It's common now to think of writing a blog as an education for your readers, but I find the blogger also learns a great deal in two significant ways. Reader feedback and discussions - The most obvious ways a blog helps you learn and understand your topic better is when you put ideas out and your readers correct, engage, develop or expand on them. I'm fortunate to have readers with a great deal of expertise and experience to share, I am sure you have clever folks reading you too. It's also … [Read more...]

Wrong StumbleUpon categories are quite common and need to be fixed. You might think this is a trivial issue, and in the scheme of things probably not a major priority, but if you have been mis-tagged by mistake you are missing out on traffic, but malicious mis-categorizations also happen (eg. marking as adult theme etc). StumbleUpon Category Mistakes Happen Often When someone discovers your post they set for everyone the category it will be found on. In most cases this is a good thing, you get … [Read more...]

It's OK to not have all the answers. Let's face it, everything changes so fast, it's hard to keep up with absolutely everything. Sometimes though we have burning questions that Google can't solve. What should we do? Well, as bloggers, a great thing to do is to ask the question and publish the answers. If you don't know the answer, it could well be lots of people want to know too. Plus, if you can't find the answer in Google then you just might have an idea that will bring you regular … [Read more...]

Chris Guillebeau is one of those people who absolutely lives his philosophy. His blog is about travel and "Nonconformity" and you can believe he follows his own advice 100%. Recently Chris and Reese Spykerman worked up a fresh design and asked me to provide some feedback, so here is their critique. Note on Blog Critiques If you don't have the funds right now to buy one of my critiques, you can pick up tips for your own blog right here. While reading any of my blog critiques, see if any of the … [Read more...]

How would you like the chance to win one of 10 copies of the ProBlogger Book AND get lots of interesting stats and facts about bloggers worldwide? If this sounds good, take the survey! :) Every 100 survey entries up to 1,000 I will pull an email address out at random to win a copy of the book, so all you have to do is enter the survey to be in with a chance of winning. All the details are optional, including the email address which is purely for the prize draw. I have tried to make the … [Read more...]

Michael had the idea and I ran with it, now we have at last count 11 pages of bloggers who have joined in. What am I talking about? The Authority Blogger Blog Pack :) The idea is simple, a group of bloggers who want to help you get noticed and help each other out. Add your feed and Twitter details to the thread Download the OPML file and import it into your feed reader (preferably to a folder, the file is already organized this way but relies on your software to notice). This will add … [Read more...]

You might have noticed in my comments some of the commenters have their smiling faces grinning out at you while others have a drab gray blob. This my friends, is the Gravatar! A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs? Essentially they help you be more recognized. As we discussed … [Read more...]

Social Media tools have an enormous power to put you in contact with thousands of people. As I have said on numerous occasions though, attention on its own is useless, what are you going to do with that attention? If you want to build your online brand you have to know how all your activities work together. You need a consistency and congruency. Each part of the social media puzzle builds into a picture people have of you, how they imagine you to be relates to how you really are to the degree … [Read more...]

One aspect of my presentation over the weekend that I have been giving some thought to is the value of fewer, more in depth articles versus many shorter posts. Traditionally people would look to the top blogs like BoingBoing and think to be successful in blogging you need to post many times a day. Recently though on the blogs I work on I have seen more benefit from scheduling planned, deep and promoted content. I wonder if services such as Twitter are taking the ground that the rapid fire … [Read more...]

If you are blogging for a purpose it is not enough just to attract attention, we need things to happen as a consequence. That means at least providing the right content to the right people. As I have said many times before, while many people are looking for "traffic", you can often be more successful with a smaller audience. One of the challenges we face when launching a new blog is what our theme or subject should be. What will attract a good audience for what we have to offer? The … [Read more...]