Excuses & News
Maybe you weren’t counting, but I absolutely noticed that I went the entire last week here without posting once. I feel major guilt over stuff like this. Skipping a week of posting is not the best move for building traffic, and worse it doesn’t allow for a nice flow of communication and interactions with your readers.
So, just a quick sorry for being MIA; it’s not cool of me to miss so many days here. My slack has good excuses (trust me), but those excuses are all sort of dull unless you’re me, so why go there. Let’s look at solutions instead.
Deb and I were chatting about this blog, which so far we adore. Of course we like the topic, but we also like the readers here. It’s a nice place to be so far; pretty chill. However, last week I realized that I have some new time constraints, and as you all know, Deb landed a very cool new gig.
Because we both have new schedules to work around, but would still like to see this blog grow, we decided to bring on a third network blogger. We’re thrilled to have this blogger joining us here at Network Blogging Tips. She’s a great blogger who has some special insight into blogs and blog networks, so you’ll enjoy the addition as well.
Hopefully she’ll be introducing herself soon.
Now, as for me; ironically, while I was off not posting here, all I did was think about blogging issues, so I have some posts coming up asap. Stay tuned.
Taking Your Blog to the Next Level with Radio
I’m not going to do this too often, I promise. I won’t spam you with stuff from my day job.
I wrote a post today at BlogTalkRadio featuring 7 Reasons to Take Your Blog to the Next Level with Radio and I thought it might interest many of you. If you’re looking for new ways to promote your brand, build community and talk more about topics that interest you, radio is a good way to do it.
Anyway, it’s something to consider. What do you think of using radio for blogs? Is it something you could do? I was nervous about using video and it worked out well. I think radio will be fun too. In fact, I’ll probably be on the air soon - but more about that at another time. Many bloggers don’t want to appear on video, is radio better for the anonymity factor? I’d love to know your thoughts.
NBT Weekend Link Love June 14th & 15th, 2008
Happy Saturday, blogging friends. It’s looks to be a great weekend with no shortage of great things to read.
Congratulations to Proud Pappa, Darren Rowse. There’s a new edition to his family today. What a great Father’s Day gift.
Here are a few items of interest:
- The World’s Oldest Blogger? at Blog Herald
- Chitika and b5Media Announce Premium Ads Partnership at Blog Herald.
- JOhn McCain launches a blog at Bloggers Blog.
- Are Blogging Advice and Making Money Online Blogs Simply Rehashing the Same Stuff? at Blogging Tips
- 5 Alternatives to Social Media Marketing at Blogtrepreneur.
- Increase Readership and Build Community with Better Headlines at Business and Blogging.
- 3 Simple Secrets to Reducing Your Blogging Stress at Daily Blog Tips.
- Where Blogging Can Take You at XFeP
- Life as a Web Worker at Freelance Folder
- What do Givers Get? at Successful Blog
- When is Your Blog Focus too Narrow? at Lorelle on Word Press
- What Thomas Edison Can Teach You About Blogging at ProBlogger
- Blogging a Dead Horse at SparkPlugging
Have a great weekend, friends.
NBT Blogging Job Application Tip: Follow Directions
Here’s a quick tip for anyone looking for blogging jobs: Follow directions. Read through the entire ad and do what the employer asks. If he says to send three samples of your writing, do so. If he says not to send attachments, don’t send attachments. If he asks you for specific information, include it in your job pitch or application.
I’ve been in a position to hire many times and might receive hundreds of applications. Out of those hundreds perhaps 20 people followed directions. It’s frustrating.
My blog Freelance Writing Jobs is having an “American Idol” type contest to choose our next blogger. It’s for a paying position, two days a week, and the FWJ community will be choosing the winner. Each week another candidate will be voted off the island. I asked everyone to post their pitches, and to apply as if they found my job ad on a job board. I listed specific requirements. To me, the most important requirement was the one where I asked applicants to pitch a specific freelance writing niche to base their twice weekly blog. For instance, freelance marketing, or rates. Only a few did. This bugged me because it made me wonder if everyone read the entire ad.
This is the first time it’s happened and I know plenty of employers who complain of this. The next time you apply for a job, follow all the instructions in the ad. It could set you apart from the rest.
16 Things You Need to Make it as a Blogger
Think anyone can blog? Think again! While it’s true that anyone can start, the fact is very few people can successfully pull it off. If you want to truly make it as a blogger, you need to have several things. I’m not talking laptops and software, indeed those are important. Most of what you need to become a successful blogger can’t be found in stores, or even blogs about blogging.
1. A good idea –Not the same idea as everyone else. Not a copycat of someone else’s blog, but your own unique, good idea. If you want to make it as a blogger, you have to have content and a fresh idea. You have to be able to say something different.
2. Creativity –You’re going to need to update your blog, at the very least, several times a week. A successful blogger is creative enough to come up with fresh, engaging content every time.
3. Passion for Your Topic – If you choose a topic you love, your passion will show through. If you choose a topic you don’t know much about, that will be apparent as well.
4. A good work ethic – If you think blogging is just writing a quick five minute post and forgetting about it until next time, you couldn’t be more wrong. You’re going to spend hours on your blog writing it, promoting it and more.
5. A thick skin – Trolls, chronic malcontents and basic rudeness can be commonplace. People are going to pick your blog posts apart and call you names. You can let it get to you or you can develop a thick skin.
6. The ability to work alone – Most bloggers work alone. You have to be able to shut out all of the distractions of home or the coffee shop and concentrate on creating a good post.
7. A notebook. You’re going to come up with ideas at the oddest times. It’s helpful to have a notebook or PDA handy so you can jot down ideas.
8. A thriving social network. It helps to have people to talk to, network with and shoot ideas off. Plus social networking eliminates the loneliness some probloggers experience. By interacting with others you’re sure to come up with fresh new ideas and avoid some of that solitude.
9. Motivation. What keeps you motivated? Passion for your topic? The adoration of your public? Whatever it is, channel it and use it to keep you driven.
10. Longevity – Blogging isn’t a fly by night operation. If you want to succeed, if you want your readers to trust your name, you’ll want your blogs to last through the ages. The most successful blogs have been around for a few years. It’s the people who cut bait and run after two months of blogging that fail.
11. Long term vision – Sure, you have a month’s worth of posts written in your head, but what about a month from now? Two months? Two years?
12. The ability to work odd hours – Blogging isn’t exactly a 9 to 5 gig. Ideas hit at any time. Many probloggers even work well into the night or the wake at the crack of dawn to fit blogging into a busy day.
13. A willingness to learn new things – As a blogger you want to continue to feed your readers new information. This means you’ll have to set a portion of your day aside to read other blogs, books, magazines and websites in your niche.
14. An open mind – Sometimes bloggers need to completely change their line of thinking. What might have worked a year ago, doesn’t work now. Tools and techniques become obsolete. Keep an open mind, don’t be afraid to admit defeat and always be on the lookout for new trends and ideas.
15. The ability to teach – Blogging isn’t always talking about yourself. It’s about sharing what you know with someone else. Many bloggers are teachers, not story tellers – though it’s not a bad thing to be able to tell a story either.
16. Patience –Blogging isn’t instant gratification. It takes time and patience to build up a successful blog. Traffic doesn’t happen over night and any network penalizing you for not having high numbers in the beginning doesn’t know enough about blogging to succeed.
This post originally appeared at About.com Weblogs, I thought it was appropriate here as well. - Deb
Brevity Is A Gift I Wasn’t Born With
I’ve never been brief. I think a lot, talk forever, and as it turns out, I write massive amounts.
I can write concisely. For example, if I have a boss, college professor, or magazine editor breathing down my neck about word counts; sure, I can be nice and succinct.
However, give me a blog, with no word count limit, and I swear, I just go to town. Talk, talk, talk. On and on. Much like I’m doing right now. Of course, longer posts have their place, but not all the time, and not if the topic can and should be shortened.
If you think, talk, and write long, your best bet is as follows: Fake it. Fake that you’re short winded. Right now, by telling you that I have to fake it, I’m not faking it, because frankly, this could go un-said. I’m assuming you’re assuming that I do fake it, or I wouldn’t have suggested you do so.
The above - TOO long winded.
To fake it, try mind mapping. I’m not all fancy with paper mind mapping, but I will talk topics out in my head.
Here’s an example: My idea for a topic is green weddings. Lord, that’s way too broad. Here’s how I work it out; I come up with a list of related topics, choose one, and then narrow that one down.
I go from green weddings to..
- Green wedding cakes to…
- Saving money on your green wedding cake to…
- Saving money on your green wedding cake toppers to…
- Make homemade eco-cake toppers to…
- Three great ideas for easy homemade eco-cake toppers!
Short, sweet, perfect for links, and it leaves all those other topics I can write about later untouched. I could have shortened it more, but I’m happy with this.
Do I always manage to fake it? Um no, please refer to the above post title. I am who I am. People either deal with my sometimes longer posts, or maybe they don’t read me. Whatever. Part of the beauty of blogging is that it takes all kinds. However, I do try, about 80% of the time to be shorter than I’d normally be left to my own not-analyzed devices. I can get more work done in less time when I blog short, my readers are happier, and mind mapping allows me to always have a great list of topics sitting on the back burner.
Now was this post short enough? There’s also a too short mind you. No one wants to read this post:
“Keep readers happy and increase blog traffic by mind mapping for short blog posts.”
Or maybe they do? I don’t, but what do you think?
Squeeze More Hours Out of Your Blogging Day
When it rains, it pours. Literally, everything that could possibly go wrong, barring natural disaster has happened to my workweek already, and I’m only at 11am of workweek day two. That sucks. I wallowed a bit today, and then worked out a plan. If you need to squeeze more hours out of your week, here are some speedy post ideas that can help, without compromising your blog/s too much.
Best of list: Round up ten posts you wrote on any one topic. Slap a title like, “Best cleaning posts of 2007″ on it and go.
Link love baby: People probably like when I have a bad week, because I tend to link more. Because I read a load of blogs, I always have some ideas about great posts to link to, posts that match my blog, and posts that my readers will enjoy. Link love posts go together quickly.
Picture o’the day: This won’t work for just any blog, but if you have a blog that is supported by images, then one image can be a whole post. Example: At a green blog, you could show a picture of trash on the sidewalk, and note, “What’s up with this? Any ideas about how to lessen trash in our communities?”
Thank god for YouTube: YouTube can also provide an entire post. People like videos, and there are videos about every single topic you can think up. Other places to score filler videos include MonkeySee and Instructables.
Rewrite; but not drastically: Find one old post that you have a new opinion on (A quick opinion). Link to the old post and write a couple new thoughts that expand on the old post.
Suck it up: Not every week of blogging is perfect. One week of sub par posting never killed anyone. It’s not the most fun ever, but it’ll do. If you have a decent blogging rep to start with, one bad week is forgivable. Don’t stress too much (easier said then done though; I know.)
*NOTE: You may have noticed I didn’t mention guest posts. In some cases guest posts can be great, but they’re not usually time savers for me, not when I’m having a surprise bad week. Reason; not all my blogs allow other posters to log-on, meaning, I have to email people asking them to guest post, wait for their reply, then wait for guest posters to email me, then post their post, and usually reformat pictures as well. Not a time saver. I like guest posts more for planned breaks, because I can set them up ahead of time.
What else can you think of that saves time when you’re in a time crunch?
Get To Know You Question of the Week: Why Did You Start Blogging?
I get curious about other bloggers, but we don’t ask too many personal questions here at Network Blogging Tips. I decided to start a weekly question. I’ll try to remember to post questions on the weekend, to keep it sort of orderly.
I think we should start with the obvious… So bloggers, how come you started blogging? Forget jobs, forget networks, (unless that is how you started); tell me why you first started blogging.
My answer:
I honestly never even used computers, except in extreme passing, until I was maybe 22 years old. However, I always kept journals; pretty much my whole life. I have a big stack, so the logging of my world was old school for me. When I was the afore mentioned 22 years old, I was working as a social worker with homeless kids. I was offered a promotion to run a program, but it required computer skills. Which I lied and said I had. Actually, when asked if I could use computers well I said, “Piece of cake.” So, not a total lie. I really wanted the job.
I taught myself all about computers and started using the internet for all sorts of stuff I never knew you could use it for. Finding new info, reading news, and all that good stuff that newbies figure out. I also was teaching myself basic stuff like Word (I was seriously a newbie). I loved that I could write on the computer, and not in some bulky notebook. I started keeping my journals on the computer, then realized I could even keep one in blog style. I still have that first blog, which is yawn inducing and secret. I never give the url because it’s all mine.
A few years later I took a web writing college class for my professional writing minor. My professor made us start real blogs, you know, non-secret blogs; blogs about a decided topic not just ramblings, a blog that other people could see and comment on. At first I was miffed about being forced into a blog. A public blog sounded sort of useless to me.
What I learned was that I loved the whole interaction with others deal, which was missing from my secret blog journal. When the class ended my professor told me I should keep my blog going, or start a new one, because he thought I had one of the best blogs in the class. So I started another blog, just a basic Blogger blog, one that I actually made public. It wasen’t about anything too compelling, but I got comments, met other bloggers, spent all kinds of time on blog sites, and sort of fell in love with blogging as a whole.
I owe that college professor a lot. He sort of changed my world. I might have fallen into blogging some other way, but who knows.
How did you start?
Some Basic Rules for Running A Blog Contest
Blog contests can bring in some good traffic, but you need to run them correctly, or they can be a total pain. I’ve run countless blog contests, some more successful than others. When I first started holding contests at my blogs I made some pretty dumb mistakes. The good news is that I can tell give you some tips about what you should and shouldn’t do if you decide to hold a blog contest.
Make the rules simple. SIMPLE. I just had a blog contest at one blog. We had 215 or so entries. At least 80 of those entries were disqualified because the people didn’t follow the very basic rules. And believe me, they were really simple. If you get too tricky with your rules, you’ll end up with about five decent entries.
Make readers work a little. While I don’t think you should make things too tricky, it can be hard work to snap up cool prizes for contests, so I’m not normally a fan of having readers simply “leave a comment” to win. If I don’t have a good simple plan, I’ll use an old standby, like, “Visit our prize sponsors website, and tell me an item you like.” NOTE: This is way too tricky for some people, but seriously now, if they can’t read and follow something this easy, well, maybe they don’t really want to win.
You don’t have to pay shipping. I always ask sponsors if they’ll send prizes to my readers, vs. the sponsor sending me a prize then me having to pay shipping to send one or more prizes off. I’ve never had a sponsor refuse. If you have a prize yourself to send, and work for a network, you can always ask if they’ll pay shipping. One network I work for will do this.
Always ask your sponsors where they’ll ship to. I used to forget this little step (back in newbie days), and I could have gotten into a lot of trouble. I didn’t, but that’s just luck. If you don’t ask, you won’t know to note something akin to, “Sorry folks, but this contest is only open to U.S. residents.” Then when someone from Australia wins, and the sponsor has to pay loads of shipping they didn’t count on, that’s trouble. If you’re paying shipping yourself, make a decision about where you can afford to ship as well.
ALWAYS have a notification disclaimer. Note somewhere in your post, “I will draw winners names on June 5th. I will email the winners for their addresses. If you don’t email me back in 5 days, I’ll draw a new winner.” If you don’t put a disclaimer in, you may wait, and wait, and then most likely wait some more. This means you’re tied up with a contest that should have been over ages ago. Also, contest sponsors expect a somewhat timely response. It’s not cool to make them or the winners who respond wait.
Send a quick thank you to your sponsors. Nothing fancy, but it’s nice, and it keeps you in their head should they feel like offering another prize at some point. I always send off a quick email thank you, along with links to any posts I did about their product / company. Often times this works in your favor too, because a company will add you to their press page, giving you an instant link.
There are many more ways to make a contest a success, but these tips above can help you avoid a lot of the obnoxious stuff that tends to come along with a contest.
Also check out: Where To Get Blog Contest Prizes
Where Blogging Can Take You
A couple of years ago I explained what it was I did for a living to someone at a social club I belonged to. "Why?" she asked, "Where will blogging take you?" At the time I couldn’t answer that. Blogging was blogging. It could take me to new levels of blogging. Perhaps I’d earn six figures, who knows?
Today I can answer in a more knowledgeable fashion. I just accepted a full time position as blogger and Community Manager for Blog Talk Radio. The job involves two of the things i love best, blogging and social networking. Sure there’s more to it, but if there was ever a dream job, this is it.
A couple of weeks ago, David Peralty, the Community Manager for PicApp spoke here about using his service on blogs. He too used his blogging skills to catapult him to a full time Community Manager position.
I’ve been saying for some time now as blogging reaches the main stream more full time, salaried gigs are going to open up. Corporations will want bloggers and social networking gurus on staff to help spread the word about their products and services. David and I are both proof of that.
When your networks offer training sessions, and when the probloggers offer tips and advice, pay attention. Take it all in. Because you never know where blogging can take you.
