to do well in the tail terms category. As you can see from the chart on the right, Marketing Profs proves that tail terms statistically yield better results.

Step #3: Double Meanings and Relevance

You will want to make sure that the keywords you have chosen cannot have double meanings. For example, if you have a keyword like â€œtravelâ€ you need to consider â€œtime travelâ€ and â€œspace travelâ€ as possible reasons someone may be typing in the word â€œtravel.â€ It seems silly, but this happens more often than you may realize! You will also want to make sure that your keywords are totally relevant to your site. If you think one keyword is going to get a lot of traffic, you shouldnâ€™t put your resources into targeting it if your website has nothing to do with it. This may bring someone to your site, but they will quickly leave. You also run the risk of getting in trouble with Google if you try to pull this stunt.

Step #4: Check Search Volume

After you think youâ€™ve created some good, specific keywords, itâ€™s important to run them through a keyword tool. One of the most popular keyword tools is Google AdWords. Whatever tool you decide to use, your goal is to make sure that the keywords you have chosen get search volume. Below is an example of a possible keyword for a Chicago restaurant. You will want to make sure that the trend is moving upwards and that the keyword has a high search volume. In this case, the keyword â€œChicago Illinois restaurantsâ€ is likely to be your best bet!

Step #5: Consider the Competition

You will want to take the keywords youâ€™re considering and type them into Google to check out the top results. You will want to check the age of the domain by using Whois Source, the number and quality of backlinks, and their Google PageRank. In general, an older domain with a lot of quality backlinks and a high PR means tough competition. This is something to consider before working hard on ranking a specific keyword.

Although it may sound like a lot of work, choosing keywords to target is actually pretty straightforward. You will certainly need your marketing team up to speed on how to find good keywords because it is time consuming. Getting ranked on a Google search page takes time, so donâ€™t be discouraged if your efforts donâ€™t show up right away. If you follow these steps above, youâ€™re sure to get the results you want in good time.

Photo Credit: ryanchaffin.com, seoservicesgroup.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to credit card processing. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

How using JQuery could help speed up your blog

Patrick Lambert — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:43:27 +0000

The world of blogging has certainly become easier and more approachable for all types of people. No longer do you need to know how to manually code HTML, PHP, or JavaScript in order to create, design, and maintain a blog. But, for some of us, we may want to go further than what the blogging platform, or the available plugins allow. We may need to add more functionality for our users, or to integrate a new function that simply isn’t available yet through those easy to use tools. That’s when we have to be ready to learn some coding and get our hands dirty, plunging into code. Fortunately, even then there are tools to help us. When writing JavaScript, for example, here’s how using JQuery could help you write faster, and speed up your blog.

JQuery is a JavaScript library available from the project’s web site, and is designed to simplify your web site. It changes the way you write code, so that it makes more sense, it can be done in less time, and it makes the whole page work more efficiently. To start, all you have to do is download the library, and add the file to the same folder where the rest of your site resides. Then, at the top of your page, you add a reference to that library:

Once that’s done, you can start using JQuery code instead of normal JavaScript. There is a learning curve, of course, but once you get familiar with the way JQuery does things, you won’t want to go back. Their site has a lot of tutorials on how to use this language, and the language has quickly become a staple of online use. Some stats show that close to half of all top web sites are now using JQuery to speed up their own pages.The library not only speeds up the development of sites, but also maintenance, since there’s less lines of codes, and it’s easier to find what you’re looking for, should you go back and want to change something.

To show you just how much more efficient JQuery is, let’s take a common example of something you may want to do in JavaScript. Here’s the code for reading the value of a cookie using nothing but pure JavaScript:

To contrast that, here’s the code when using JQuery:

As you can see, the difference is quite drastic. Of course, not every comparison will give you such as huge improvement, but in most cases it will make things easier for you. Overall, using JQuery is a great idea if you’re set on going down into your code and tweaking the blog yourself. It makes things so much easier, and helps the performance of your pages tremendously.

How to Make Your Blogging Job Queries Stand Out

Wayne Ernest — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:22:15 +0000

Blogging is serious business, so when you start looking around for blogging jobs you are going to run into some stiff competition. If you try to just toss out a quick email asking to write for someone, you won’t even likely receive a response. However, if you take the time necessary to craft a serious query, you’ll often find that a serious job offer will quickly follow it. The following are some ways to rise above the pack of other writers out there.

Consider the Needs of the Hirer

A lot of job seekers, whether it concerns blogging or anything else, take the stance of talking about themselves obsessively. While the person reading your query is going to want to know why you think you’ll do a good job, they do not need to hear everything about your entire life. What does the hirer want? They want to save time and have the blog be taken care of without them having to babysit it (or the person writing it). So before you focus on anything below, focus on making the hiring manager’s life easier.

Avoid Sound Like a Used Car Salesman

If you find yourself using a bunch of fancy jargon to try to impress or confuse the person reading what you’re writing, just stop. Nobody wants to read a query from someone who acts like they’re trying to pull a fast one.

Offer Very Specific Suggestions

One of the worst things you can do is to show up and just shrug and say, “Yeah, I can write about anything.” Maybe you’re just starting out and you have no examples of your blogging efforts thus far. But if all else fails, it should only take a few minutes to jot down and briefly outline some ideas that may be promising.

Keep Your Introduction Informative Yet Brief

A couple of paragraphs when you introduce yourself should be plenty to start with. Just mention that you’re interested in the blogging job, you have some writing experience and why you believe you’d be a good fit. If you can’t boil it down to between six and ten sentences, you’re trying to say too much. For most blogging jobs, there may be over a hundred people interested — let the hiring manager write back to you if he or she is initially interested.

Blogging is partially about creativity and partly about consistency. If you sound boring or flaky from the beginning, you won’t be given the opportunity to prove otherwise. So use your words and the hirer’s time carefully.

Certain jobs pay really great others don’t for example writing about personal finance, how to get an online payday loan, and budgeting are great topics as you can get paid really well.

How to Be a Better Blogger, Guaranteed

Andrew G. Rosen — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:38:22 +0000

Blogging is not difficult. In fact, if you know something, and are prepared to write about it on a regular basis, in actuality, blogging is quite simple.

Sure you can get lost for a lifetime in SEO and audience development and Web analytics and about 1,000 other moving parts — but when it comes down to it, successful bloggers write great content and adhere to several basic principles.

This post assumes that your command of language is stellar and that your grammar skills are up to snuff. Once your “housekeeping” is in order, I recommend that every blog post you write have at least two of these three key elements. If you can incorporate all three, better yet!

Your blog posts must…

BE TIMELY.

Unless you are already an established name on the Web with an impressively large email list, the majority of your traffic is going to come from search engines and social media. Case closed. Every niche will have its tried and true searches – and you should target these using free keyword tools. However, nothing lights up the social media sky than what is happening right now. Not yesterday, not an hour ago – this instant. Write about things that are in the news and tie your existing ideas into things that are current.

For example, when the season finale of a popular television program is set to air, schedule a new blog post smack dab in the middle of the episode. That’s because at that time, thousands, if not millions of people will be searching for information about the show. They will be talking about the characters. So the trick is to hop on the Tweets and the blog posts surrounding a subject at the trough of the wave, and then be ready to publish as it crests. Timing is everything.

Put on your creative cap and you’ll be amazed at how you can tie two seemingly unrelated topics together.

BE CONTROVERSIAL.

Taking an unpopular or unique stance on a topic and attaching your name to it takes cajones. Maybe not the cajones it takes to get up in front of 2,000 people and deliver a workshop, but balls none the less.

One way to alleviate your blogging fears is to do your homework. Before hitting publish be sure that you believe in the stance you are taking and have the knowledge and willingness to backup it up.

This is a great way to differentiate yourself from the glut of other bloggers out there. Being a good blogger AND thinking differently is a marriage that very few people pull off successfully, but if you can do it successfully, your blog will reap the rewards.

GIVE PEOPLE A TAKEAWAY.

Everyone wants to walk away with something they can apply to their life and instantly make things better. We live in a solution-driven society. Need proof? You need go no further than your favorite blog or bookstore to see the line of content standing by to help.

And I hope this blog posts gives you a takeaway, albeit a very short but important one. Three words:

TIMELY

CONTROVERSIAL

TAKEAWAYS

Write it on a Post-It note. Get it tattooed on your arm. Do whatever it takes to keep these three items in mind with every blog post you write. Do that and you will be a better blogger, guaranteed.

Author Bio: Andrew G. Rosen is the founder and editor of Jobacle.com, a career advice blog.Â Follow him on Twitter (@jobacle) or connect on LinkedIn. He also likes to take pictures of lonely chairs.

How to Choose What to Blog About

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:04:11 +0000

It’s probably the first question every blogger has to ask themselves. It comes before writing the first post, choosing the theme or even selecting your blogging platform: What is my blog going to be about?

It’s a tough question and how you answer it will have a big impact on what your site is going to be. It’s going to affect the type of content it has, the media it uses, the audience it reaches out to, how it is promoted and much, much more.

In short, every decision you make about your blog depends on that first critical choice.

But it is also a decision that is fraught with both peril and reward. Choosing the wrong target or the wrong niche can literally kill your site before you’ve published your first post. Choose a good one and it is almost impossible for your site to not find a healthy audience.

So how do you choose your site’s topic? Though you can certainly find some good help from Google and other tools, finding a blog topic that interests you enough to write on regularly and one where your site can thrive is an almost impossible challenge.

With that in mind, here are a few tips to help you choose your blog’s topic and ensure that your site has every chance to thrive from the moment it hits the Web.

Where Good Blogs Go Wrong

When it comes to choosing a blog topic or finding a niche, there are three big mistakes that a blog can make.

Choosing a Pond too Big/Crowded: The first mistake is choosing a blog topic that is much too big for them, either in the sense it is too broad, making it about nothing at all, or a field that’s too crowded or already dominated. For example, a blog on tech startups would find it almost impossible to compete against TechCrunch.
Choosing a Pond That’s Too Small/Limited: The second is the reverse error, choosing one that it’s too small or narrow. While you can be the king of a small pond easily, it does no good if no one is interested in it, see James’ previous article on using Google for this, or if there isn’t enough material to fill your pages.
Choosing a Topic You Can’t Write On: Finally, it’s important to remember that whatever topic you choose you’ll be forced to write on several times a week well into the future. If your interest is lacking or there just isn’t enough to say, your blog will reach a dead end sooner rather than later.

When you consider that there are millions upon millions of blogs online, seemingly on every conceivable topic, finding a blog topic without at least one of these problems might seem to be an impossible challenge. However, with a little bit of creativity and research, it’s actually very easy. All you have to know is where to look and how to mine for the best blogging ideas.

How to Choose Your Blog’s Topic

The obvious place to start with your blogging topic is the things that you are passionate about. If you aren’t interested in something but choose the topic because you think it meets the other criteria, you’re either going to stop writing or simply create a bad, dispassionate blog. Either way, it’s not worth choosing a topic just because it’s “easy”.

Once you’ve narrowed the field a bit to things you can actually write about, you need to look for a topic that appears to be decidedly under-served. An area where there is a group of people who either don’t have a blog (or at least not a good one) that caters to a particular interest they have.

The easiest way to do this, when starting out, is to target a niche within a niche, within a niche.

What this means is that, when picking your topic, you first look at a broad area of interest, then choose a subsection of that interest, and then choose yet another subset of that particular interest. This way, you’ve started with an area of very broad interest and drilled down until you have a tiny section of it that, while still having an audience, is likely greatly under-served.

A quick example of this works as follows:

Start with a Broad, Already-Popular Product: Apple products
Choose a Segment of that Topic: Apple Mobile Products (iPhone, iPad, etc.)
Choose Yet Another Segment of That: Apple Mobile Products for Students (College, High School, etc.)

What you have then is a blog about Apple’s mobile products aimed at college students. It could cover, at least in theory, apps for academia, how new features may help students with the academic/social life and rumors about Apple deals aimed at college students.

All in all, if you use that formula, you’ll usually stumble upon topic ideas that others have not tried, or at least not tried well. After several searches on the above topic, I was not able to easily locate an entire blog aimed at this market, just many static resources and individual blog posts.

The idea is that A) The topic has an audience, albeit not a huge one or an aware one and B) Once you become established in it, that you can use your reputation within this niche to expand, slowly, into the higher ones, eventually talking more about mobile Apple products in general and then Apple products at large.

However, the work isn’t quite done at this point. Now you have to make sure that there’s enough to write about and that you’re interested enough to keep writing on the topic. The best way to do that is to simply write. Try to get at least a month’s worth of posts done before taking the blog live, both to make sure there’s enough interest on your part and to ensure that there’s enough of interest to keep the blog active and interesting.

Once you do that, you most likely have a good topic that you can start your blog with and one you can grow on as well, setting the stage at least for a very successful blog.

Bottom Line

To be clear, finding a good topic is no guarantee for success. First, as we’ve discussed earlier, there are a million ways in which a blog can stumble and fall, ranging from blog abandonment to legal troubles. A good topic is just a solid beginning, nothing more.

However, while a good start doesn’t mean instant success, it’s almost impossible to find success without it. In short, a good start doesn’t always create a great blog, but a bad one almost always creates a failed one.

This is why it’s important to plan your blog’s topic carefully and to choose a niche that you can step into, find an audience and grow out of.

It may seem difficult, but with a little imagination, you can probably come up with dozens of creative blogging ideas quickly and then focus your efforts on finding which is the best for you and your site.

Using Google To Find a Niche

James Dunaway — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:40:27 +0000

Researching a new niche is a tedious process, many blogs and internet marketers suggest launching a blog on a topic that is of interest to you and this is great advice. But as your portfolio of sites grow it will become harder and harder to find a niche that you are interested in.

When this happens you need to look at a wide range of niches that you may want to move into. We all have different tactics on how to find a niche, what works for one person may not work for another and often the best ideas will hit you out of the blue, if this happens all you are left to do is to dig a little deeper into the niche, find out how tough the competition is and whether or not it may be a profitable niche to enter.

I prefer to use Googles keyword tools and here at the reasons why.

The obvious reason is the search volumes and how much traffic you could expect to receive if you rank highly for a specific keyword. These figures are by no means gospel but they are probably the closest you will get to a reliable number.

Even if your root keyword proves to be too tough to tackle, there will be a long list of similar keywords that you can research. Targeting a long tail version of your root keyword can often mean you can get a foothold in that niche and once you have built your site out enough you may then be able to compete for the root keyword.

For me the most important reason to use the keyword tool is that I can get a better idea of potential earnings in that niche and whether or not it may be a lucrative niche.

I donâ€™t normally launch AdSense targeted sites, but instead I use AdSense as a backup plan, if I am promoting an affiliate offer that doesnâ€™t work I can always switch the site to AdSense. If you choose to target a keyword that has a very low CPC value and your affiliate offers donâ€™t work you may be left with a site that may be worthless.Â The CPC value can also help you to roughly gauge any potential commissions you may earn as an affiliate. As an example if you target a keyword that has a CPC value of 10 cents, this usually means that profit may be low on these goods and in turn your commissions will be low. If however you target a keywords with a CPC of $3 it will usually mean that there is a decent level of profit in these products so Merchants will usually be willing to pay more in commission.

Every marketer will have their own way of researching a niche, but it is important to try new methods and see what works for you. Some great tools like Market samurai make the job easier but in the end it will be down to your own intuition and how you feel about a specific niche and in the end you will never really know the full potential of a niche until you test it out.

This is a guest post from Neil at eMobileScan, A company with sites throughout Europe focusing on offering the latest in label printers like thezebra ZM400Â or theÂ TLP2844.

What is DNS and How to Fix Common Issues

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:08:22 +0000

As James recently pointed out, owning your domain name is crucial for establishing your identity online and building your brand.

However, with using your own domain name comes a new headache, DNS.

Though working with DNS may not be the biggest challenge that a blogger will face, especially if they register their domain from a good company, it is something that can be a nightmare when and if it goes wrong.

Simply put, without a properly working DNS, your site, your email (if hosted on your domain) and anything else you run off of your site will stop working. Even worse, DNS problems can often be very elusive and, in many cases, can take hours or even days to fully resolve.

As such, it’s well worth understanding what DNS is and what some of the more common sticking points with it are.

A little education on the front end can save you serious headaches later.

Understanding DNS

At the most basic level, DNS is an acronym that stands for Domain Name Service. DNS is an attempt to solve a problem that would make the Internet almost unusable without it.

To connect with one another, computers on the Web use IP addresses, a series of numbers that indicate where a computer is on the Web. Every computer or machine connected to the Web has one and you can see your public-facing IP address by going to What is My IP.

However, as great as IP addresses are for computers, they are hard for humans to remember so there needs to be a system for converting IP addresses into human-readable addresses, namely domains.

What the DNS system does is bridge this gap by converting domains into IP addresses. Basically saying that thedomainyouwant.com = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This lets you remember or bookmark the domain for a site and rest assured that your computer will be able to get the site’s IP address and access it, even if the site moves to another server.

The system works through DNS servers, which are essentially giant directories of domains and their IP addresses. The Internet has a series of root DNS servers but most ISPs, in order to make the process faster and reduce the load on the root servers, have their own DNS servers that mirror what’s on the root server.

Whenever you register a domain or make a change to your DNS settings on your domain, your registrar updates your DNS information with the root servers. That change then propogates out to the other servers, usually over the course of several hours.

Problems, however, arise when this DNS information is incorrect. For example, if your domain points to an incorrect IP address. This can direct your visitors to the wrong site or, in many cases, to no site at all.

Since your DNS settings also detail how your mail is handled, you can find that you don’t get your mail and that your outgoing mail never arrives. Likewise, anything else you do with your domain will break.

This makes it crucial that you understand how DNS works and be able to fix troubles when and if they arise.

Common DNS Issues With You May Face

Most hosts, upon signing up, will present you with a pair of nameservers you should provide your registrar. By doing this, you are instructing the root DNS servers to check those nameservers, which are under your host’s control, for all of the DNS information on your domain.

This is done because hosts may have to routinely move your site to a new IP address (unless your site has a static one) and it is much easier to use a nameserver than to have to update your registrar’s DNS settings every time they need to make a move. This also improves reliability as it, at least potentially, puts your DNS information in mulitple locations so, if one goes down, your site stays online without trouble.

However, this also means that most of the DNS changes you’ll be making will be taking place on your host’s side, usually in the control panel.

For most sites, setting up the nameservers is enough as your host will automatically configure the DNS on their side to point to the correct server. So the first step is to follow your host’s configuration steps carefully and, for the most part, problems will be avoided.

That being said, there are still some tips and tricks you need to know to keep your site running smoothly.

Learn How to Move Hosts: If you need to move to a new host, you need to learn how to do so without downtime. First, setup the new account and change your local DNS settings, meaning on your computer, to use the new site even as the Web sees the old one. Then, after you set up the new server you can change your nameservers and cancel your old account after a few days.
Configure Email: If you don’t intend to use your domain as your email address, there’s no worry. Similarly, if you want to just use IMAP or POP3 on your server, there probably isn’t much to set up as it is already configured. However, if you want to outsource your email, as with Google Apps, it can be tricky. Setting this up is usually easy, just adding MX records in your control panel, but can be intimidating if you haven’t done it before.
Setting Up Custom Nameservers: Setting up custom nameservers is probably the most difficult semi-common DNS-related task. If you want to use your domain as a nameserver, for example if you use a VPS that offers it, you can do so but ONLY if your registrar supports it. If your registrar doesn’t, your site will break to many, if not most, of your visitors.

All in all though, by far the most common DNS issue is the first item, moving to a new host. However, if you do it properly and don’t terminate the old account too soon, you likely won’t have any major problems.

If you have no idea what to do, most likely your new host has a setup or transition team that can help you.

Bottom Line

The good news is that, while DNS problems can be difficult to resolve and devastating when they happen, for most bloggers they are fairly rare. If you run a straightforward site on a basic host, DNS only really becomes an issue when you need to make some kind of change to your site, such as moving it to a new host, changing email providers, etc.

Still, without DNS your site wouldn’t work and if something goes wrong with your configuration it will go completely dark. As such, it’s an important technology to understand and an important tool to be able to troubleshoot.

After all, the last thing you want in addition to a DNS problem is being helpless in the face of it.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Create or Find Your Blog’s Identity

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:59:49 +0000

Very quickly, if I visit your blog, will it stand out and be memorable to me? Will it separate itself from any of the sixty blogs created in the last minute? What about any of the more than 86,000 that will be created today? What about the more than half a million created this week?

If your blog is going to succeed, it has to stand out and be something other than “Just another WordPress (or other blogging system) blog”. Doing that, however, isn’t very easy not because it’s difficult to give your site a custom identity but because, with so many other sites out there, it can take a lot of work to give your site something that no one, or almost no one else, has.

However, if you don’t do it, you risk your good work and your energy going to waste, getting lost in the endless and faceless crowd that is 99% of all blogs created. For your site to succeed, it must have a “face” and a unique presence, something you’re not going to get without rolling up your sleeves and getting a little bit dirty with your theme, logo and your domain.

It might be intimidating if you’ve never done it before, but it isn’t half as scary as having millions of twins out there, ready to take your blogging identity in a heartbeat by sheer accident alone.

The Pitfall

When it comes to blogging, standing out from the crowd is both one of the most important and one of the most difficult things you have to do. There are many elements to this, including your logo, your theme and your domain, among others.

We’ve talked previously about why you can’t ignore blog design and why you should always own your own domain, and, while these things are individually true, they are merely parts of the larger challenge, creating a blogging identity.

A blogging identity is how your entire site comes together and how the reader feels about the blog as a whole. For example, a person’s identity consists of elements such as their physical appearance, their clothes, their job, their actions, how they talk and what they like to do for fun, you blogging identity has many, if not most, of the same variables.

However, unlike a person, who has an entire lifetime to develop and grow a unique identity, a blog only has a few weeks to find theirs, or at least their initial identity. Without planning in advance, certain elements of your blog’s identity will look stock and fake, causing areas that aren’t to appear the same.

So, before you ever first put words on the screen, you have to pause and take a moment not just to look at the various elements that will make up your online brand, but at how they fit together and whether or not the resulting site will be unique enough to leave the pack behind.

How to Avoid it

Piecing together your blog’s identity requires taking a look at many of your site’s variables and seeing both if and how they work together to create something unique. Though the list of elements is, quite literally, too long for any one article, here are some of the key ones that you need to focus on.

Niche: What market is your blog serving, who should read your blog and why yours versus someone else’s? Finding a unique niche for your blog is a great start to having a unique identity.
Content Style: If you’re writing a traditional blog, what is your writing style? Is it informal and friendly or professional and journalistic? If you are doing a video blog or a podcast is your content professionally-produced or more off the cuff?
Appearance: Does your site have a unique theme and does it match/work with the content that it contains? A unique theme that clashes with your content can harm your site more than help.
Logo: Your logo is your business card on the Web, would I recognize it if I saw it again and does it convey a message on what your site is about?
Your Domain: Is your domain unique enough to stand out but easily remembered and spelled? Do any other sites have a domain too close to yours? Having a great domain not only makes your site look more professional, but makes it easier for others to share, especially offline.

However, more important, or at least as important, as each of these items individually is how they work together. These elements, among others, combine to give your reader a feeling and an experience as they read your site. That complete experience is what truly matters to the reader and its what determines if they remember your site and if they come back.

This makes it important not just to look at the elements one at a time, but to also look at them in total. One easy way to do that is to pretend that your site is a person and ask yourself what kind of human it should be. Do you want it to be a wacky sitcom neighbor? A serious professor? A glamorous movie star? Or a nerdy walking encyclopedia?

Then, when you have that vision, you can start picturing how the site should look, sound and feel in order to best meet that expectation. This, in turn, is how you get past details such as what font to use in your theme and start looking at how it all is supposed to work together, something that is much more compelling to your readers.

After all, no one is going to remember if you use Arial or Georgia for the font in your posts, but they will remember if the fonts chosen clash with the words written or the subject of the site, creating a distraction. On the other hand, your readers will also remember if it fits together perfectly and feels like a complete package that was well put together creating a natural experience that they have not seen elsewhere.

The first will drive your visitors away, the second, will keep them consistently coming back for more.

Bottom Line

Tying your site’s identity together is easily one of the most difficult things to do as a blogger. Creating an identity that combines all of the elements of your site while providing a unique, cohesive experience is nearly impossible to do but it’s what separates the good blogs from the great ones.

Unfortunately, in this area, there are no shortcuts to success and, sometimes, a lot of what will become your identity has to come out later as you write and work on your blog. Simply put, blogs change direction and it’s best to work with those shifts and not fight them. However, this does mean you may not have a full understanding of what your blog wants and needs to be until months or even years into working on it.

That being said, you should always be thinking about the direction you want your blog to take and how it fits within your site’s identity. If you can maintain cohesion and originality as your blog finds its way, you’ll likely find that your site does far more than do well, it begins to thrive.

After all, while there may be sixty new blogs created every second, almost none of them will stand out or have anything truly unique about them. If you can avoid that pitfall and give your readers a truly unique experience, you’ll already be well ahead of over 99% of the blogs on the Web right now.

Blogging Pitfalls: Blogging and the Cult of Personality

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 25 May 2011 13:38:28 +0000

Like any industry or competitive environment, blogging has its share of superstars and top-tier performers. They are the names every blogger knows and everyone who has installed a copy of WordPress wants to be like.

But while it’s fine and great to have heroes, goals and even people you want to emulate, many of these superstar bloggers have built up a cult of personality around themselves, including empires of ebooks, guides, personal coaching and much, much more.

The promise of these guides is that, often for a price, you can be more like them and learn their system and their approach. The pitches often border on infomercial territory and promise outrageous results for almost no effort and time. However, even the more down to earth systems come with problems and concerns.

As a blogger, it’s easy to get sucked into this cult of personality as the lure of making large amounts of money and building a huge fan base are tempting to just about anyone. But it is a dangerous path to follow and a mistake you most likely can’t afford to make.

The Pitfall

The obvious problem with nearly all of these systems is that very few bloggers, including those who follow the systems to the letter, have anything near the kind of success of their founders. If every blogger could achieve that kind of success, then the results of the superstar blogger would be merely average and, thus, no one would be interested in learning how they blog.

In that regard, most of these systems, articles and ebooks are a lot like diet claims and get-rich-quick schemes, a few shining successes but mostly false promises. Those promises might not be deliberately false, but mathematically there is just no way the results obtained by the leader could be typical.

However, even worse than the time and possible money wasted on chasing the cult of personality is the real risk of missing out on your personal method of success.

The simple truth is that no other blogger holds the key to how your blog can and will succeed. They might be able to help with elements, but every blogger, every blog and even every blog entry is different in what it needs to do well.

Trusting someone blindly to guide you through the murky waters of growing your site is a virtually guaranteed way to sink your creation and run it into a dead end.

In short, if you want your site to succeed, you have to find your own way, not try to follow someone else’s and hope for the best.

How to Avoid it

As a blogger, you have to accept that there is no “one true path” to success. Though the system used by person X or Y may lead you to bigger and better things, it probably won’t. With so many options and opportunities ou there, limiting yourself to one approach just because it worked well for someone else doesn’t make any sense.

Instead, you are much better off carving your own path. This may mean doing something old or trying something altogether new. But it will definitely involve a good deal of trial and error and being willing to abandon things that aren’t working for you.

in short, you need to be prepared to honestly evaluate your efforts, find out what is going well what isn’t and then cut out or tweak the areas that aren’t going as hoped. You should never keep doing something just because it worked for some other famous blogger or it’s a part of the system you’re following.

This isn’t to say that you can’t or shouldn’t learn from the success (and failure) or others. Those who came before you can be a very valuable guide but you should always take the information with a grain of salt and, when implementing such strategies, keep an eye on the data to back up and support the claims of success.

With that in mind, here are a few tips when trying to learn from the lessons of others to avoid taking in bad advice.

Define Your Blogging Goals: Don’t let others dictate to you what will make your blog successful. You need to decide what your objectives are and not be swept up by the success others had with their sites.
Be Wary of Claims: If a claim sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Claims that something can triple your traffic or double your revenue without work or overnight are usually just sensationalist claims designed to get clicks or sales.
Look For Bloggers Like You: If you’re a niche blogger, taking hints from a more mainstream site may not be wise. Find bloggers in a similar position to you and learn from their growth as it may more closely mirror a good path for you.
Be Careful With Your Credit Card: Most “secret guides” aren’t that secret and a lot of the paid systems and courses are little more than staple blogging tips that, while solid advice, are hardly unique. There are very few true secrets when it comes to building a successful blog and even fewer worth paying large sums of money for.
Don’t Fear Failure: If you fear failure and dead ends, then you find yourself trying to emulate others successes. However, if you don’t fear failure, you’re free to try your own ideas and abandon them when they don’t work without feeling hurt. Remember, even good ideas can fail miserably.

All in all, blog success is not about emulating what others did, but carving your own path to your own goals. It’s not an easy task by any stretch and there’s not neat roadmap or system to get you there. But if you make it work, you’ll be much happier and, most likely, much more successful when you do reach your goals.

Bottom Line

The Internet has a tendency to make people seem larger than life and to hide the hard work from success stories. When we’re all faceless entities and domain names, it’s easy to lose sight of the hours of toil that goes into a site. Furthermore, when we are only seeing the sites that successfully got our attention, we can easily overlook the dead ends and failures that took them to their more successful strategy.

However, blogging is very much a human endeavor. It’s one fraught with many pitfalls, including the ones we’ve covered here, hard work and more than a few blunders. There are no sure-fire paths to success and no guaranteed ways to make a fortune.

The quicker we all realize that and get away from the cult of personality that seems to have grown around certain bloggers, the quicker we can all find our personal success.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Engage Your Readers

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:22:37 +0000

Last week, we talked about the difficulties and the pitfalls around building and maintaining trust with your readers online. We talked about why it is important to build trust, how difficult that is and how easily it can be squandered.

However, trust is only one half of the process for building the best audience possible. Though having readers that trust you is key for success, if those readers aren’t engaged and participating in your site, they aren’t providing much more than blips on your Google Analytics.

For most bloggers, the end goal isn’t just to get their readers to trust them, but to get them involved somehow. Whether it’s to have them to support a cause, provide feedback, spread the word about the site or even become customers, trust is only step one.

So how do you take a reader who trusts your site and your expertise to take things to the next level? There are many ways to do that but here are a few keys to making it happen.

The Pitfall

As we discussed in the previous post, it takes a great deal of time, energy and work to build trust with your audience and even more to maintain it. Trust online is both incredibly rare and incredibly valuable. However, it is worthless unless that trust encourages readers to take some kind of action.

Most bloggers don’t blog simply to build an audience. While having lots of traffic is great, most bloggers want comments, feedback, their links to be shared and other behavior that requires their readers to not just trust the content, but want to engage with it.

The problem is that trust, though valuable, is a fairly passive activity. People don’t necessarily engage with content and sites that they trust, even if they visit them regularly. However, usually, for a blogger to meet their goals or to grow their sites, their readers have to somehow get more actively involved, taking initiative and doing things that help grow the site.

The trick, however, is to find ways to turn those who trust your site and enjoy it, but are passive about their interest, and turn them into customers, active community members or whatever your site’s goal is. That, in turn, requires engaging your readers and it is by no means a simple task.

How to Avoid it

The secret to avoid wasting earned trust is to try and engage your readers actively as you are building your relationship with them. The goal is to work hard to build a good rapport with them and, when you’ve earned their trust give them a way to say thank you. Whether it’s a comment, a tweet or an email, many readers are just looking for a way to reward your effort and will do so.

The problem is that many readers feel that they aren’t given anything to do, that the site is just a wall of text and there isn’t anything they can do beyond read and move on.

To fix this, you have to be constantly trying to engage your readers and it’s a difficult task to say the least. Try too hard and you could actually drive them away, thus completely ruining the trust you earned. Don’t try hard enough or try the wrong ways and your efforts might go unnoticed.

With that in mind, here are a few tips to engage your readers in a productive way that might actually get them to take action:

Ask Questions: As per the previous column, part of being an expert means admitting what you don’t know. Take this as an opportunity to ask your readers for their thoughts, opinions or information. People have a very hard time ignoring a direct question, especially one that interests them, so this can be an easy way to interact with readers and get them involved.
Write Incomplete Articles: If you want your readers to ask questions or leave comments, they aren’t going to do so if your articles tie up all loose ends. Leaving an article intentionally incomplete, as per a suggestion by Liz Strauss, opens the door to conversation.
Use Share Buttons: Even if no one ever uses your Facebook and Twitter buttons, their presence will remind readers that they can share your stories on these services and let them know that you would appreciate them doing so. However, it’s important to use these buttons wisely, visible enough to be a reminder but not overwhelming.
Ask for What You Want: If you want people to check out your services page or to take action on a certain cause, sometimes simply asking for what you want directly, without being pushy, is the best approach. Careful and selective advertising can be very effective in having your readers take additional action.
Don’t Forget Your RSS Readers: Since many of your most loyal readers will get your site solely via RSS (either in an RSS reader or via Email) it’s important not to forget them. Make sure to include any calls to action in your posts themselves, or at least in the RSS feed.

All in all though, these are just a handful of tips and there are many, many other ways you can engage your readers further.

The main thing, however, is that it is important to experiment with new ideas because a solution that works well on one site with one set of readers may not work well on another. No two sites or communities are the same in this regard.

On that note, if you have found a method that works very well for you, definitely leave a comment with it below. There is always room for more ideas.

Bottom Line

Engaging readers is not an easy task and there is no magical formula to make it happen. The one thing that it definitely does require is effort and the willingness to take a few risks.

On that note though, be careful that your efforts to engage readers don’t accidentally ruin the trust that you’ve built with them. That would be like trying to build a house in a way that destroys the foundation.

Be smart about engaging your readers and give them the chance to do what they probably want to do already, support your site. You’ll likely be surprised how many want to do just that.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Build and Maintain Trust

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:52:15 +0000

Trust is easily the most valuable and most fragile of all the commodities a blogger has to have to be successful.

However, making complete strangers trust you and count on you is no simple task, especially when they will most likely never meet you. It can require years of tireless, consistent work, the ability to repeatedly prove that you are capable of delivering on what you promise and constantly striving to build a reputation for high quality work.

But for all of the work required to build trust, it can be lost in the blink of an eye. One breach of that trust, no matter how small, can set you back months, even years in terms of trust and some incidents can even overshadow your entire history, becoming damaging “buts” to an otherwise stellar reputation.

Learning how to build and keep trust is critical for every blogger. If your readers are going to let you in as part of their lives, no matter how small of a part that is, they need to know what role you’re going to fulfill and that you will do it well. Trust is often what separates the one-off or casual reader from the avid fan, trust is how you build inbound links and trust is how you grow your site.

Fortunately, building and managing trust is easier than many make it out to be, but it isn’t quite as simple as just doing quality work either. To build and keep trust, there are steps you have to take to ensure that others are receptive to your work and will notice your efforts, thus ensuring that your hard work doesn’t go to waste.

The Pitfall

Trust is something that is gained with months of tireless posting and work, but can be lost in a matter of minutes with one poorly-handled mistake or one act of dishonesty.

In short, with blogging one misstep can, quite literally erase months, even years of high-quality work. A reputation is slow to be built, but quick to be blemished and there is no avoiding that reality.

But as fragile as trust is, it is at least equally valuable. Trust is the very foundation upon which a reader base is built upon and it is what keeps people coming back to your site, causes them to tell others about it and even link to it from their sites. A good reputation even impacts casual readers or newcomers, encouraging them to link to your content when they are interested in it and to trust your content as reliable, even if they don’t visit it regularly.

In short, the more trust you’re able to build, the more likely your readers will come back, the more they will spread the word about your site and, over time, the better it will do in the search engines for relevant terms as inbound links grow.

This makes trust absolutely essential to build and maintain, but it’s not going to be easy to do and the best time to start thinking about these issues is day one. However, if you haven’t been pondering these issues, there’s also no time like the present to get started.

How to Avoid It

There’s no simple key to building and maintaining trust. The vast majority of the process is simply a matter of doing consistent, high-quality work over a long period of time. The better the content you create and the more regularly you provide it, the more people will trust in your ability to keep providing it in the future.

Still, there are several key steps that bloggers can and should take to ensure that their hard work has the maximum possible effect and to minimize the potential damage and slip up or problem can cause.

Here are a few such things any blogger can do today:

Use a Professional Theme: First impressions do matter. If your site has an unprofessional theme, you start out with a negative amount of trust with every visitor and have to claw your way back to zero with good content. Spend the time and/or money to create a good, professional theme and your visitors will respect you more right off the bat.
Be Human: People don’t trust websites, they trust other people. So, try to make yourself as human as possible. Include a bio, a photo and just enough personal information to let people know that you are a real, live person and not just a faceless site.
Learn to Say “I Don’t Know”: Admitting you don’t know something publicly can be the hardest thing a blogger has to do, especially if they are trying to position themselves as an expert. However, admitting the limits of what you do and do not know increases trust in the things you do say. We all have limitations so it is best to be honest about them.
Interact With Your Audience: People trust others that they “know” and the best way to have people know you online is engage with them. Reply to comments, answer emails and encourage participation in your site. Once people have interacted with you, they are much more likely to invest in you emotionally and trust you moving forward.
Make Your Case: There’s a fine line between being a braggart and explaining why people should trust you. Be sure to talk about your accomplishments, list any mentions you’ve gotten in the press and anything else that might show you to be an expert or otherwise trustworthy. Even small awards can be a big deal for newcomers looking for a reason to believe in you.

For additional tips, check out Andrew Rosen’s article last year about how to build trust on your site.

However, all these steps are, at the end of the day, are boosts to your trust and not magic tools for creating it out of thin air. In short, they are meaningless without putting in the work and effort to consistently produce high quality content and the knowledge to handle mistakes well.

In the end, it’s the day to day grind, more than anything, that builds trust and generates respect, even if it is the least sexy or interesting part of the process.

Bottom Line

On the Web, trust is difficult to earn, critical to have and easy to lose all at the same time. If you run a blog and you want it to grow, you need to focus of building and sustaining trust.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be easy and it will require a lot of hard work, but if you take steps to nurture your site’s reputation and consistently do good work, you’ll likely find that the trust flows naturally.

After all, the best trust is the kind that’s earned organically, not the kind that’s won over with slick marketing copy or grandiose promises. Earned trust is the only kind with any staying power, that can weather small storms and even absence.

In short, people don’t forget when you earn their trust, as fragile as that trust still is, but you still have to set your site up to make your readers receptive to giving you a chance.

But if you do that, put in the time and produce the content they want, your readers will trust you and that is something no amount of advertising can buy.

The Ultimate Guide To Blog Promotion

James Dunaway — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:00:41 +0000

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, 3 new blogs will have come into existence. There can be no doubt that the world wide web in general, and social media sites in particular, are becoming more crowded and more competitive every second.Â The result?Â Standing out from the crowd is getting harder and harder.

Social media marketing is both necessary and extremely challenging. Blogs are an integral part of SEM, but simply building one isn’t enough. You need to get people to read what you write!

That being said, there are myriad resources that have become available which can help you promote and measure the success of your blog. Below you will find a definitive guide to some of the best resources online.

Overview of Blog Promotion

Promoting Your Blog

Some sweet, simple and easily actionable tips for blog promotion from Google itself, although we also love their disclaimer: “This is in no way a science or guarantee; it’s simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success”. If you know little to nothing about blog promotion, it’s a good place to get an idea of the basics without getting overwhelmed.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

SEOmoz offers some great, detailed advice for bloggers who want not just more traffic but better, more targeted traffic. There’s a lot here to help diagnose why your blog might be fledgling, and what to do to remedy the situation.

Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do

If you know nothing about branding, heed the advice of power blogger Leo Babauta, who shows you how to figure out what your readership is thinking and use your insights to enhance the core identity of your blog.

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Blogging

Several blog marketing rules that worked well a few years ago no longer apply, while numerous new ones have cropped up. You have free platforms and social media at your disposal, but you’re also competing with online publications that have more resources and established traffic. Learn more about how blogging has changed and what lies ahead.

How I’d Promote My Blog If I Were Starting Out Again

Darren Rowse has found great success in blogging and promotion, so it’s worth finding out what he’d do differently based on his experiences and lessons.

Launching a Blog Successfully

10 Things to Do Before Launching Your Blog

To give your blog its best shot at success, cover your bases, make important decisions and strategize both content and promotion before the launch.

101 Ways to Promote a New Blog

Consult this check list of popular blog promotion ideas that include everything from blog networking to paid advertising.

14 Attention-Grabbing Tactics for Launching a New Business Blog

Move beyond the obvious with this resource which shares both the essentials and the ‘extras’ of blog promotion. The latter is where the competitive advantage lies.

A 3-Step Blueprint for a Brilliant Blog Launch

Finding blog success doesn’t have to be a slow and lonely process. Start strong with this blue-print; create content, set up your network and finally launch an attractive, already-thriving blog.

10 Ways to Launch a New Blog with a ‘Bang’

A list of classic promotional techniques applied to launching a new blog, highlighting the importance of being creative and setting yourself apart right from the get-go.

How to Get 6,312 Subscribers to Your Business Blog in One Day

Not just in one day; the very first day! Business blogs have assets and resources that can give them an immediate and ongoing edge over the competition. Learn how to start leveraging your data and content to gain followers in social media.

What it Takes to Start a Successful Blog

Several things are important when it comes to priming a new blog for success. Design, social networking, identity and adaptability are some of the things that set some blogs apart from the outset, while others might take longer to learn those same lessons.

Creating Popular Content

The 10-Step Content Strategy

Go from blogging newbie to content strategist in 10 steps, starting with figuring out what you need and finally coming up with a blogging plan you can commit to.

How to Write a Better Weblog

Writing advice from one of the most well-respected web magazines. It doesn’t claim to teach you to become a great writer, but it can definitely help you avoid some common unforced errors of blog writing.

The Three-Step Guide to Getting More Traffic by Writing Less

You don’t have to write a post every day or even every other day in order to succeed — in fact, Copyblogger recommends once a week. Learn how writing occasionally as a guest blogger for others can be more profitable than writing a lot on your own blog, among other content-based promotional strategies.

Use These 10 Tips to Write Your Most Popular Post Ever

All posts on your blog are not created equal. It’s up to you to give some posts extra effort and turn out your best work. These tips can help spice up your blogging routine.

How to Create Viral Content (The Key Element behind Every Successful Blog)

Viper Chill makes the case that viral content (content that becomes popular on social media networks) is what sets successful blogs apart from the rest. Learn, with examples, what makes for a blog post that has all the right elements — headlines, introduction, main content and summary — to go viral.

Top 6 Ideas for Incredible Viral Content

Social media expert Tamar Weinberg is not the only one who believes that viral content is king, but she’s definitely one of the most qualified people to tell you what makes content go viral, and how to use those insights to give your own content a facelift.

5 Effective Linkbait and Link Generation Strategies

Linkbait is content designed to get back links on blogs and social media web sites. Back links not only bring in more traffic but also tell search engines that your blog is valuable to others and worth showing in the top results. Learn some tried-and-tested strategies to create content that succeeds on social media networks and gets tons of back links.

Using Social Media Networks

233 Social Networking Sites for Marketing Your Blog

Submitting your posts to common, general-interest networking sites like Facebook and StumbleUpon isn’t enough to give your blog an edge. Consult this super list of networking sites, organized by niches, to know where you can find a more targeted community for your topic, be it parenting, pets or comics.

9 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

Social media and communications expert Chris Brogan offers insights into the blog promoting strategies that work best and are worth applying to every post you publish.

How-to: Write Effectively for Twitter & the Social Web

To promote your content on the social web, consult IIG’s comprehensive list of resources on the subject, which covers everything from how people read online to writing a great Twitter headline.

Mastering Shameless Blog Promotion

Learn how people spend their time on social media sites and what kind of “shameless” promotion techniques can be geared to those habits.

How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more

Find out how a relative newbie got the attention and recommendation of power bloggers and catapulted his blog to the next level.

How to Promote Your Blog Using Facebook Pages

Step-by-step instructions for creating a Facebook feed for your blog and publicizing your page on your blog.

Search Engine Marketing for Blogs

20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To

A list of the top blog directories that will not only get you targeted traffic but also valuable back links and more search engine props.

SEO Tips for your Blog

A guide to basic on-page SEO techniques for blogs — meta tags, keywords, sitemaps and robots.txt.

4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

In addition to giving great content to your readers, you need to make it easy for search engines to understand what it’s about. Use these four tips to get the most SEO benefits out of every post.

How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level with SEO

If your blog has a lot of content already, your analytic tools can reveal a lot about what your blog is good at. Build on its successes by optimizing old pages and creating content around the keywords that are already working well for you.

More Blog Promotion Tips

How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies

Some promotion techniques are great, some are inefficient and some are downright broken, doing more harm than good — so knowing what to avoid is as important as knowing what to do.

Guest Blogging: Tips, Advice, and Best Practices

Guest blogging can be a great way to gain exposure on other blogs and get targeted traffic, but it’s also one of the more challenging ways of promoting yourself. Keep these tips and best practices in mind as you pitch your idea and write a quality guest post.

8 Prime Locations to Promote Your Blogâ€™s RSS Feed â€“ What Are You Missing?

RSS makes it Really Simple for readers to keep up with your content, and it’s a significant indicator of your blog’s value to readers. Beyond just having a feed link, there are a number of things you can do to promote your RSS feed, from submitting it for auto discovery to having effective calls-to-action.

Blog Metrics and Tools

Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations for Measuring Your Success

As author Avinash Kaushik notes right at the beginning: “blogs are not websites.” They compete and perform differently than other web sites, and the metrics used for measuring blog success are accordingly unique to blogs. Kaushik further breaks those metrics down by type of blog: Diary, personal blog and business blog.

Meaningful Metrics for B2B blogging

The metrics that apply to regular blogs don’t necessarily apply to business blogs. Other types of questions are more important for business bloggers than for the rest — find out which ones.

Blog Metrics and Analytics

A conversation between WordPress expert Joost de Valk and analytics expert Avinash Kaushik on the relative merits of various blog metrics and what they use to track and measure their own blogs.

20 Blog Analytics Tools

A list of useful resources and tools that blogs can use to track their effectiveness, conversion rates and other metrics.

Guest Bio: Seth Persily is the President of Penn Multimedia in Atlanta, GA. He also leads the online marketing department for Premiere Tree Services.

How to Write Link Bait Articles

James Dunaway — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:00:22 +0000

Good content still sells and is one of the most effective ways to attract valuable links to your site. It is imperative to understand that most people venture into the cyber world looking for information on a plethora of topics, so when you offer informative articles not only do you please your visitors and get more link backs but also you establish a reputation for yourself as a niche expert. When writing link bait articles, it is essential to remember that while what you write is important, how you write it will add chutzpah to your content. So, here are some tips on how to write link bait articles that will keep your readers and the other webmasters coming back for more.

What should you do?

Spice up your articles: A very important contention when writing link bait articles is that most of the stuff that pen will already have found its way on the internet, so you need to ask yourself the crucial question, how can you make your writing stand out?

There are three key elements to remember when writing a memorable article that others will reference in their own writing…

* Make it entertaining
* Use lists if possible because they makes things simpler and easy to understand
* Offer detailed information.

As a matter of fact, the more in depth the article, the better will be its chances of being used by other webmasters and writers.

Originality is exciting: The term originality has garnered a new meaning when it comes to online information, given the sheer amount of data available in the cyberworld. So, you can be sure that you will need to work really hard to ensure that you offer something original and exclusive. If you feel that the Internet abounds in information on the niche, try to use a unique effort; for instance, you could add links to a lot of useful tools and resources in your own article. You would be surprised at how many people would be happy to reference your article just to get to the resources and tools all mentioned in one place. You will find that putting a fair amount of effort into research will quickly get you an unexpected fan following with several regular readers.

Style is still important: Presentation is the key to an attractive article; after all, few people would like to rack their brains with information presented in half a dozen fonts of varying sizes and colors. So, aesthetic appeal does matter even when it comes to your articles; choose something that is nice and easy on the eyes, some time tested tips include:

* Using pictures to break up a long article
* Throwing in a video or two if possible
* Using H1, H2 tags
* Incorporating lists where applicable
* Changing the color of the header tags from the text of the article.

Try not to be lazy with the formatting of your article because it is a sure fire way of turning off your readers.

Does size really make a difference? Most individuals who are trying to write an impressive link bait article ponder over the appropriate size. After all, it is only natural to wonder about what would be just the right word count that will inform without boring and seeming painfully lengthy.

Although there is no hard and fast rule about the size of an article, ensure that the information is offered in a chronological order and that there are no repetitions. Also, make sure that you do not include fluff or redundant phrases which needlessly stretch the work.

Research and research some more: There are simply no easy ways to write an article that do not involve the mandatory research. To reiterate the point made above, a well researched article is a reader magnet that can get you scores of links just because its so good, without any fanfare involved in the equation.

Titles: Much like the trailer of a movie, your title will make or break the chances of your article. For instance, would you really be interested in reading an article titled “Gardening Tips or Gardening Made Easy”? Are they simply not too clichÃ©d? However, you will certainly sit up and take notice if the title reads “10 ways to double your gardening yield” or “Read This and Save Your Garden Today!”.

Live up to your promise: Since a catchy title entices your audience into reading what comes after, it is akin to a promise and the last thing you want to do is disappoint your readers by offering fluff. So, make sure that if the title grabs the attention of your readers, the body of the article is full of valuable information. After all, your readers have chosen to spend their valuable time reading your work, so you need to give them something that can be taken back home.

Give credit: Not all readers will be able to spot blatant instance of plagiarism; however, the search engine crawlers will certainly not be thrilled. If you want to use the ideas of a writer, ensure that you give him/her proper credit for their work.

Deep-linking: There is certainly no dearth of unscrupulous elements lurking online who will have no qualms about republishing your work verbatim. By deep linking into your existing archive of articles, you can ensure that you at least get some back links for your efforts.

Link back: You should also link back from the future articles that you write. Although you may have to vary the anchor text, using the title of the bait or relevant keywords, back linking will help your site to cement its position as an authority on the subject.

Why not use social media marketing: Social media marketing is a fantastic way to promote your link bait articles. Using your work on social news and bookmarking sites will help you to garner the attention that you need. However, you need to understand that many sites do not appreciate authors posting their own work, so you will need to have a bunch of social media friends who can oblige you.

Finally, it is crucial to understand that a thick skin will not get you anywhere in the world of link baiting. To put it simply, there will be times when people will appreciate your work and there will be some who will hate it and will not hesitate to let you know about how they feel through their comments. It is imperative to look at every comment as a feedback and to let the truly nasty ones slide over without creating a dent in your ego. Just remember that while it is not possible to please everybody in life as long as you get most of them, the effort has been well worth your time and hard work.

Visit my web marketing blog for more traffic generation tips. In Addition to insightful tutorials you can find there unbiased reviews of best rated article submission software.

Blogging Pitfalls: Your Content, Someone Else’s Site

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:38:23 +0000

If you blog long enough, it is bound to happen to you, even if you aren’t aware. Someone will take your content and republish it on their site, sometimes with a link, sometimes without, sometimes the full work, sometimes just a snippet. There are a million ways your content can appear on other sites, some ways legitimately and other ways less so, but they are all interesting lessons in how your readers interact with your work and, in some cases, problems you have to address.

Because, while most content reuse is fairly harmless. Some uses, especially by plagiarists and spammers, can have a negative impact on your site. This makes it important to know both how to track your content, what your rights are regarding your work, when is a good idea to step in and, most importantly, what you can do if you find that you need to.

Unfortunately, the issues are far more complex than what we can discuss in a single column, but we can definitely give a good overview of the situation and what you can expect.

The Pitfall

The pitfall here is fairly simple, people are going to want to use your content on their sites. Some will have noble intentions, such as quoting your content in a response or linking to it to let their readers know about it. Others, however, will have less-than-pure motives, including spamming the search engines in an attempt to gain a higher ranking and to plagiarize your work to take credit for it.

Most of the time even the most nefarious use is fairly harmless and goes unnoticed. However, there are times that a site will either be successful in using another’s content to game the search engines or manage to convince a large number of people that they are the author of a work.

Smaller sites and newer sites are especially vulnerable to these issues. Since they don’t have the trust with Google or a large reader base, it is trivial for other sites to swoop in and replace the original. Spammers, who often have large link farm networks, can often times take the content from new sites and outrank them for unique terms and can be very difficult to unseat later.

This can be a major drag on the growth of a new site, especially one that is in a spam-friendly niche. However, too few bloggers are aware of these problems when they arise and when they are aware aren’t certain what they can or should do.

Fortunately, most of these cases can be easily prevented or resolved, if a blogger is willing to give some thought to how they want their content to be used and are willing to enforce their rules.

How to Avoid It

On my main site, Plagiarism Today, I talk at great length about content misuse issues and what bloggers/webmasters can do to prevent, reduce or stop it. However, much of the process comes down to seven steps that can to be repeated for every site:

License Your Work: Determine what conditions you want your work to be used under and mark it accordingly. If you are comfortable with some level of reuse, consider getting a Creative Commons license to clearly explain your terms. If you are not comfortable with any reuse, be sure to add a copyright footer that includes the year, the Â© symbol and “All Rights Reserved”. Though the latter is not needed under the law, it helps prevent confusion.
Track Your Content: For your blog’s main content, use FairShare to monitor where it is being used on the Web. For content that is outside of your RSS feed, consider using Google Alerts with several key phrases from your work. Both will notify you automatically when duplicates of your content appear online and both are free services.
Contact the Site Admins: If you find that your work is being misused, contact the site admin and ask that they stop. This is known as a “cease and desist” demand and can take a variety of forms and tones. These requests can be threatening and professional or friendly and polite, the choice is yours based on your approach and the case itself. Sometimes you are forced to skip this step, as with spam sites.
Notify the Host: If the site is within the U.S. or another nation with a notice and takedown system, contact the host of the site to have it removed. You can find who the host of a site is using WhoIsHostingThis or Domain Tools. When sending a notice to a U.S.-based host, you’ll need a to file a DMCA takedown notice.
Notify the Advertisers: If the site has advertisers, consider notifying them about the infringement if you believe it to be intentional. Most major ad networks will discontinue accounts of those who infringe copyright.
Notify the Search Engines: If contacting the host doesn’t get results or is not practical, consider filing a DMCA takedown notice with Google and the other search engines to have the content removed from there. At the very least, you will not be competing with your own work.
Consider a Lawsuit: Though in most cases of online content misuse, a lawsuit is neither a practical nor an adviseable step, if all else fails, it may be worth considering if the case you are dealing with may be the exception to the rule.

If you take these steps, you’ll likely find that the amount of content misuse you’re dealing with is kept to a minimum and you are able to handle any incidents that do arise. Though it is by no means a perfect system, it is one that is easy for bloggers to follow and doesn’t require any money to complete.

In short, it is meant to be a simple, effective and free way to protect, monitor and enforce your content on the Web.

Bottom Line

All in all, protecting your content from misuse is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t take a great deal of time and energy. If you’re doing everything correctly and focusing on the important cases, it won’t be a distraction from your regular blogging efforts.

However, this means being smart about how you enforce your work and realizing that, as a blogger, not all reuse of your content is bad, especially those that create an inbound link. If you license your work to encourage good use, you’ll likely find that very few people actually abuse your content and those who do can usually be stopped quickly.

This will let you protect your work while encouraging its spread and still not spending too much time thinking or worrying about these issues.

After all, if you spend all of your time thinking about copyright issues, you’re not blogging or growing your site and that could be the biggest disaster of all.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Never Run Out of Ideas

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:08:55 +0000

There’s an old maxim that says “Ideas are a dime a dozen.” In sort it means that ideas are worthless without execution, which is what gives them value.

That maxim largely holds true for bloggers, that is, so long as ideas are plentiful.

However, if you blog long enough you’ll likely find that, at some point, you’ll run completely out of ideas and your mind, no matter how hard you force it, isn’t able to create new ones.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing in a tight niche or about something as broad as things you see in your day-to-day life, at some point inspiration dries up and you’re stuck with a post to write and nothing to write about.

How you respond to this challenge can say a great deal about you, your blog and the potential future of both, especially if it is to last for any length of time.

So how do you deal with this problem? The answer is surprisingly simple.

The Pitfall

Running out of ideas is always an unpleasant experience, but it is rarely one that is actually harmful to a blog. There’s a natural ebb and flow to creativity that makes it so that you’ll eventually find yourself beached on a low tide from time to time.

There are two ways that this relatively minor inconvience can be come a true disaster.

Dry Pool: Sometimes the lack of new ideas becomes a more permanent state and eventually the pool of ideas simply dries up. Bloggers with this problem often begin to look at their site as being done and simply walk away, unable to think of what else to say.
Inconsistent Quality: The more common result is that new ideas don’t stop coming but instead slow down until the rate of posting can not be maintained. As such, the blog either has to change schedules or, more commonly, suffer from inconsistency in post quality. This has the effect of turning away subscribers and slowly eroding the site’s potential fan base.

The first is more often caused by a lack of interest than a lack of ideas. If one stops being interested in their topic, or at least in writing about it, they don’t keep their eyes open for new possibilities and eventually close themselves off to new ideas completely.

The second, on the other hand, is a genuine struggle to keep new ideas coming in, meaning that the blogger needs to either make adjustments to how they seek out new ideas or when they write about them.

Fortunately, both can actually be cured, but we have to be careful to address both a lack of interest and a lack of ideas as, without both, we end up in the exact same position, if not a worse one.

How to Avoid It

The first step to dealing with the problem of running out of ideas is being comfortable with the notion of running out of ideas. Though deadline pressures, self-imposed and external, make it difficult, if you can recognize that this is a normal condition and not take it too harshly, you’ll be very well-positioned to recover.

Beyond that, you need to focus on keeping both your interest up and the new ideas coming in as fast as reasonably possible. With that in mind, here’s several tips to help you get more ideas and improve their quality.

Keep a Log of Good Ideas: If you think of a good idea, write it down immediately. I use Google calendar for my blogging calendar though there is also a plugin for WordPress that can help. This helps avoid losing ideas that you can’t act on immediately and lets you keep several in the bank for when you need them, letting you work with, not against, the ebb and flow of creativity.
Stay on Top of Your Niche: Read blogs dedicated to your niche and stay on top of related news stories. I start almost every morning with a relevant Google News search and my RSS reader, about half of my story ideas come from one of those two places.There is a constant stream of new things to write about circulating on the Web and, sometimes, you don’t have to be the first to cover a story, especially if you can be the best.
Revisit Old Ideas: If you’ve been blogging long enough, you may have a lot of old posts you’ve written and may be able to revisit with an update or a new angle easily. Take a look at your most popular posts and consider coming back to them if they are more than a year old or are otherwise showing their age. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you’ve already done.
Seek Alternative Sources: Back in July Andrew wrote a great post about sites to find new ideas on, including several PR sites. You can actually find a great deal of information on these sites and, in many cases, be the first to a breaking story.
Take a Break: If all else fails, take a break. Pressuring yourself to come up with ideas when none are available doesn’t do you any good. If you are under external deadline pressure, consider asking if you can rearrange your schedule for a while to brainstorm and come up with a pool of new ideas. Sometimes a blogging vacation is just what you need to recharge.

To be clear, none of these are magic bullets that can cure you of idea problems, but they can certainly lessen them.

The main thing to remember is to try and work with the natural ebb and flow of creativity rather than against it. If you can remember the ideas you have (rather than just forgetting them when you can’t act on them) and know where to find new ideas and how to keep your interest high, you’ll likely find that you have plenty of backlogged ideas to weather any storm.

In fact, many find that, when they start actively working on this issue, that they have a large surplus of things to write about, a pitfall for another day.

Bottom Line

In the end, the maxim is right. Ideas are cheap. But so is air. The problem with both is that, with either, when cut off from your supply, you begin to suffocate.

Much like a SCUBA diver, you need to be aware that you’re going to spend time, at least occasionally, cut off from the flow of ideas and you need to be prepared. Just like going underwater is a lot less scary with a tank of air, going through an idea drought is a lot less scary when you have a good backlog of ideas and a lifeline for new ones.

If you use your ideas wisely and treat the good ones you come up with the proper care, you’ll likely find that you are never truly out, but at worst, choosing the old one you want to write about. That is not a bad place to be.

Blogging Pitfalls: How to Avoid Lazy Writing and Editing

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:00:03 +0000

At the end of the day, the most basic activity a blogger must do is write.

While it is true that bloggers are, with good reason, expending more and more into video and audio, at some point every blogger is going to have to write something. It might be a description, a bio or even just an advertisement but, at some point, a every blogger is going to have to put words onto paper.

But not every writer has the heart of a poet or the writing skills of a hard-hitting journalists. Bloggers come from all different backgrounds and styles and many have had little training or experience with writing prior to starting up their blog.

The good news is that you don’t need to be the next Shakespeare to be an effective and popular blogger, in many ways it helps not to be, but you do have to be able to write clearly and in a way that is engaging to your reader. It may not require a Ph.D in literature, but it does require that you work on honing your craft and make your writing as good as possible.

Failure to do so can sink an otherwise great blog and make your previous hard work a complete waste of time.

The Pitfall

Many bloggers, if not most, start out their sites obsessing over the content they are putting out over the Web. This obsession can sometimes reach unhealthy levels that can actually do more harm than good, but often times this drive leads to some very good writing and great attention to detail.

The problem is that many bloggers reach a comfort zone as their blog begins to grow, something of a holding pattern with the quality of their writing. They stop editing their work as much and take fewer precautions to ensure that their writing is up to code.

Mistakes begin to creep in, the writing becomes more awkward and less approachable. Visitors may not stop coming, but they certainly spend less time on the site and the search engines notice as the bounce rate begins to go up. People generally take the blog less seriously and enjoy spending time there less and it is only a matter of time before the blog’s clout begins to drift away and it suffers in its statistics.

Over time, it can become something of a ghost town, a shell of its former self, and it becomes a blog that is ripe for abandonment as motivation becomes harder and harder to come by.

However, it doesn’t have to happen and, in fact, is a form of blogging death that can be very easily avoided.

How to Avoid It

The easiest way to avoid this pitfall is to simply enjoy writing. If you like writing you’ll invest the time and energy needed into it not just out of desire to create a good blog, but also because it’s something you want to do.

However, for bloggers who perhaps only tolerate the writing portion of the blogging experience or perhaps just deeply hate the editing portion, there are a few things you can and should do to ensure that you don’t slouch in your writing duties.

Set a Writing Goal: Find a word count that you are comfortable with and shoot for it every time you write. Give yourself a range with a minimum and a maximum to aim for. This doesn’t mean you have to stick to it every time but that you should have a good reason for breaking the rule.
Create an Editing Ritual: Editing a piece of writing is difficult, especially if you are the one who wrote it. Most people find it hard to give their own work the kind of attention it needs to effectively proof it. I find it better to step away from my work for at least 15 minutes before editing to help me read it with fresh eyes. Create your own ritual to ensure you give it the proper attention.
Focus on Making Content Skimmable: An easy way to make your writing readable is to make it visually more appealing. Add lists to your post (like this one) and use subheads. Also, shorter paragraphs and a mixture of short and long sentences will make your content easily skimmable and readable without requiring too much effort.
Don’t Hesitate to Delete: When writing, make liberal use of the delete key. If a post idea isn’t working out, trash it. If a section doesn’t fit, delete it. Delete words, delete paragraphs, delete entire articles. Eliminating the garbage helps what’s left shine that much brighter and is the easiest thing you can do as an editor.
Read Everything Aloud: You can often times spot a good writer by whether or not their lips are moving as they write. Good writers sound out their articles to see how things “sound” in their mind. This also forces you to go through your work word by word, eliminating the tendency to skip around as we read.

But while all of these suggestions are fine, the most important thing to remember is that your blog is only as good as its last post. What you wrote two weeks ago or two years ago may be doing well in Google, but to your subscribers, your main audience, it is what you posted yesterday that counts the most.

That is why you can not rest on your laurels and have to keep up the pressure and drive to write good, high-quality content every day you sit down write.

Bottom Line

In the end, there is really no substitute for having a passion for writing. If you don’t like writing, it’s going to get harder and harder to make yourself take the time to do it well.

This isn’t to say that it is impossible, but that it is an area you will have to focus on and keep working on as you move forward.

Simply put, we all have areas of blogging we don’t enjoy but have to do, whether it is promotion, maintaining backups or something else altogether, we all have our least favorite parts.

The ultimate trick is to find ways to get yourself out of bed and to spend the time and energy to do those things with the same vigor and attention that you do the things you love.

If you can manage that, there is little that can stop you from creating a very successful and very long-term blog.

Blogging Pitfalls: Why You Can’t Be Just a Blogger

Jonathan Bailey — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:49:24 +0000

Everyone knows what being a blogger entails but fewer people know what creating a successful blog involves. Far too many bloggers have fallen for the false mantra of “If you write it, they will come” only to watch their traffic, readership and even profits lag behind their efforts.

There is much more to writing a blog than just simply putting out new blog entries. Even ignoring promotion, communication and other activities all bloggers do, there is a simple truth that, for the most part, a great blog can not be simply a great blog.

Nearly all great blogs are something else too and it is important to be thinking about that both as you work to develop the idea for your site and as you grow it. Rather than focusing merely on the daily grind, you need to make sure that your readers have other reasons to both first find your site and keep coming back.

After all, blogs are a dime a dozen on the Web, without something more, your site may not be worthless, but it can sure feel that way.

The Pitfall

Simply put, most bloggers don’t pay much attention to why they read the sites that they do. This, unfortunately, really hinders them when trying to create a blog that others will enjoy and find value in.

As we write our daily and weekly blog posts, it can be easy to assume that blogging is nothing more than the process of creating new posts, editing them and publishing them. Throw in some Twitter work and some email, and many feel that their blog will take care of itself.

While this may be a tempting illusion, mainly because it makes blogging seem to be a lot easier than it is, it simply doesn’t pan out in reality. Instead, it is a sure-fire way to ensure that no one beyond your family and friends reads your site and that your blog languishes in obscurity, just waiting for abandonment.

The Danger

The problem is pretty simple. Most people who read blogs don’t view blog reading as purely a pleasure activity and they don’t actively seek out new blogs to read. Instead, they stumble across interesting blogs while looking for other things on the Web and then, if they are interested and willing to make the commitment, subscribe.

And for a reader, subscribing is a commitment. Many already refer to their RSS reader as their “second inbox” and some have even designed feed readers around avoiding the guilt associated with it.

Having a good blog is not enough to ensure that you get a good reader base and it is important to find ways to reach out to potential readers and to ens are the ones who come by. Otherwise, your blog traffic is not going to grow nor will your subscriber base and that, in turn, it going to make it very difficult to not abandon your blog as motivation to write will be very limited.

In short, if you want to keep your blog growing and keep yourself excited about it, you’ll need to do something to ensure that it is more than a blog, but rather, something that is unique and compelling for your readers.

How to Avoid It

The solution is simple. Try to describe your site as succinctly as possible without using the word “blog”. If you can’t do that easily, it may be time to rethink your strategy. If you remember that the term “blog” represents the format of a site, not necessarily a type of site, it becomes clear what you have to do.

Instead of focusing on being a blog, you have to find a way to use the blog format to make a site that is independently interesting and/or useful. There are many different ways you can do that. Here are just some of the easier ones to impliment:

Be a News Site: Don’t be a blogger, instead, be a journalist or an expert. If you’re niche-oriented, focus on covering the latest and greatest news in your field and providing good commentary. People interested in the topic will subscribe.
Be a Personality: Perhaps you are so interesting that a blog by and about you can work, but it needs to reflect you and be your voice. More importantly, it must be a way for people to interact with you. Those who find you interesting and compelling will subscribe.
Be a Resource: Use your site to teach people things, offering tutorials, techniques and information relevant to a particular topic. If you can make learning something easy, people who are interested in your subject will subscribe.
Be a Voice: A blog for a company or organization can provide a powerful and compelling voice for that group. If people are independently interested in said group, they will subscribe to the blog to get the latest news and information about it.
Be Entertaining: If you have a talent for comedy, music, art or something else that you can express in blog format, using a blog to display that talent can make sense. People who find your work compelling will subscribe, though understand that this is the most dangerous route as often times people who are interested in other forms of art aren’t interested in reading blogs at all.

Remember that none of these are mutually exclusive and the most successful sites are able to combine two or three of these or other elements to reach the highest level of success possible.

But regardless of the path(s) you choose, you have to do one of two things. You can either create a different type of site and put it in a blog format or have something independently interesting and exciting that will make people want to read your blog.

Most readers simply will not add a new blog to their RSS reader without some very compelling reason and it is up to you, the writer, to give them such a reason. Sadly, “It’s my blog” is rarely a good enough excuse.

Bottom Line

With so many millions of blogs out there, you have to find a way to make yours stand out. If you’re fine with just your friends and family reading your site, then by all means don’t bother doing anything other than filling out post after post on whatever you feel like.

However, if you want strangers to read your blog and to grow your traffic, you have to go a bit beyond that and offer real, compelling reasons to subscribe. Your blog has to become a sales pitch with a subscription being the desired transaction.

If you can do that, you’ll likely find that your blog grows much more quickly than it would otherwise and you, in turn, will be much more motivated to keep writing. Don’t, and even though you are writing what you supposedly want to, you will likely find it harder and harder to maintain interest and passion as blogging becomes a very thankless chore.

Give your readers a reason to come back and they will thank you, don’t and you will be wondering where things went wrong.

3 Ways to Ruin Your Blog with Blog Post Titles that Stink

Susan Gunelius — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:46:10 +0000

Blog post titles are like little ads that can do three things:

1. Entice people to read more.
2. Encourage people to click away.
3. Lull them to a state of inaction.

If you want your blog to grow and be successful, then you want your blog post titles to achieve #1 in the above list — entice people to read more.Â In other words, your ad should intrigue people enough that they stop what they’re doing in their busy days to keep reading.Â It’s not as easy as it sounds, but if you learn to write great blog post titles, you’ve reached a success milestone that many bloggers aspire to but never attain.

The key to writing great blog post titles is to avoid doing the things in crafting titles that achieve #2 and #3 in the above list — encourage people to click away and lull them to a state of inaction.

With that in mind, following are 3 ways your blog post titles ruin your blog.Â Avoid them at all costs!

1. Ignore keywords.

Search engine algorithms value keywords in blog post titles highly.Â While you don’t want to stuff post titles with keywords or use keywords in titles where they don’t belong, it is important to try to include them when it’s appropriate.Â They can make a difference in sending some extra search traffic to your blog.Â Not only that, but those people who arrive at your blog post via a keyword search are likely to be interested in your post (assuming the post title appropriately used that keyword) and stick around to read more.

2. Trick people.

The classic bait and switch is detested in blog post titles just as much as it is anywhere else.Â Don’t promise people something in your blog post title then deliver something completely unrelated in your post content.Â People won’t fall for that trick a second time.Â In fact, they might spread the word to their friends and online connections.Â That’s a reputation you don’t want to get.

3. Bore people.

Your blog post titles need to capture the attention of people who are quickly clicking through web pages and have little time to spend on anything that doesn’t appear to immediately meet their needs or set off the “Hey, this is cool” bells in their heads.Â A boring blog post title will get looked over, ignored, bypassed, and any other synonym for skipped that you can think of.Â Don’t let readers get away!Â Instead, pique their interest with blog post titles that stop them in their tracks and make them curious.

What do you think are the worst things bloggers can do when writing blog post titles?Â Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Achieve Blogging Success – Tips To Fight The Deadly Disease Of Procrastination

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:19:16 +0000

There are many habits and practices that affect our abilities to truly succeed in blogging. For many of our bad habits, we are not aware of them until someone points them out to us or we see others complain about them. Thus it is very important that we are aware of all that we are doing by conducting some critical self analysis.

Truly successful blogging requires the same effort as would any other goal or vision; and many of us are experiencing failure because we allow bad habits to creep in and take over. One of the deadliest habits we could ever allow and become complacent with is procrastination. Continuously putting off those great post, product or serviceÂ ideas for later will inevitably cripple your blogging efforts.

Here are some highly effective tips for defeating this deadly disease to help you experience ultimate blogging success.

Know Where You Stand

Denying that you have a problem and pretending to be the best in the industry are the worst things that you could ever do when it comes to overcoming this habit and building a solid reputation online. Before anyone else gets a chance to criticize and make suggestions, ensure that you are steps ahead of them and you’ve already started that analysis. By doing this, you should be able to correct the problems before it truly becomes a crippling issue.

In addition, there’s nothing worse than someone who brags about how great their blog is then to realize that they lack the even basics. Denial of procrastination and other bad habits can put you in this precarious position.

Simple Tasks To Help You Overcome

Based on my own experience, up to 90% of tasks that are put off usually go by undone or executed at a time when the results are not all that wonderful. You’d be very surprised how simple it is to just do what you need to do!

Here are some quick and simple techniques to help you overcome this bad habit:

Break down huge tasks – For huge, complicated and time consuming tasks, you really need to simply break them down into smaller activities so that all you need to focus on each time is small and simple steps.
Write down your goals and objectives – Putting your goals on paper has a tremendous psychological effect and makes the things you need to do and achieve more tangible and realistic. Thus giving you greater drive to do more.
Set time limits for your goals and tasks – Start setting personal deadlines for your tasks and goals. If you’re blogging with a team, set your personal deadlines earlier than what has been mutually set by the team.
Clearly define a reward or benefit for each completed task – This way you will know for sure what you’re working towards and can provide huge motivation by helping you to keep your eyes on the ultimate prize, regardless of setbacks.
Write your blog posts in advance – Look for inspiration for blogging from all aspects of life before the appointed time. As soon as you get post ideas, start drafting them up. This builds excitement and it will be easier for you to complete the perfect post when the time comes to publish it.
Just do it! – Its as simple as that, just do what you need to do NOW. Make that habit a part of you until procrastination is no more.

Discussion & Conclusion

As you steadily defeat the disease of procrastination, you will begin to realize massive improvements in how you execute tasks that are critical for success and that awesome feeling of fulfillment through effective blogging will pour into other areas of life and people will want to emulate you. Your efforts in becoming the next problogger becomes a reality.

Do you struggle with procrastination in blogging? What steps have you taken to overcome this overwhelming and silent disease? Please share your experiences with us in the comments below. We would love to hear from you.

How To Harness The Power Within Your Readers’ Blog Comments

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 04:43:51 +0000

For many bloggers, a comment is a very valuable thing, especially for new bloggers who are looking for confirmation that their voices are being heard and visitors are actually engaging their new blog. Its very satisfying when our articles are well received by our audience and we begin to build a vibrant community of dedicated readers.

The truth is that blog comments can provide a greater purpose than just feeding our egos and offers a wealth of information that can help to propel us further on our blogging journey. Blog comments contain clues to the things we may be doing wrong and what our readers really want to see.

Let us take a look at what we can learn from our blog comments.

Are Your Readers Commenting At All?

If you’ve been blogging for some time now and all you’ve been getting are a couple comments on your posts and sometimes none, it may be an indicator that you need to be doing things differently. There may be a couple articles occasionally that receive zero comments but your blog should not look like a ghost town.

If a reasonable number of readers are not commenting this may mean that:

You need to write more engaging, reasonably sized articles
Your articles need to have a call to action like the last paragraph in this post
Your blog design may be too cumbersome and scares your readers away
You have barriers to commenting like captcha forms or require readers to login
Your readers don’t trust your opinion
You don’t interact with the comments that you do have

And the list could go on. Most importantly, try reaching out to others in your niche by connecting through social networking sites or a blogging community like My Blog Guest. You will need to really put yourself out there, get social and meet some new people. Remember, being anti-social will not help your blogging career.

Lessons You Can Learn & Ideas Gained

Commenting is the quickest and easiest method for readers to provide feedback and share ideas; and oftentimes within these comments are clues that will help you to do better.

I will often create blog posts based on questions posed by readers or even ideas they may share from their own experiences. These posts offer the greatest opportunities for truly connecting with your readers as it will show that you are truly serious about blogging and value your readers’ input. This will help you to gain dedicated readers who will not only read your posts and follow your blog but spread the word for you and define you as an authority in your field.

One could say that blog comments serve the same purpose as what customer feedback would be for a large organization. So if you are looking for ideas or inspiration to do things differently, the answers may lie within your comments.

Conclusion & Discussion

Acknowledging and responding to your blog comments is key for growing a vibrant community around your blog by truly connecting with your readers. As your readers become more familiar with you and your writing, the more valuable information they will share about their experiences and ideas that will help you to become a better blogger.

How has commenting helped you on your journey and what have you learned from your readers’ comments? Do you have any tips for getting more comments? Please share your thoughts with us below, we would love to hear from you.

Why Your Blog Needs a Comment Policy – NOW!

Susan Gunelius — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:36:26 +0000

There willÂ come a day when a comment lands in your moderation queue that you don’t want to publish.Â Of course, it’s your blog, and you have complete control over what you do and do not publish on it.Â However, if you’re trying to develop a popular and successful blog, then simply deleting every comment that offers an opinion which differs from your own is a mistake.

The best blogs allow open conversations and encourage visitors to voice their opinions.Â However, that doesn’t mean your blog should be a free-for-all where anyone can say anything they want and you’ll publish it.Â Instead, you need to use your best judgment to edit or delete comments that detract from the user experience on your blog.

There is just one big problem.Â You don’t want to be accused of controlling the conversation on your blog, and that’s where having a Blog Comment Policy is essential.

A Blog Comment Policy allows you to set user expectations and protect yourself if your edit to a comment or deletion of a comment is ever called into question.Â You can simply refer people to your published Blog Comment Policy to learn what types of contents are edited or deleted on your blog.

Following is a sample Blog Comment Policy, which you can use to get started in writing your own.Â Of course, you Blog Comment Policy should reflect your own commenting guidelines for your blog.

There are some instances where comments will be edited or deleted on this blog.Â Following are some of those conditions:

Comments that may be considered spam will be deleted.

Comments including profanity will be edited or deleted.

Comments containing language or concepts that could be deemed offensive, hateful or libelous will be deleted.

We reserve the right to edit or delete any comments submitted to this blog without notice. This comment policy is subject to change at anytime.

Remember, the purpose in creating a Blog Comment Policy is to protect you and your audience, so the user experience they expect to get on your blog is not threatened.Â Publish your comment policy and be sure to include a link to it from all pages of your blog.

What kind of comments do you delete or edit from your blog?Â Leave a comment and share your opinion.

Image: stock.xchng

How To Get Readers To Engage Your Blog Using These 6 Easy Tips

Robyn-Dale Samuda — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:56:18 +0000

Personally, having dedicated readers engage my blog by asking questions, providing feedback and coming back for more are some of the basic goals for my site. User interaction and engagement is a great sign that you are producing content that sparks the interest of visitors and is an excellent indicator for sustainable growth of your blog’s audience.

Among the many different goals bloggers may have, user interaction and engagement should be among the top on your list. Whether your goal is to increase affiliate sales, e-book sales, drive traffic or become a leader in your niche, an inviting and user-friendly blog is key for all these achievements.

Let’s take a look at some of the basics that will capture the interest of all types of readers.

Interactive Commenting

Ensure that your blog allows users to comment and that you reply to all relevant comments. You may have noticed that there are lots of blogs out there that have different commenting policies for good reasons. For example, Seth Godin’s blog does not allow comments but at the same time his blog does extremely well. Unfortunately, not all of us can pull that off.

So for the rest of us commenting will help our blogging community to grow and strengthen relationships with readers and other bloggers. Some readers will feel compelled to leave comments on sites that already have a high level of interaction.

Be Human!

Rather than writing as though you are creating a technical manual for the latest model space shuttle, you need to have a little personality on your blog. This applies to corporate blogging as well. I’m sure you don’t enjoy talking to a brick wall, right? So don’t make it a brick wall experience for your readers. Write like you’re having an actual conversation. Use words like “you” or “we” to help connect with the reader’s experience.

Host A Weekly Blog Debate

This is a technique I rarely see being used but can be very effective for increasing commenting and spark discussions. This is much easier after you have started to develop a modest readership for your blog. Choose hot topics that readers can’t help but to give their 2 cents and make the entire post about asking for opinions and feedback. Also, ensure that you’re consistent and pick a specific day for the debate weekly. Your readers will look forward to it.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask

There is nothing wrong with asking for feedback. Asking can take you a very long way towards getting the things you want. At the end of your posts, try to include a section that asks for readers’ opinions and questions. This is an excellent invitation for interaction and encourages readers to comment when they read it. So give your readers that extra nudge.

Host A Contest On Your Blog

There’s nothing like winning a valuable item or service that you didn’t pay for and visitors will flock to your site for free stuff. I would advice to use this technique sparingly since if not done right visitors will simply come for the contest and never come back when its over. So proper planning is very important.

For your contest, ensure that it ties strongly with your blog’s purpose, goals and services as much as possible. If your site offers paid consultations or e-books, ensure that these are included in the prizes or are a prerequisite for entering the irresistible contest. You could even host a high quality guest posting contest that will produce tons of content for your blog that will attract followers of your guest authors. It would also be great if you host a contest just before a service or product launch. This will give it maximum exposure.

Maintain A Profile Section or “About Me” Page

Share a little about who you are on your blog to help readers connect with you on a more natural level. They will realize that you are a human being with a life and personality just like them and it will become easier for them to relate and connect. This is especially important if you’re trying to sell products through your blog. It eases some of the tension of doing business online if readers see that you’re a real person and can even becomes friends with you through your social profiles. So be as real as you can be.

Conclusion & Discussion

As you focus more on interaction you will begin to find more unique ways of connecting with your particular audience. Reader engagement provides a feeling of accomplishment and will encourage you to keep growing on your blogging journey.

How much interaction to you receive on your blog and how do you think it will help you and your blog to grow? Please let us know in the comments; we would love to hear from you.