Blog Improvement Advice From Problogger Easton Ellsworth
Easton Ellsworth blogs at Know More Media, a blog network with a focus on business. He currently blogs for Business Blog Wire, an excellent blog, covering daily blogging tips and advice. He’s also a Know More Media editor, and in the past helped to to run the Know More Media Author Certification program, which was created to help bloggers improve their blogging skills.
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An Interview with b5Media’s Jeremy Wright
Back in August, I had the pleasure of interviewing b5Media’s Jeremy Wright for About.com Weblogs. I’m longer with Weblogs, but I’m happy to bring Jeremy’s interview to you here. If you ever wanted to know what went into running a blog network or how to get a foot in the door, you won’t want to miss this.
Network Blogging Tips: b5Media is well-respected name. Why do you think this is?
Jeremy Wright: Are we? Great! To be honest, our biggest goal has to always put our authors and bloggers first. From day one we’ve done whatever we could to protect, promote and encourage our bloggers. If we’ve done nothing else right (and I’d like to think we have!) I would hope we would do that right, and that our care and concern for our blogging community may have something to do with the perception of b5 in the market!
NBT:What’s involved in running a successful blog network?
JW: Long days, long nights, lots of tears, even more laughs and a whole lotta learning! Seriously, though, our approach has always been that if we were going to do this long-term, we needed to do it properly. We started out doing revshare, but worked as hard as we could to move from that model to something that ensured that bloggers (even at the start of their blogging careers) earned some money – and that they got rewarded for the extra value they brought.
Likewise we’ve tried to evolve our infrastructure, templates and advertising sales on a constant basis.
Really, though, day to day the network is run by 3 teams: the tech team (they keep everything up, do a whack of programming, etc); the content team (dealing with bloggers and editors directly, working on promotions and contests, providing training, etc) and the sales team (fairly self-explanatory, heh). Each of those teams works incredibly hard to make sure the network survives, thrives, and that bloggers get the best of each area that they can!
NBT: To what do you attribute your network’s success?
JW:I’d say it’s because we always try and do the best we can by our bloggers, that we’re never afraid to work our asses off and that we aren’t afraid to try new things and to fail (as often as we can, in fact!).
NBT: How many blogs and bloggers are currently with b5?
JW: We’re at about 250 blogs and about 175 authors, give or take.
How to Blog Nice - An Interview with Liz Strauss
So, I did say I’d talk about clients who don’t get blogs today, (and I will soon - promise), but yesterday I saw a question at a forum about people leaving rude comments at blogs. Mainly, this was about people being rude just because – with no rhyme or reason. This sort of situation - rude people at blogs always irks me. There’s really no point.
Blogger etiquette is a big deal when you blog for others because not only are you representing yourself as a blogger, but you’re representing your client or network. Blogging etiquette also matters because you will be dealing with comments, not all of them nice.
When I see bloggers acting rude, either in a post, or in comments, it does reflect on what I think of a network, channel at a network, or in some cases a company. It’s in your best interest to blog nice when possible. And I’m not talking about being a push over, I’m talking about being genuine, having manners (a seemingly lost art), and not pushing people’s buttons simply to stir up controversy. Disagreeing or debating topics is part of blogging in my opinion. Being rude well, I wish it wasn’t part of the blogosphere, but you see it a lot.
One blogger who is in no way rude is Liz Strauss. In fact, Liz is really nice. Ask anyone. A while back, I did ask around and Liz’s name kept popping up as “the nicest blogger” in town, so I knew she’d have some great tips on blogger etiquette.
As many of you likely know, Liz offers blogging wisdom and advice at Successful Blog, one of the few blogs about blogs at the b5media blog network. Nicely, (no pun intended), Liz answered some questions about blogging nice.
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