The Best Of Daily Blog Tips in 2010

Another year is in the can, and as usual I am creating a list with the most popular posts I published in 2010. Make sure to check them out if you missed some, and a happy 2011 to every one!

The Blog Post Checklist: How many times have you published a post, only to find out you forgot to proofread and that many typos slipped through? What about when the links you included are broken, when you used the wrong keywords, or when you forgot to optimize the post title?

10 Ways to Get Your Comments Blocked or Deleted: Leaving comments on other blogs is one of the most efficient ways to promote your own blog, and to network with fellow readers and blog owners. Given the rise of blog spam, however, getting your comments approved is not as easy as it sounds.

15 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Blogging: I built my first blog back in 2005, and today a large part of my online income is generated from my blogs. Over these years I made many mistakes and figured some things out. Below you’ll find 15 of them.

Interview: 12 Top Online Entrepreneurs Share How Hard They Work: I strongly believe that behind every successful person there is a huge amount of hard work, and that is why I am always interested in learning how long and how hard other entrepreneurs work (maybe to confirm that I am not the only one crazy out there….).

What Is Success?: This past weekend I was browsing through my RSS reader, and I came across an interesting post titled What is success? Impact. The author is basically questioning what should be considered success (on a professional level), and he comes to the conclusion that success should be measured as the positive impact his work will have upon the lives of other people.

15 Tips For Those Who Want to Make Money Online: If you are hoping for some kind of ‘secret’ or ‘magic pill’, I am sorry but you will not find it within this post. In fact, I can assure you that you will not find it anywhere else on the Internet either. However, that doesn’t spell doom and surely doesn’t mean that you will never be able to achieve your goal of making money online. While there are no secrets or magic pills, there are tips and points that can help you in your journey.

Top 10 Tips to Sell Your Website or Blog on Flippa: If you are planning to buy or sell a website, you probably already heard about Flippa. It is the largest online marketplace for websites. Most people who list a website for sale there, however, end up selling it for peanuts (e.g., $100), or not selling at all.

5 Reasons Why You Should Respond To Every Comment: If you enable comments on your blog (which I’m sure most of you do), then you obviously want your readers to interact by leaving comments after your post. Then why, I ask, does it usually end up being a one-sided conversation?

What Is Bounce Rate?: Today I was going to write about why new websites can display very misleading bounce rates, but I realized I had never covered the bounce rate concept before, so I’ll stick to the basics today, and expand on the topic over the coming weeks.

10 Things Bloggers Should NOT Do: Every now and then I will see a list of things bloggers should do, but I notice people are not that inclined to do what they are asked to do, while they pay more attention to things they should NOT do. That is why I decided to create the list below.

What If I Had $1,500 To Start My Blog?: First of all I would recommend you to spend part of that money purchasing a good domain name. As a rule of thumb, look for something with 2 words, a .com extension, and with some branding potential.

5 Reasons to Take A Break From Your Blog: Approximately three months ago, I had a personal loss in my family. As a result of that loss, I took a much-needed break from blogging. It ended up being about two months of posting nothing to my blog, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

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How to Supercharge Your Blog

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2010 is coming to an end and now is the time for bloggers to begin to have new plans for moving their blog ahead in the new year.

Many of us have invested a lot of effort into our blogs and we’re now reaping the rewards and many of us have wasted a lot of time doing things that contribute nothing to the success of our blog in the year 2010. It is time to revise your blogging plan and this article will be giving you some tips to supercharge your blog.

Focus on Your Content

Writing quality content is essential to your success as a blogger and there is no point in writing a post if it won’t have an impact on others. The more effort you put into your blog posts and the more impact it has on people’s lives the better results you will get from your blog.

When I was still a fairly new blogger, I was averaging 150 visitors a day and I wrote a guest post for a particular top blog. I didn’t focus on giving the best of my content and I believed traffic and marketing is all that matters. My guest post went live on that blog and I ended up having over 1000 visitors to my blog on the same day, fast forward to 3 days and you will hardly believe I went back to getting the same number of visitors I was getting before that particular guest post.

There is a great difference between getting traffic and making your traffic stick and as a blogger your main aim should be to get quality traffic that sticks – that can only be done by providing quality content.

Lead by Example

If you try to estimate the number of blogs we have online about how to make money blogging you will end up finding out that there are millions of them.

The truth is that very few of these bloggers truly make money online and this explains the reason why most of them find it very difficult to make money from their blogs.

There are a lot of hypes on the internet that people are tired of reading just any content; they want to read from someone who has been there.

The only way to successfully make money blogging is not only by blogging in the how to make money online niche, in fact, you will easily achieve success with other niches you’re more knowledgeable and passionate about.

If you’re yet to be making money online try to search within yourself to see what you’re more knowledgeable and successful at; focus on building a successful online business in this area before teaching people how to make money online.

A true blogger would lead by action and not by words. You should let people see clearly that you not only know what you’re saying but you’re getting results from it. This will give you more credibility and will make people trust anything you say, it will also make them willing to share your content while referring their friends and family members to your blog.

Promote! Promote! Promote!

It doesn’t matter how knowledgeable you are about a subject or how sticky the content you write is, people won’t know about you if you don’t market your blog.

While it is highly important to focus on giving the best of your content while at the same time building trust by making sure you’re successful at what you preach it is also highly important to spend more time and focus your efforts on marketing your blog.

Actually, doing the first two things will help your blog market itself but you need momentum to give your blog a head start. Once you have this momentum you will find everything very easy.

There are several ways to promote your blog, and below are 3 methods I’ve found great success with.

- Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is the process of writing for another blog in order to get the word out about your blog. There are several benefits of writing guest posts for other blogs but the two immediate benefits is that it helps you gain traffic and instant credibility. Other benefits such as link building follows.

Guest blogging is the main way I promoted my blog in 2010 and it has yielded far more results than I expected.

- Blog Commenting: Another great way to get the word out about your blog is by commenting on other blogs. Promoting your blog successfully through blog commenting is more about commenting smartly and not in the numbers. Look for the top blogs with the best posts and community in your niche, read their posts and make well-thought out, highly sensible comments and you’ll be amazed at the type of quality traffic you will get back to your blog.

- Collaboration: Collaborating with other bloggers is the best way to build a great community fast if you’re a new blogger. Do your best to network with other bloggers and make them see that you truly care about them, let them know you’re interested in collaborating with them and “carefully” outline what they’ll be gaining from it. Once you’ve gotten a reply from them and the post is live, try to notify them about it and tell them to share it – with time you will have built a great community.

Conclusion

Note that building a successful blog is not something that can be done in a day, many few drops of water make a ocean and the more you work on building your blog with combination of little efforts you will achieve success in due time.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Season’s Tweetings: Santa Teaches Social Media Enrichment

Do you follow Santa on Twitter? I don’t, but I imagine him tweeting his way across a city’s rooftops on December 24th like so many metropolitan food trucks. He could use foursquare to check-in for valuable chimney-descending tips or to know what kinds of cookies to expect, but that might ruin the element of surprise.

Regardless, Santa is no different than most of us – save a red jumpsuit and diminutive slave labor – in that he has been changed by social media. If the millennium-old character can keep up with the times, clearly there’s an opportunity for most organizations’ communications to evolve. In fact, social media Santa – or, if you prefer, Rudolph (@RudolphHoHo) or the horrifying Krampus (@MisterKrampus) – can teach brands of any size an important lesson about enrichment through social media.

Enrichment, in this context, is a concept that organizations can add communications dimensions through providing entertainment, information, and other value-adding layers. Enrichment could entail a number of techniques, and @santaNORAD demonstrated how social media can be used in a unique way to enrich a folkloric figure.

Santa tweeted from the rooftops in 2010 with help from NORAD

Why is enrichment important? It’s an opportunity for brands, organizations, retail outlets, entrepreneurs, and others to flesh-out their digital presences. A website may have clever copy or colloquial terms of service agreements (browse around Moosejaw.com for a nice example), but they’re generally static and most often one-way expressions of “personality.” Social media can be two-way enrichment on a daily, hourly, or real-time basis.

Enrichment isn’t a complicated concept – in fact, it’s dead obvious – but it isn’t easy. Just as firms struggle to “add value” through social media, enrichment is no different and no less vague. It might be helpful to review a few diverse examples:

Backcountry.com (@backcountrycom) – the outdoor sports outfitter uses Facebook and Twitter accounts to give audiences updates on snow fall in mountain towns and promote fans’ photos of death-defying conquests. Promotional messages occur regularly, but only to the benefit of its customers:

Comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) – with nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter and more than 11,000 Facebook fans/friends, Tompkins uses social media channels as witty extensions of his profession, not simply for promoting his gigs or products:

The ONE Campaign (@ONECampaign) – the “grassroots campaign” aims to galvanize more than 460,000 Twitter followers and 150,000+ Facebook fans by providing cause-related information to those interested in its mission. This includes info driven by those same fans and followers:

Of course, I will acknowledge that the use of colloquialisms and engagement is inherently more difficult for certain types of organizations (see: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), but value-adding through enrichment is never impossible. Think about it: Santa isn’t even real and yet he has more than 50,000 followers on Twitter – almost 50 times more than I do and I’m totally real! Yet, NORAD was able to tap into a notion that would enrich an audience member’s experience with its mission through the use of Santa.

That’s a pretty creative use of social media in my book. Can you think of other organizations that use social media for enrichment? Get back to me – I’m off see if NORAD can track down that mischievous New Year’s Baby so I can get a few more things done in 2010.

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How to Create More Content for Your Blog and Kill 2 Birds With 1 Stone

“Darren, do you have any tips for creating more content for my blog? I have grown my blog to become reasonably successful but as it grows find myself with more and more requests and questions from readers that take me away from writing content. What should I do?”—William

Hi William and thanks for the question. I do have one tip that comes to mind that I hope you find useful. It certainly helped me keep my inbox load light and create more content!

I certainly understand the pressure of managing a growing blog, and the demands that come with it. A few years ago, I would wake up in the morning to many reader questions and wonder how I’d ever get any actual posts written.

That was until I realized that the emails in my inbox were actually part of the answer—not the problem.

What I came to see was that many of the questions readers were asking me about the topics of my blog were things that others would be interested in hearing about also. If one person is asking a question, many others are probably thinking it.

I began to approach writing answers to emails differently, so that I could capture my responses and repurpose them as blog posts.

Of course I would normally take off the greeting at the start and farewell remarks at the end of the email—and I might change the opening paragraph to introduce the topic a little more. But I would write the bulk of the response in such a way that it could simply be copied and pasted into a blog post.

In doing so, I killed two birds with one stone:

1. Individual readers were satisfied. Actually, they were ecstatic because they were getting such comprehensive answers.
2. I was creating relevant and useful content simply by clearing my inbox!

The added bonus of this approach is that these posts were written in a much more personal style than normal. It’s amazing how writing something in response to a real person with a real problem or need (instead of covering a random topic for a nameless audience) changes your style of writing.

I hope that this approach is helpful for you. It took a little while for me to build it into my natural workflow, but once I began to think this way, I started to see more and more opportunities to do it. I’d estimate I added three to four posts to my output each week using this technique.

The other thing I’d add is that you can apply the same approach to answering questions from other sources.

For example, I often find myself doing the same thing as I answer questions in forums, on Twitter or Facebook, in the comments on my blog—even the questions I see other bloggers asking on their blogs. Pretty much anywhere you’re asked a question (or where you see someone asking a question) you can use this principle: answer it in such a way that you can repurpose the information for publication on your blog.

Hoping this has given some food for thought! Thanks for the question, William!

Darren

PS: Do you mind if I use this as a blog post?!?

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