http://blogsessive.com Visit Blogsessive for daily WordPress blogging tips. Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:09:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Since Alex has been kind enough to allow me to contribute a guest post on his blog, I thought it would be appropriate to write about, well, guest blogging. I believe guest blogging should be a top priority for anyone who is serious about building their online presence. After all, what better opportunity is there to expose your name to a new audience that to post on someone else's blog? Finding the Right Blog I know people like to say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but you want to make sure your guest blog contributes to your overall goal of brand building. For this reason, you should conduct careful research to find a blog suited for your needs. If you're an offshore welder, you probably wouldn’t get much benefit from posting on a blog about flowers. But that’s common sense, right? So, the first step is to find a blog you can contribute your expertise to. After discovering a few blogs in your niche, you want to find one that has a following. If you're going to take the time to create a well crafted guest post, you want to make sure at least a few people are reading it. And with so many fly by night blogs out there, it's hard to find one with a loyal audience. The best way to determine if a blog has a good following is by checking out the comments. If all of the posts consistently generate a few comments, you've probably found a good blog to post on. Getting to Know the Blogger Before you jump right in and ask the blogger if you can contribute a guest post, you should settle down and get to know the blog. Study the old posts, and subscribe to the RSS feed. This will help you get a feel for the general theme and tone of the blog. Furthermore, you should become a regular in the comments section. And, no, saying "good post" after every entry doesn't count as being a regular. As readers of Blogsessive discovered in a recent post, you need to make your comments stand out [1]. Doing this will get the attention of the author, and you can create a relationship this way. It also helps you get a more intimate feel for the blog's audience, which will help you craft your post should you become a guest blogger. Ask the Author If you wait around long enough and you write enough comments, the blogger might eventually ask you to contribute a guest post. Then again, he might not. That's why the best way to land a role as a guest blogger is to come right out and ask for it. As an example, I've been a loyal reader here on Blogsessive for a few months now, and I shot an e-mail to Alex asking if he needed someone to contribute a guest post. As luck would have it, he was going to be out of town for a few days, and he needed someone to step in. Now, here I am. All you have to do is ask. The worst they can say is "no". Making the Most of Your Opportunity Now that you've landed a spot as a guest blogger, the real work comes in. You have one chance to impress this new audience with your knowledge, ability, and personality. It really is a lot to tackle. This is why many guest bloggers fall flat on their faces. Don’t over think your guest post. If you try too hard to be smart and witty, the audience will spot you for the phony you are. Instead, just be yourself. Write a post that shows your knowledge and that fits in with the general theme of the blog. Another mistake guest authors often make is to give a sales pitch. In their mind, this is their big chance to get on stage in front of a new audience, and they have to make the most of it. Unfortunately, there is no quicker way to lose a reader than to try to pawn your product off on them. Instead of viewing your guest post as a chance to sell something, think of it as a chance to build your name and reputation. In my opinion, the biggest benefit of guest blogging is you get to extend your network and gain some authority in the process. Authority and respect are things money can't buy. And, yes, that inbound link you earn from guest blogging is nice too. ;) About the author Eric Brantner is a business copywriter that has served clients from virtually every major industry with freelance copywriting services [2]. Make sure to check out his website at EricBrantner.com [3] and his contributions on the SeoNoobs.com blog [4]. [1] http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/outstanding-comments/ [2] http://www.ericbrantner.com [3] http://www.ericbrantner.com [4] http://seonoobs.com/blog/ http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/start-guest-blogging/ This is a question that probably some of you want to know the answer of. Lately, the posting activity on Blogsessive has fallen to a slower pace. Fear not, Blogsessive is not "shutting down"! I'm around and have been all this time, communicating with those that asked me different questions or simply wrote me emails. Before saying anything else, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Hendry Lee of Blogbuildingu.com [1] for his wonderful guest post published last week: Research and Dominate - How to Strategically Plan Your Blog for Success [2] and to Eric Brantner [3], who's guest post you'll be reading a few hours later. I'm not going to spoil the surprise of his post so make sure to check back later and read it. Back to the publishing flow on Blogsessive, the last two or so weeks have been a total madness. After 9 years of working as a full time employee in the web industry, I've finally decided that it's time to set my own terms of business and to make sure that if I'm going to win, it's because I did what I did and also, if I fail, it should be based on my OWN decisions. So, from August I'll have time to dedicate to my projects, including and focusing on Blogsessive. Also, even if it's a bit early to say more about it, I'm in the middle of setting up a blogs network with a couple of Romanian friends that write for the international audience. I'll let you know more about this when the time is right. Other smaller things have come in the way of my regular activities, such as being invited and getting ready for one of my dearest couple of friends' wedding and also taking time to look for a new motorcycle, which apparently it's quite time consuming. All has been put behind and activity should be back to the regular flow. Thanks to each and every one of you who came here and left comments and emails during this period, to all those who have subscribed to the feed or that did what they do daily, being loyal Blogsessive readers! Thank you! [1] http://blogbuildingu.com [2] http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/research-strategy-success/ [3] http://www.ericbrantner.com http://blogsessive.com/blogsessive-news/whats-up-with-blogsessive/ I am always astounded at the speed I can do research nowadays. What could have taken weeks or a few months suddenly can be accomplished in 30 minutes or less. When it comes to blogging, you can now gather a lot of data for free. This can help you even before you start a blog [1] around that topic, so you are aware of the amount of work you need to do to be one of the best in the market. A simple competitive analysis, for instance, can help you determine what you should do next and create a strategy to better penetrate the market. (Like it or not, when you blog, you are communicating with the market.) What's astounded me most is the fact that more bloggers don't take advantage of the Internet from this standpoint. For example, if you are looking forward to start a blog about gardening, it is impossible to dominate that niche alone unless you have a team working full time for years to build massive content for for the blog. Gardening is a huge industry. You are more likely to get into the top 10 if you target a sub niche. Rose gardening comes to my mind -- not that I know anything about growing roses. By the way, why getting into the top 10? The Beauty of Being the Market Leader Don't get me wrong. You can make very good living by keeping your business small and self-manageable, if you prefer to be a solopreneur. A friend of mine is silently making six-figure income by selling to a quite crowded niche. He was not even known as the expert in the market. If that's what you want, it is perfectly fine. However, if you want to grow big, here are a few facts. You need to think about the 80-20 (Pareto) principle. Basically it says that... "For many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." In niche blogging, perhaps the number is more like 95/5 or even 99.9/0.1. Only a few blogs are really going to make it to the top. Consider yourself lucky if you find a crowded and rabid niche with moderate amount of competitions. A top 10 niche blog is only going to be more successful because of the following reasons: It will only grow stronger. Once you have a lot of traffic, every time you update your blog, there will be tons of people link to you, sending you even more traffic. People want to be part of it. Engagement rate becomes higher. People will spend more time on the blog than any other sites combined. Credibility and trust. If you sell anything online, you should know how trust affects sales. Higher advertising rates. When a lot of advertisers compete to tap into the blog's audience, you can charge even more. How to Become One of the Best If you have the chance to start over, or even if you don't, you can do the following to focus (and refocus) on your niche to zero in on something that you can possibly handle with the amount of resources you have, and become one of the best blogs in the topic. Take into account that you can always hire or outsource once you are getting the momentum and start earning from your blog. So here it is. The key to dominate and win the game is to study the battle field and the enemies. Find out what they are doing and create strategic plan to do better. Simple enough, but how do you actually implement it? Identify the top 10 blogs in your niche Use keyword research tools [2] to determine top 10 most frequently searched keywords in your niche and feed those keywords, one at a time, into Technorati or Google. Write down the list of blogs that appear in the result pages. For Google, you may have to go to the second or third page before you come down to the 10th blog. Using a Firefox add-on like SEO for Firefox [3], you can get a lot of data like Google PageRank, number of inbound links from Yahoo, Alexa and Compete ranks and other information. Tips: You may find spreadsheet software extremely useful in organizing these data. Perform a Detailed Analysis of What They Do Once you get the list of 10 blogs, now it is time to visit them and do some home work. Subscribe to the RSS feed. You definitely want to get the blogs' feed into your news reader. Chances are good they have a strong blog's subscriber base. Pay attention to their content model and see why it works so effective. Popular blogs doesn't always keep their blog updated several times a day. You may be able to determine the publishing schedule based of the pattern you notice. Observe the writing style. Some people have natural talent in writing. If that is a factor that contributes to the success, you want to know it. You will be surprised that a lot of bloggers really don't write perfectly. They just have the passion to write conversationally and get across their message very well. Identify marketing strategies. You can't always see what they do behind the scenes but sometimes you can figure out things by doing a bit more research. If you see a blog post that is very popular in social media, start thinking strategically what made it work. Find out how they build responsive audience. If the bloggers choose to enable comments, you will often notice a blog with 1,000 subscribers will have far more comments per post than one with 10,000 subscribers. There should be a reason behind it. I recommend make it a part of your analysis. I'm sure there will be some other things I have missed, so be flexible and creative when analyzing those blogs. Expand Your View to Include More Blogs One reason why we only perform detailed analysis on the top 10 blog is to keep you from a syndrome called analysis paralysis. While this is important, you should not overdo it. At the end of the day, what really matter are content, promotion, and networking (with the audience and other bloggers). However, once you have done the analysis above, you can expand the horizon and enrich your research by including more blogs. Not all top blogs are going to have the best of everything. Some ideas will be available in other blogs. What you can learn from those blogs: Design details. I got the idea to include a content feed icon at the end of every of blog post from a new blog. I really like that idea so I test it. Perhaps it will turn more of the social media traffic into subscribers but I haven't figured that out yet. (It seems like a few other more popular bloggers also use the same technique so I'm quite sure it will work.) Diversity of content formats. I started to see a few smaller blogs complement textual content with video and audio podcast. Some of them were doing very well when they posted reviews. There were always a surge in comments every time the bloggers posted new reviews, perhaps due to how he balanced the information between the drawbacks of the product and promotion. Methods to jazz up the posts. In recent years, I've seen bloggers include images from Flickr and other image hosting sites to make the structure of the blog posts more dynamic. Additional moneymaking opportunities. [4] Many smaller blogs that provide monthly earnings report show that creating an e-book can help building traffic and also income. This is an example of one of the most overlooked promotion strategies bloggers make. For beginning bloggers, this means a tremendous opportunity to reach people who are otherwise not available if they don't tap into this one idea. Ideas are around us. You can often trigger your mind by stimulating it randomly, such as what we use in this section. Review I hope you jot down ideas as you go through the process above. Based on your notes, you should now have an idea about what to do to build your blog and dominate the niche. It is hard to work based on scribbles of notes though. The next step is to plan your approach to produce content, promote it and use marketing strategies appropriately. Finally, if you haven't yet implemented an action management system like Getting Things Done, I recommend you to take a look at it. It will make your life more organized. Take action! Photo credits by Luis Alves [5]. About the author This is a guest post by Hendry Lee [6]. Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome technology challenges in starting and growing their blogs. Get daily tips, techniques and strategies by visiting his blog at http://blogbuildingu.com [7]. [1] http://blogbuildingu.com/how-to-start-a-blog [2] https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal [3] http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html [4] http://blogbuildingu.com/make-money-blogging [5] http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Fenix [6] http://blogbuildingu.com [7] http://blogbuildingu.com http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/research-strategy-success/ From where I stand, the greatest advantage of blog writing is, without doubt, the instant feedback. Unlike classic media, like newspapers or magazines, our blogs give us the possibility of getting valuable opinions on every post that we publish. Of course, not all feedback should be considered valid, but this is a matter of personal choice and analytic skills. Writing reader engaging posts is definitely one of the biggest challenges of every blogger, since these posts are usually excellent ways to create and grow a community around your blog. At a short glance, among the advantages of writing reader engaging posts we find: Community growth - Obviously, writing quality posts has the power to turn casual visitors into loyal readers, as long as you maintain a good flow; Social media exposure - The more interesting and better written the post, the more people will want to share and recommend it across services like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and so on; Conversations - A good post is more likely to entice readers to engage in commenting. This is a great way to further develop the topic or even generate new content ideas; Networking - Engaging posts are great ways to network with other bloggers in your niche. Write something appealing and you'll surely make their link-round-ups; Quality traffic - Of course, all of the above are great ways to generate either a great deal of traffic or quality traffic. Tips for writing reader engaging posts With such important advantages and assuming that the topic you have chosen for your post is interesting enough, you should concentrate on making it more conversational and giving it that personal touch. To do so, here are some of the most important things you need to consider when writing. Write opinion posts Even if your post is simply a news item, you should always try and take some time to express your own views on that particular topic. Some will agree, others won't, but it definitely should a boost for the discussion. Use the 2nd person, singular or plural "You", "your", "yours" are very powerful words, mostly when used to address a single person. They establish a direct connection between you, the writer (see, I've just used it), and them, your readers. By using them you're more likely to make your readers feel like what you wrote is there especially for them, thus feel the need to leave feedback and answers. Ask questions No, asking questions does not make you look stupid. It's all about asking the right questions, in the right place and form. Let's take a product review for example. Do you think that asking your readers about their personal experience with that particular product would make you look bad? Absolutely not; it will only show your readers that their opinion matters to you. Leave path for readers to explore Writing insightful and in depth post is important. The better the quality, the better your reputation as an expert in the field gets. Still, it's also important to leave "unexplored" paths for readers to develop in the comments section, and why not, on their own blogs as follow-ups (this will probably get you some backlinks too). Also, if you're trying to sell services that relate to you posts, it would be a good idea to keep some "business secrets" to yourself, or simply for future blog posts. Focus on delivering to your target audience It's very important that you write with your target audience in mind. The people visiting and reading your blog have niche-specific needs. Focus on covering those needs and solving their problems. This will encourage feedback and contribute to your reputation. Be concise and effective Don't strive to write a 1000 words blog post just because a famous blogger does so. Write it because that's the amount of words required to present the topic without any useless additions. Keep your post long enough to incorporate all your ideas and short enough to encourage visitors to read it in full. Also, use enough spacings and elements that break the natural paragraph flow, like lists, subheadings, images, quotes and so on. Writings are for readers. Sounds basic, but focus on it! Indeed, whenever you write, keep the human factor in mind. I'm not saying to ignore search engines or social media potential. Just to write for your readers and spice up the post seamlessly with elements for SEO and social media. Now, what was your most reader engaging and comments generating post about? http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/engaging-writing/ [1] Simple Balance theme is a 3 column widget-ready WordPress theme. Some of the features include: Widget-ready left and right sidebars; Top 468x60 ad space; Right sidebar built-in ad space for 125x125 banners; SEO smart coding for titles and content; WordPress 2.5 ready; Valid cross-browser tested XHTML and CSS; Possibility to fully display the latest X posts on homepage instead of the post excerpt (to prevent duplicate content issues); Not to forget, beautifully balanced design; Since this is version 1.0 expect some changes in future versions to make this theme even more appealing. Suggestions are kindly appreciated. Enjoy the Simple Balance theme! Preview and download To download Simple Balance, follow this link: [download#1#size] You can preview the Simple Balance theme on this demo server [2]. More info on this theme is available here [3]. If you use and enjoy this theme, you could consider a PayPal donation of your choice: [1] http://demo.blogsessive.com/index.php?wptheme=Simple+Balance [2] http://demo.blogsessive.com/index.php?wptheme=Simple+Balance [3] http://demo.blogsessive.com/wordpress-themes/simple-balance-free-wordpress-theme http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tools/simple-balance-free-wordpress-theme-released/ Interaction has always been one of the strongest points of blogs. Every blogger sharing advice will tell you how important it is to interact with bloggers in your niche, through comments. Some of them will tell you that comments even generate a great deal of traffic, which is true, but not in the way most people understand it. Traffic generation through comments is a thing to look for in the long run. Don't expect to receive 1000 visits only by posting a comment on a famous blog; that is not going to happen (with some very rare exceptions). Instead, focus on leaving meaningful comments on every post that you read and enjoy, focus on leaving comments that stand out. How can an outstanding comment help you? First of all, I'll say that in my opinion, leaving a comment is not a thing you should do to get or expect something in return. Still, constantly posting interesting comments will help build up your reputation with certain communities in your niche. Reputation generates interest. Member of those communities will want to find out more about you and will come to your blog, where, if they find great content there's a good chance they'll visit again and again, becoming loyal readers. Further more, not only community members could find interest in your comments, but also blog owners. This can help your networking efforts and also generate a good amount of backlinks to your articles if the blog owners find your content relevant to a post they're going to write or simply add in those "link round-up" posts. As I said, the effects of focusing on leaving outstanding comments are not instantly visible, but rather show themselves in the long run, by generating a constant or increasing amount of "secured traffic" based on loyal, returning visitors, by growing your own blog's community and by building up a better reputation for yourself (creating awareness). 6 ways to make outstanding comments Whenever I decide to leave a comment on a blog post I ask my self three questions: Was that post useful or interesting to me? Can I express a valid opinion on the topic? Will my comment be useful to someone? If the answer is "Yes" to at least two of these questions, I then proceed to leaving the actual comment following a few personal guidelines: 1. Never leave short and meaningless comments. I'm sure that everyone has seen those "Great post, X!" comments floating around in the blogosphere. I'm sure that some people really feel that way about a blog post, while others leave that kind of comments only to get listed between the commentators. Showing appreciation that way it's nice, but unfortunately it will rarely get you noticed. 2. Extend the topic If the topic happens to meet your field of expertise, try to leave a comment that will extend the blog post. Explore other possibilities and ideas. Think of it as writing a small follow up. 3. Provide personal insight If you are familiar with the topic and have personal experience with similar situations, don't hesitate to share. Different tips apply and have different effects to different readers. Talking about your personal experience will help comment readers identify with your situation and estimate future effects. 4. Be communicative After all, comments are a form of interaction. Whether you're going to engage in a discussion with the post author or the community, it will prove to be a good strategy of getting you noticed. Blog owners appreciate community members that contribute to starting and developing interesting and intense discussions. 5. Identify yourself Comments are not trackbacks. Trackbacks are automatically left by blogs and blog posts, comments are left by humans (spam bots not included). Start using a real name or at least a nick name in the "name" field of the comment form. Personally, while in most cases I approve almost every comment, even if it's signed with a keyword phrase (as long as it is on topic), I tend to show less interest in comments not signed with a name. Imagine a real life conversation going like this: "Hi Alex, these are good tips! I'm looking forward to implementing them." "Thank you, 'internet marketing'. I'm glad that you've enjoyed them." Sounds a bit weird doesn't it? It's not a pleasant situation. 6. Be a critic, not a hater No blogger should think that he holds the absolute truth and must be ready to be criticized. If you're going to leave a negative comment, try to use common sense and arguments. If your critique and arguments are valid, it's likely that the author will give you credit for them and even be thankful and so will the community. Things to avoid when commenting Just like some things are sure to get you noticed and give you a good reputation, other things could have a negative effect on you and your blog. Avoiding the following should keep you safe in most cases: Do not over-promote yourself or your blog /services; Do not include irrelevant or too many links in your comments; Do not link again to the same URL provided with the comment form; Do not harass the author or members of his community; Do not use caps excessively; Do not use excessive text formatting (bold, italic, underline); Do not make excessive use of emoticons. Over to you These are my personal guidelines, guidelines I follow when posting or reading comments. Now, tell me, what do you consider a good commenting strategy? What do you do in order to leave outstanding comments? http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/outstanding-comments/ So, what's up with Blogsessive lately? Well, in short, here it goes: Simple Balance WordPress Theme As you might know, I've been working on the "Simple Balance" WordPress theme that I plan to release for free download. The design has been fully coded, validated and cross-browser checked. All that I need to do now is to implement the code on a WP theme structure.  A couple of days at most, so, stay tuned. Blogsessive offering 4 PRO logo designs If you're in need of one, check out Plurkable.com's PlurkCAST contest [1], with Blogsessive among its sponsors, and find out how you can win one. Want to contribute to Blogsessive? Then, give it your best shot. Write a good article that would perfectly fit in Blogsessive's general content guidelines and send me an email [2] with it. All emails considered. The Blogsessive Debate We've had our first debate [3], now it's time for another topic. On Wednesday we'll talk about interaction between the blogger and his/her community. And of course... More interesting articles coming up on Blogsessive, including tomorrow's post, "How to Make Your Comments Stand Out" and another post in the Blog SEO Tips series on Sunday, discussing relevant keywords and some keyword suggestion tools. This is going to be a nice week! [1] http://plurkable.com/2008/06/30/plurkable-contest/ [2] http://blogsessive.com/contact [3] http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/blosessive-debate-loyal-readers/ http://blogsessive.com/blogsessive-news/latest-blogsessive-news/ One of the most basic, yet highly effective things you need to consider when doing blog optimization is using keywords to indicate search engine spiders what your posts are about. The more relevant to the page's content, the better the search engine ranking. Keyword optimization is part of on-page SEO, which means that it is a part of the optimization you'll make on your blog's code. What you should know right from the start is that keywords can give your blog posts a boost in rankings or get your blog out of the first and most important search results. It all comes down to how well you're using them and how relevant they are to your content. Rules of keyword optimization Since you're reading this, I have no doubt that you understand how important well-researched keywords are and that you're willing to make better use of them. These are some of the most important things you need to consider: Things to do Consider using keywords relevant to your article; If the keywords are somehow related to each other, that's a plus (for example: internet marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing); Use different keywords for different blog posts. In most cases, search engines will return two results from you blog at most, so having five or six posts optimized for the same set of keywords would be a waste of content; Write your article first, but with the right keywords in mind, not the other way around; Use your most important keyword(s) in the title tag [1]. If you're using a SEO plugin, you can set a different page title than that of your blog post; Use those keywords in the META description [2] too; Use the keywords in the title of your blog post and preferably in the first phrase or paragraph of your article; Edit the post slug (permalink [3]) so that it contains the most important keyword and also try to keep it as short as possible; Place the keyword(s) a few more times (don't overdo it) throughout the article in a humanly natural order and context; If there are other older relevant posts on your blog, try to create backlinks from them using the selected keywords as anchor text (same goes for external incoming links). Things to avoid Don't target too many keywords. Use as many keywords as you feel that are relevant to your content which means they are present on the page and have value to a visitor. A list of 50 keywords means that most probably at least 40 of them are almost totally irrelevant; Don't use irrelevant keywords. If your post is about NASA's recent trip to Mars, I don't know how Demi Moore or Vi*gra would fit in the picture; Using text formatting on some keywords in your content is OK. Bolding everything out is not; Avoid duplicating keywords in your META tags; Placing a list of comma separated keywords in your title tag and META description is a big NO. Write something natural and appealing to humans; Avoid keyword stuffing. Don't fill your blog post with keywords only to increase the keyword density. It is unnatural, provides a negative user experience and will probably get you penalized by search engines. Conclusions Some say that keywords don't really matter when it comes to search engine rankings, and since everyone is entitled to an opinion, I will disagree with that. Same people say that their blogs or websites rank high even if they neglected keyword optimization. That is true, but I'd like to see how well they perform when they'll be competing with a well optimized blog or website when similar factors are on the table, like: almost same age (possibly younger), number of indexed pages, number of backlinks etc. Keyword optimization is part of a much bigger and complex process. Acting blind in front of it is like sticking your head in the sand, hoping that if you don't see anyone, nobody will see you. Next week, we'll talk about choosing relevant keywords and discuss a few keyword suggestion tools. [1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html [2] http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp [3] http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/blog-seo-tips-keyword-optimization/ Friends, relationships, family, these are today's topics in the Domain Names for Bloggers series. Available Domain Names TabooSmashing.com DefinitelyLove.com TeenageCrushes.com GirlyCrush.com CrushCoach.com CoolestMother.com & CoolestFather.com EligibleDad.com & EligibleMom.com FriendshipAdvisor.com Befriended.net WordPress? WPTip.com WPTweaks.com For further help, please read the How to Register a Domain Name for Your Blog [1] article on Blogsessive. Also, if you find this post helpful and you register any of the domains above, please leave a comment with the registered domains, so that I can erase them from the list, and it would be nice to know that one of my readers registered them. [1] http://blogsessive.com/domain-names/how-to-register-a-domain-name-for-your-blog http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/domain-names-for-bloggers-9/ As you might have noticed, the past week was a bit more quiet on Blogsessive, but before I get to the reason behind that, let me tell you some things about me and Blogsessive. For a blog, I always thought that there are a few critical steps that can shape its future. In my case, Blogsessive took these steps successfully. Blogsessive has passed the first three months of existence; Blogsessive has gathered over 100 RSS subscribers and Twitter followers; And most important, a wonderful community began to grow around this blog. None of these steps would have been possible without you, Blogsessive's loyal readers. For that, I sincerilly thank you! As I've shared with you in a previous post [1], I believe that blogging's biggest value resides in its education capabilities. So, during the past (almost) four months, I've learned many new things, along with you and from your comments. Those of you that read the about [2] page, know that I have a background in web design and development and what better way to repay you for all your help and loyalty than by putting those skills at work, as I've done when building this blog's design from scratch. Simple Balance WordPress Theme Soon (most probably this weekend), I'll make available for download a free theme that I've worked on lately, called "Simple Balance". There are still things that need more work at a coding level, but I can definitely give you a preview of the theme: Again, thank you for visiting and being active on Blogsessive! Alex [1] http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tips/blogging-blogging-tips/educational-blogging/ [2] http://blogsessive.com/about/ http://blogsessive.com/blogging-tools/for-blogsessives-loyal-readers/