Do you know what Blogging Consistency and Frequency are really about?
Yesterday, Syed Balkhi published one of his best posts lately: “Consistency & Frequency Are The Ultimate Downfall of Blogging“. While Syed was probably looking – as he stated at the article’s end – for a bit of controversy, he actually managed to create a very thoughtful post that made me write a follow up, something I rarely do.
Blogging “Experts” always preach that you must be consistent with your blog, and you should post frequently.
This is how Syed starts his article, making it clear where he’s going to hit, the famous “Be consistent, write frequently” blogging tip. While he makes some very good statement on consistency, I would have loved to see a more detailed explanation of what should be understood by “being consistent with your blog”, and since I did not find those, I’ll share my views in this article.
Click here to read the full blog post!
How to Effectively Plan a New Blog Post
You know, planning a new blog post can be one of the most common problems for a new or recurring blogger. At the same time, the quality of one’s content can dwindle if you don’t take the proper time to consider what it is you want to write about, and stay on task. So how do you go about creating that perfect post idea?
Write When You’re Most Productive
To start, you should try writing when you’re the most productive. If you really want your content to sizzle, you need to be on top of your game, ready to outperform. For example, sitting in a comfortable chair and listening to music might be the best writing environment, while a silent library works for others. Naturally, it’s impossible to be able to sit down and be in perfect writing form 24/7, but being prepared to write is important to developing exceptional content.
Before you begin writing, why not try arranging your desk area in a way that suits you? Make your environment as comfortable as possible to get yourself into the writing mood. Try opening a window. Sounds crazy, right? Whatever you might think, creating an atmosphere that you feel at ease in will make you that much more productive.
Click here to read the full blog post!
3 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Ever since blogging has become “mainstream”, companies has discovered a new marketing tool in blogs. Some took blogs even further and transformed them into brand elements and it proved to be a winning decision, as blogs have the power to give a voice and a personality to a company.
But even so, corporate blogging has not always been the best choice for some. Just as with any other marketing tool, it needs to fit your company’s profile, needs and expectations in order to be truly effective. Is a blog really going to help your company? Ask yourself these 3 essential questions before taking the step and launching a new corporate blog.
Question 1: Is the blog a necessity or a caprice?
The decision to launch a corporate blog can be based on many factors and proven advantages of blogs. Among them:
- Empowering the sales process;
- Prompt product feedback and customer support;
- Position team members as experts an thought leaders
- Search engine rank improvement;
- HR tool;
- and so on.
Triple Your Traffic with Content Distribution Techniques
There are billions of blogs in the blogosphere. People always say that creating another blog might not be the better thing since almost everything online is saturated. Of course, that’s a complete baloney! Fortunately 60-70% of blogs don’t get traction and just couldn’t seem to make progress. And it’s because of several reasons which I wouldn’t want to talk about here.
Most people fall into this big misconception about blogging. This misconception is about “post and publish”. People think that the key to getting traffic is by creating a killer post, then publishing it. We all know it’s not the case. If no one reads your blog, then no one is even going to notice you created a good post! Obviously the one thing you have to do is to let people know “you” exists in the blogosphere. How? By spreading your content. Today I would like to talk about how you can possibly triple your traffic by spreading your content. Without further “fluff” here they are:
The 3 C’s of Blogging
How to blog? How to promote content? How to attract readers? How to keep them coming back? The are hundreds of blog offering blogging tips, and Blogsessive is only one of them. But, while running back and forth through the abundance of information, most times we forget about the basic principles of blogging.
Most times, we focus so much and invest too much of our time doing only one thing (ie: writing, promotion etc.) and we forget that blogging is actually a 3 step process, and all 3 steps should get the same level of attention.
These 3 primary steps of blogging are what I call the 3 C’s of blogging, or the 3C process:
- Create
- Communicate
- Collect
Kontain – Flash-based Blogging Platform
Yesterday, Fi (Fantasy Interactive) sent out alpha invitations to their new product, Kontain.
This is one product I’ve signed up and (not very) patiently waited for its launch, as it should be pretty revolutionary in terms of user-friendliness. Basically, it’s the first Flash-based blogging platform open to world wide free public access.
Here’s how the folks at Fi describe Kontain:
Kontain is a free destination for users to media blog and share photos, videos and audio with friends, family, colleagues and even beautiful strangers. The core of each user's experience is media-driven and Kontain takes the everyday concept of blogging to a wider audience by making it easy for users of all demographics to "kontain" and share their life online. Simple enough for Mom and Dad, yet flexible and sophisticated for a web veteran, Kontain aims to be the Internet's premier destination for user-generated content.
The Alpha launch features (which would soon be backed up by a lot more features that are currently under development) as listed on the Kontain website are:
- Easy to Kontain your life
- Upload Photos, Videos and Audio
- Explore Kontain’s most popular
- Search the media way
- Personal dashboard
- Ratings and Popularity
- Commenting
- Basic privacy settings
A look into what’s in development shows us high resolution media uploads, galleries and collections, messaging, groups, subscriptions, stats, possibility of having your “kontainer” embedded on other websites, multimedia comments, rich(er) text editing, notes over multimedia and many more features.
Click here to read the full blog post!
What About the Readers’ Perspective?
Blogging, before being a tool of expression and communication is a tool of desire, especially these days when thousands of people start a new blog each day, hoping to become successful.
It doesn’t matter how each and every one of them defines success. It can be a big readership, new relationships, business leads, money making or whatever, in the end, it starts out from the desire of doing better for yourself.
Unfortunately, that’s the point where most bloggers get stuck. Success is a two-way street, a give and receive relationship between the blogger and its community, and a blogger that cannot see his work from the readers’ perspective is bound to fail.
Have a clear and easy to digest message
As bloggers, you are the experts, your ideas make sense to you and probably a lot of your readers too, but don’t expect everyone to be able to understand and follow your thoughts as easy as if they were of your level.
In order to attract and maintain a good readership you need to appeal to the novice and the expert both. You need to be able to explain things in such way that novices could understand, but interesting enough so that you engage the advanced ones too.
A good way to reach that is to avoid a vocabulary consisting mostly in technical or complex words. Rather than using such a vocabulary, add references to each of your articles, encouraging the novice to find out more about the topic. The experts can still be engaged by leaving enough room for conversation or second opinions, but don’t expect them to come by their own. Ask for opinions. Different people handle the same situation in different ways and those people might be willing, if encouraged, to share their experiences and results.
Click here to read the full blog post!
5 Ways To Take Your Blog To The Next Level
About a gazillion people have blogs today. Devoted to anything from garden gnomes, celeb’s plastic surgery to the life of living in Papa New Guinea, blogs have become an easy way for average Joe to share his daily contemplations with the world. But with so many blogs, at least a couple of hundred per niche, you might need some help in sticking out.
As you can see we have taken the liberty to list five things that will help your blog reach great heights. All tricks below are equally useful and are hence not listed by worth.
1. Update with weekly content
A common expectation on a blog website is frequently updated content. Popular blogs normally have a high percentage of returning visitors through personal bookmarks or RSS feeds. If that is your ambition, you have to make sure to give your visitors reason enough to come back. New spaced out blog posts normally do the trick.
2. Create unique interesting content
Mentioning the importance of quantity and frequency above it is only fair to list quality as yet another important blog preference. And much like this article you should focus on bringing unique, practical and useful information to the reader. Internet users also normally tend to go mental over “How To”-guides and “Top 10″ listings. Quality blog posts will generate more RSS feeds and loyal visitors.
Click here to read the full blog post!
Link Share Special (4)
It’s hard to keep up with the blogosphere, being such a dynamic environment. Great content gets published every single minute, and sometimes, we miss the best things because they get buried deep in a long list of feed updates.
Here’s a list of link that you should not have missed these days:
Reader Blog Critique on BloggingTips.com
Kevin Muldoon of BloggingTips.com has recently started a blog project called Reader Blog Critique. The community response it’s amazing. Bloggers have a good chance of understanding their own blogs from their readers’ perspective and to improve whatever needs improvement.
Could an Ad-Free Blog Work?
According to Tibi Puiu from LostArtofBlogging.com, it can. Tibi explains Why An Ad Free Blog Rocks, covering topics like: advantages and disadvantages of classic monetization and alternative methods of earning a living through blogs. A great, extensive, worth-reading article.
Blog Action Day 2008
This year’s topic on Blog Action Day was Poverty. On October 15th over 12,000 websites with an estimated audience of over 13 million readers published a post about poverty. Amongst them CopyBlogger.com, ProBlogger.net, DailyBlogTips.com, SkellieWag.org, Guardian.co.uk, Lifehacker.com, HuffingtonPost.com, FreelanceSwitch.com and many, many more.
Stories That Sell
That’s what Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com teaches us, by publishing a guide on How to Write a Story That Sells. It’s a well written and filled with examples article that you definitely should read.
More Worth Reading Stories
- Authority Versus Pure SEO by Chris Garrett
- The Price of Closing Comments on Old Posts by Lorelle VanFossen
- How to Choose Categories for Your Blog by Ali Hale on ProBlogger.net
- Search Engine Traffic and Not-so-New Blogs by Steven Snell
- 10 Ways to Improve Navigation in WordPress by John Pratt on HackWordpress.com
Enjoy reading and writing great content! If you’ve recently published an article that you’d like to get included in a “link share” post, do drop me an email.
Breaking the Blogging Patterns
Most niche bloggers have definitely experienced what is called a “writer’s block”. It’s a natural reaction that comes along with writing to much on the same subject and can be induced by many other things, non-blogging related, like the lack of sleep.
Just as writers experience these blocks, readers are no exceptions. They too can experience what people call reader’s block.
The good thing is that writer’s block and reader’s block can be treated or prevented by using the same medicine: Diversity.
Diversify by breaking your blogging patterns
At one time, many of us felt that a certain writing style or topic is more appreciated by our community. The obvious choice was to expand that topic and create follow-ups, or write aticles on other topics, but use the same writing style.
For a period of time, that proves to be a good strategy, but in the long run, you and your community will experience saturation which will lead to a block. This is where diversity should step up and break your blogging pattern.
Blog post alternatives
There are quite a few types of blog posts and writing styles you could experiment with and even mix them up as you find fit for your next article.
Click here to read the full blog post!
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