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A positive response to negative word of mouth -By Andy Sernovitz

Expert: Andy Sernovitz, WordofMouthBook.com

#30 of 30

We’ve all had to deal with negative blog posts about us, our companies, or causes we believe in. It’s hard to ignore … and it’s even harder to resist getting into an all-out battle of the bloggers.

Try to resist the temptation to get drawn into a fight. As they say “Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” You can’t win a fight on someone else’s blog – they will always get the last word.

But you can do a few reasonable things to calm things down, and get your side of the story out there.

What you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.

You can make sure that the conversation ends on a positive note, that your views are heard, and that you’re part of the community.

Working with bloggers is hard for many PR-trained executives because of the inherent lack of control over the situation. It’s about learning to respond and participate instead of plant and initiate. It’s no longer about managing what other people say, but letting your own words speak for themselves. And it’s about earning respect (but not necessarily agreement) from bloggers by showing you know how to participate the right way.

Five steps to dealing with negative blog posts

1. Listen carefully. Every day you should be searching for your name, company, and products on the blog search engines. You should always know what is being said about your company, and never get caught by surprise. Stay in the loop, because it’s too late to respond to a post that you discover weeks after it appears.

2. Participate. Nothing earns more credibility with bloggers than a company that is part of the blog community. Blog. Comment. Converse. Don’t be a stranger. Become part of the community. It’s too late if you aren’t already blogging when a negative attack happens. You can’t earn respect after you need it … you need to earn it up front, and build a storehouse of good will.

3. Show that you are listening. Many bloggers are (pleasantly) shocked when they find out that a company is actually reading what they write. Post a note when you read something you like. Post replies and comments when you see unfair criticism. Post an offer of help when you hear a complaint. Always identify your affiliation with your company, and offer to solve any problems. In many, many cases, this is the most important thing you can do.

4. Convert critics when you can. You can’t make all people happy all time, but you sure can try. Work your butt off to find ways to make people happy. You should be doing this for all customers, but you should work extra hard to help bloggers. There is a double payoff here: First, you’ll have the story of a happy resolution as the most recent post on the blogs. Second, much research shows that converted critics are the most enthusiastic fans.

5. Write for the record. In the end, don’t expect to win every point in every blog debate. It’s not possible. What you can do, however, is tell your side of the story. Post comments or entries in your own blog for posterity. Remember the permanent record, and write what you want history to see.

And then … move on.

Once you’ve made a genuine attempt to resolve a problem, and after you’ve told your side of the story, it’s time to let it go. You’ve done all you can, and anything else will just drive more traffic to the negative post.

The Bottom Line

If you want a good rep in the blogosphere, you need to be good. Genuinely good.

Your reputation is the amount of respect you earn, less the number of people you annoy. So choose to earn respect.

In the end, it’s much more fun to go to work each day at a respected company that is honest, fun, and treats people well. You might as well work to make that happen.

Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions -By Jeremy Wright

Expert: Jeremy Wright, b5media

#29 of 30

Y’know, I remember back when blogging was simple. More community oriented. Less commercial. There were no “blog measurement” companies, no “blog consultants”, hell there were probably only 3 companies that had blogs at all.

A simpler time. A quainter time. The wild, wild west. Home, home on the blog… Where the jerks and the buffalo roam.

Yep, them were simpler times.

And then, just like our precious wild west, somebody realized there was gold in them thar hills. I still remember the original feud that raged across the blogging world back in 2003 about ads on blogs. At the time it was a shitstorm (pardon my French) around “running AdSense on your blog will compromise your integrity!” I mean it was serious! People unsubscribed from A List bloggers by the dozens! The blogging world nearly imploded!

It’s pretty funny looking back on it.

But eventually bloggers got used to ads. Readers got used to ads. And the truth was that almost nobody’s integrity was compromised. And those who had their integrity compromised were self-selected out and shunned.

From Day 1, bloggers have always stumbled along in the world of advertising.

Even at b5media, the blog network I help run, that we’ve often stumbled along a little bit. Sure, there’s a bit of a process for going from 3$ a day (where we started) to 3,000$ a day (what we’re about to reach)… but we totally ignored that process. We made a lot of mistakes. This post is designed to share a few of the lessons we learned while stumbling along in the dark. Sure we got lucky, had a fantastic team and had great timing… but we still made a crazy number of mistakes! I hope you’re able to learn something from them

Have a Vision

I remember in early 2005 when the first email that kicked b5media off was written. It was something like “hey, we’re all making decent money, let’s pool together and sell our blogs as a package!”

Famous last words, eh? (yep, I’m Canadian!)

Then, like a bunch of putzes, we figured “well, if we’re going to do that we should put them under their own brand” and “if we’re going to have our own brand we should launch new blogs” and “if we’re going to do that we should hire writers”.

One of our biggest mistakes in the early days was having a clear vision. We did fairly well at planning 2-3 months out, but we simply weren’t able to figure out how the company would grow 2-3 years down the road. What would it look like if we had 200 blogs, tens of millions of pageviews a month, millions a year in revenue? We were pretty good at imagining the status quo growth (10-20% per month)… But because we didn’t envision big growth, we often had to stop in the middle of the highway, open up the hood and go “hang on, if this continues we have some changes to make here!”
It’s pretty funny looking back on it.

Basically, because we spent our first year playing catch-up with b5media’s potential (which felt like trying to race a boulder tearing down a mountain!) we simply didn’t do enough looking ahead to the future and we didn’t do enough “what would happen if?” type discussions. Who knows where we’d be if we had (I’m hoping it’s not Iowa… *shudder @ Iowa*)?

Shut Up Until You Have Something to Say

I remember the day we launched b5. Duncan and I had been working basically non-stop for 3 weeks. We’d found bloggers, picked names, installed WordPress, designed themes, put plugins in, done the homepage… it was crazy. Absolutely crazy! We were all so excited that we … well, we kind of got ahead of ourselves. The day of launch we realized there was no tagline. So in a rush of excited, youthful enthusiasm we made the site headline “b5media – a new kind of blogging network”.

Yeah, that was a good move.

We got absolutely roasted. Especially because just weeks earlier, Weblogs, Inc. had sold to AOL for 25M$ (give or take). Everyone said we were just followers, that we’d copied WIN’s model, that there was nothing different about b5 at all and that we’d be dead in 2 weeks, nevermind 2 months.

Yep, a great move.

It didn’t matter that we’d been working on the project for 6 months, that we were trying to basically do the opposite of WIN, and that the tagline was really just a funny placeholder to us. It also didn’t matter that we had big plans! Big ideas! Big … erm… yeah.

What mattered, and what I’ll never forget, is that we spoke too soon. We knew it would take time to show off all of our ideas, but we wanted to tell the world how great our ideas were right now! Hell, we still haven’t done half of what we originally set out to do!

Only talk about things when you’re ready to show them off, or when you already have a history of doing cool shit. And even then…

The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

We started b5media with a few key things that we wanted to accomplish (one of the things we were very, very good at early on was documenting things… we had to be, until we got funded nobody in the company had ever even met!):

1. Make our bloggers famous – every chance we got we wanted to promote our bloggers

2. Value community – we honestly felt (and now know) that a strong internal community can make anything happen

3. Focus on great writers and keeping them happy – do this and the rest (traffic, revenue, etc) will happen

4. Build an industry – we’ve believed from day 1 that working with other networks, other owners and building real partnerships and sharing resources was the only way to turn the hodgepodge of networks into a real industry

Each of the biggest mistakes made in b5’s history was caused by us forgetting about one of these things. Sometimes we’d forget how important a healthy community was and make some bull-headed decision and it would hurt! Other times we’d focus more on b5 than on the health of our industry and find that other companies didn’t want to work with us as much.

We’ve never had a mission statement; the above 4 points are as close as we’ll likely ever come. But when you have a mission, you really, really need to stick to it!

Challenges of Growth

When we first launched b5media, it was our goal that within 3 months we’d grow to 50 blogs and 100,000 pageviews per month. What ended up happening? 100 blogs and 1 million pages per month. We weren’t a TechCrunch or a Boing Boing or a Gawker. But we had serious growth challenges. Hell, we still do!

We’ve had challenges in:

1. Keeping servers up – we started out sharing my 5$/month hosting plan. We’re now at 12 high-end servers. Each transition step was painful!

2. Managing the platform – running 200 blogs, maintaining the software, managing plugins, upgrading stuff… is HARD!

3. Paying bloggers – Ooh, blogger pay. We started out doing a type of revenue sharing (we did 60/40, but gave bloggers 100% of the first 100$ each month so it was basically 50/50). We’ve now moved to a 2-tier system where bloggers get a base pay (50-250$ depending on experience) plus a traffic bonus (1.65$ currently, though it goes up every quarter). The truth is that finding a fair way to pay the stay-at-home mom who loves gardening and just wants to write about gardening while also ensuring that the high-traffic blogger who has a massive audience are both compensated fairly is HARD! Paying our community has been, and will likely always be, a challenging exercise!

4. Stats – The metrics industry is in a state of upheaval right now. If we measure our stats the way some of our competitors measure theirs we’d be doing 30,000,000 pageviews per month. If we measure it the way others do, we’d have 7,000,000 pageviews per month. Finding a way to measure stats that is both accountable (ie: to advertisers) and stable (ie: for bloggers) has been one of our biggest challenges.

5. Designs – Yeah, when we have challenges we try and make them major! Blog design is a massive challenge for us. In an ideal world every blog would be totally unique, and totally imbued with personality. But doing that makes it totally impossible to manage the backend of those blogs centrally (which is fine with 15 or 20 blogs, but stupid with 200 or 300). Walking that tightrope between maintainability and customizability has been a huge challenge for us. The new templates we’re rolling out now are our newest attempt at this: they rely on a core template, but allow bloggers and Channel Editors to move elements around, do some minor restyling and add their own elements (like widgets and such). It’s not perfect, but yeah

And those are just the biggest challenges! We’ve gotten into useless fights with competitors, had to put out new contracts for all of our bloggers, had to move the company across country lines, raised Venture Capital funding, had to part ways with a founder, spent too much money on meals with potential partners, had to manage acquisition talk…

Running a blogging empire is a lot of work!

But it’s a lot of fun

If you’re looking to go from 0-3$/day or from 3$/day to a full-time wage or even trying to start a major blog-based empire, I have only 3 more tips for you:

1. Make sure you really, really want to do it first… It’s not easy. Sure, it’s rewarding, but if you can’t handle 100-hour weeks for months at a time it probably isn’t for you, heh.

2. Plan, plan, plan… Build financial models, traffic models, everything. Ask yourself what happens if you only grow by 1/10 of what you planned… Ask yourself what happens if you grow by 10000% of what you planned… Planning makes the world go round!

3. Build a great team… I can’t tell you the number of times the team and community at b5media have saved the company. Hell, how many times they’ve saved me and kept me sane. It’s way more balanced now than it was in the early days, but even today it’s the team and our community of absolutely amazing bloggers that makes us tick and that lets us do cool stuff. Without them, we’d be nothing, nada, kaput.

It’s never perfect. It’s always fun. It’s always scary. It never stops. But going from Blog to Blog, Inc. is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. We aren’t “there” yet, but if we can stay a community, stay a team and stay focused on what truly matters, we will eventually get “there”!

See you at the finish line. We’ll bring the mojitos!

What is this thing called a blog anyway? A Perspective from India -By Keith Dsouza

Expert: Keith Dsouza, Techie Buzz

#28 of 30

Blogging in India did not build up much momentum until the last couple of years. Till then, blogging was a medium used by a select few people who were already aware of it. Even though I had a passion for writing, taking up blogging took a longer time for me as I was not aware of it even though I used the Internet on a daily basis.

It was when one of my friends came up with this topic of blogs that I realized what blogging was. The first thing I learned about blogging from my friend was that he made money every month from his blogs and how many hits he got from Google.
This was the biggest mistake of my blogging experience, thinking of a blog as a money making tool rather than a medium of communication with countless numbers of people who I have never met or known.

But within a few months, I liked blogging and so money went down to second rank on my list. I did make my first 100$ after 6 months of blogging, but that was just the icing on the cake, because within six months I had started enjoying blogging so much that I was finally hooked on it. I went from owing one domain to owning two in the first 3 months itself.

I have made quite a few mistakes in my blogging career. I didn’t follow a niche and wrote just about everything on the same blog. I write more about technology so mixing a personal blog with technology didn’t turn out to be the right choice. People would be more hesitant to visit my blog to read tech related news as it was in my personal name.

Though I corrected the mistake and bought another domain name within a couple of months and moved my tech news to that domain, it was a costly mistake because I lost those readers I had generated in the first couple of months.

Along the way, I’ve made lots of friends across the blogosphere, thus coming to know people from various places which would have been impossible if I hadn’t taken up blogging. The reason I am writing this post is also because of a dear friend, Liz Strauss.

Mistakes, mistakes and more mistakes

The hardest part about blogging is that many people take it up just as a medium of making money and in the end earning nothing and losing a medium of communication. Many bloggers tend to get lazy if they are not making money because that’s the reason they took up blogging for. Many such blogs die a painful death, even if the blogger is an extremely good writer.
One way I see many bloggers err is that they sometimes just write for the sake of writing completely unaware that what they write is being communicated to their readers. I have come across blogs where the title is good but the English is horrible or at times, the whole thing is horrible. I have had to use the close button the moment I have read the first paragraph because if I don’t understand what I am reading, what’s the point in reading it?

It’s ironic how people assume others to interpret things when they cannot understand it. Communication using blogs has to be good if not perfect. Though there are many blogs that are very good, there are far too many that are very bad.

Many bloggers do not realize that content is king and if they have good content people will definitely want to come to their site. Once the blog is successful, money will also follow.

The other thing is that there are far too many duplicate posts being created. What I read on one blog will be a copy of what I read in another blog a few hours ago without much effort made to write the post in their words.

If there is a major release by a company like Google many posts have the same content, though it is bound to happen, some effort should be made by the author so that the information being passed through the blog is in his own words, something that makes a user read it again even after the information he has already devoured.

Many a times a flaw found in software gets more attention than the software itself, so if the blog is about software, rather than writing about the software, it could be more useful to use it and find out its features and limitations and write a post about that.
I had an experience when Google Calendar was released, many people wrote about it being released. I took the time to use the software and found out that it did not work in IE7 passing back that information to my users through the blog. It made a lot of sense for me to do that, unfortunately not many bloggers do that.

Another thing is many bloggers do a lot of SEO for their sites. They tend to write posts for search engines not humans. Few succeed but many more wither away.

Lack of original posts and ideas

Another thing about many of the blogs I’ve seen is the lack of originality in the articles, most of the blog posts are news picked up from the blogosphere or new software releases which is bound to duplicate, though that’s not bad as not all readers are aware of all the things at times so imparting that information is not bad, but writing an original post is a must, which many bloggers tend not to do.

I like to read articles from Digital Inspiration as it posts original articles. LifeHacker is pioneer of original articles and I love reading those along with CyberNet Technology News.

I have made a few posts which are original and help users solve problems or add value to their computers. Whenever I have solved a problem which I cannot resolve using search engines, I make a blog post out of it so that my readers can benefit from them. Few articles were related to un-installing Media Player 11 when it was in beta stage (I get about 200 visitors from Google for this), mounting box.net in windows explorer, fixing Firefox search box problem etc.

Making such original posts regularly increases the value of the blog and keeps readers coming in from various search engines even months after you have written a post, since it is more likely to turn up in search results.

Also most of the new trends that pick up in the blogosphere make its way into Indian blog sites rather than the other way around. Contribution to the blogosphere by writing articles is a great thing but we need to also contribute with more trends that are used by others. A recent trend was that of guest writing which picked up a lot of momentum in the last couple of months.

That’s a definite sore point missing in the Indian blogosphere.

Abuse and Misuse

Many new bloggers abuse the blogosphere to get more traffic. A couple of things I have noticed is that many new bloggers comment on better rated blogs which will be read by a lot of people as a way to get traffic. This is a menace and cannot be identified as lots of comments relate to the topics.

Another thing I have seen is that many bloggers post their own content to sites like Digg and Reddit using different identities and getting a meager amount of traffic but in the process losing credibility in front of thousands of people and also misusing a system to generate traffic.

I have seen literally every new article from many new sites in the upcoming pages of Digg. This is what irks me as many new bloggers use this platform to build their sites which is not wrong but in doing this they lose many a readers and may really not have a chance to be on the Digg home page even if they write a very good article.

Lack of Information

When I started blogging there was not much information I could make use of, but today there are loads and loads of sites where you can get information about blogging. ProBlogger is the best place to start from. No one could be better than Liz Strauss to learn about having a relationship with the blogger. She is also the reason I am writing this post today.
There are many more things that come up as problems with blogging in India. Internet bandwidth is a costly affair in India and thus writing articles, gathering information about software, downloading and using them has to be done carefully.

Technical Difficulties

Many ISPs in India provide users with a cap of 1 GB download per month and charge per MB for any additional downloads. This limits the researching capability as many users will be blissfully aware of their remaining bandwidth. Though there are unlimited data packages, those are during odd hours when half of the people are asleep.

Finding a good hosting solution is also quite a pain, many hosting providers charge a princely sum for a meager 20MB of web space, which usually deters a user from having their own blogs. Even in these there are bandwidth caps which further add up to the cos, a couple of Digg front page hits and the blog is paying thousands of rupees as bandwidth charges. I host my blog on Dreamhost which is a very reliable and provides me with unlimited bandwidth, etc.

Many users look for free blogging platforms like Blogger, but look at the content – more than 50% of bloggers host crap and a very large amount of those sites are created by Indian bloggers. Most of the blogs that have a personal domain turn out to be pretty good.

Future Looks Good

Today blogging in India is big and most big media companies like Rediff, NDTV, CNNIBN are pushing the blogging platform to the users and making them more aware of it. Newspapers like Mumbai Mirror are also publishing snippets from around the blogosphere on a given current topic.

The exposure has definitely reached great heights, but the quality has yet to do the same thing. I find significantly less bloggers in India whom I prefer to read in my RSS reader. Hopefully along with the exposure the quality will improve too.
Unfortunately at the time when I started blogging, I did not have the luxuries of knowing more about blogging other than the money making part. That mistake caused me to lose an opportunity to create a great niche and even more revenue at this stage of my blogging.

But I am starting all over again, I got a well deserved break that allowed me to think over and plan what I need to do. Now that I am in the US, it will allow me give more time towards blogging, which I love. Hopefully I will keep up the trend of writing more original posts.

Building and Engaging Community Around Your Blog -By C.C. Chapman

Expert: C.C. Chapman, crayonville.com

#27 of 30

I’m a huge fan of building communities and then working with the community for continued growth and success of everyone in it. TheBlogosphere is one large community filled of thousands of smaller ones. When I was asked if I could contribute to this new community about blogging I jumped at the chance.

Everyone defines community differently, but I simply view it as any group of like minded individuals gathered together and connected in some way. Sometimes they form around an event, charity, people with similar likes and desires or even around an individual or a company. But, in the end a community is made up of people and they are the most important thing.

The minute you post the very first post to a blog, a community will start forming around you. It’s a strange concept at first when complete strangers will react and post comments. You’ll notice that as you link out to other people and sites they more often then not will swing by and say hello right back. Over time through the power of new media more and more people will start reading the content you write and a small or potentially large community will form.

I am a fan of the quality over quantity philosophy. You should not write a blog just for the sake of building the community, but rather let it happen. Does it really matter what the number is as long as the people are committed, active and engaged in the conversation with you? I know some would argue that you must have at least xxxxx number of readers to be deemed a success, but I have never bought into that.

It’s important that you reach out and get to know your community. After all that is the only way it will grow and expand. Just writing to your blog every day and ignoring the comments and conversation happening around you is not going to work. If you do not want to engage your community then I suggest you stop the idea of a blog right now and return to a paper diary as your not ready to embrace what is ahead of you.

Now, this next point depends on the sort of blog you are writing, but at the same time holds true for them all. You need to determine if you are going to write posts for yourself/company or for the community. What I mean is that when you write about a site, service or topic keep in mind that people are reading your content because they are getting something out of it. Give it to them! Share information and ask for feedback. Engage them and give them a reason to be more active in the conversation with you.

If the community around you grows to be very large or very dedicated (it’s amazing when both happens) you’ll also begin to realize that you can make things happen through a simple blog post. I saw this happen last year when I began raising money for a charity walk I was doing. Through a blog post and a mention on my podcast I suddenly hit my goal in one weekend. You need to realize that this is a responsibility that many forget about because if you activate this community too often or for the wrong reason they can turn on you just as fast.

The important thing is to just get out there and do it. Write from the heart, be honest, be transparent and keep the conversation going long after you hit the publish button and the post hits the web. People out there want to engage with you and they want to read what you have to say. But, you need to remember that it IS a two way street and they will be expecting to be able to engage with you.

Advertising in the blogosphere -By Chris Batty

Expert: Christopher Batty, Gawker Media

#26 of 30

An Interview

Q. Advertisers see the Blogosphere as a swamp land but we see the blogosphere as a fertile ground. What are your thoughts on this?

A. Well, apologies in advance for having it both ways (or, every which way!) but the truth is that the blogosphere runs a very wide gamut — from professional journalistic enterprises that have already developed strong brand equity with readers and advertisers all the way to personal websites with readerships that extend no further than the nexus of its creator’s personal relationships (or fewer).

Advertisers have two challenges; first, they need to find vehicles that are appropriate to their task and, second, find an efficient way to transact with them. For brand advertisers (who typically define success by lift in metrics like awareness, message association, brand favorability, purchase intent), finding blogs that have real equity with their readerships is first and foremost. Second, and frankly more challenging, is finding a way to transact with these people. There are challenges to validating audience on small sites given the current market for ad research, finding professional counterparts at these publishers with which to engage and frankly getting enough scale (reach) to make it worth their time, agency transaction costs being what they are.

Q. What does the blogosphere need to do to get the same love from advertisers as the mainstream media sites do ?

A. Small publishers need to create advertising solutions that marketers demand that the larger publishing organizations for a variety of reasons cannot execute or can only execute at significant minimum outlay — so things like — custom ad integration, reader contests, promotions, & custom publishing.

Q. Every blogger craves for some link love from Gizmodo or LifeHacker. Can you walk us through the thought process that goes into linking to other blog articles ?

A. Its not really some drawn out thought process: break a story, dig something up no one else has, and present anything in an extremely entertaining fashion.

Q. There is a thin line between product endorsement and product promotion (as has been the topic of heated debate lately). What are you doing to maintain that balance?

A. We make every effort, from every angle, to make sure that our editors have a free hand to speak their minds without any undue influence from our marketing partners (including PR) and so, at this time, we don’t see any role for product endorsement in our advertising mix.

Q. Any advice for budding Gizmodo-wannabes on blog monetization?

A. Honestly taking on the entire consumer electronics category is a big bite so if I were an independent publisher with a passion for consumer electronics and gadget porn, I’d look for a niche to cover with a deep expertise and relentless focus.

What is at the Heart of a Powerful Blog? -By Wendy Piersall

Expert: Wendy Piersall, eMoms At Home

#25 of 30

Speculation abounds about what it takes to create a successful blog. Do you need a huge viral campaign? A hot niche? A top Digger best friend?

Quite frankly, many blogs have all of the above – but don’t find lasting success. The reasons for this are as varied as the bloggers themselves. But the one thing I can say that the top blogs have in common is one thing – they haven’t confused the messenger with the message.

A blog is just a vehicle. The real heart of a successful blog is in the person or people behind it. These people stand out in the Blogosphere because they would stand out in a crowd. You know what I mean – the kind of person who lights up a room.

So How do You Light up a Blog?

Give us the Real You - It sounds like a lesson from a children’s book. You’ll always be a second best someone else, but you can be the number one you. As simple as it sounds, the reality of it isn’t so simple to put into action. And although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it won’t get you a successful blog. It is important to learn from prominent bloggers you admire, but use their lead to find your own voice. It may take a few weeks or months to develop that voice, but once you’ve got it, you’re automatically ahead of the pack.

Lead by Example - An incongruent leader is one doomed to fail. People are smart and catch onto a phony writer fast. I’m not advocating perfection, nor am I saying that you must be an expert in order to start a blog. Many great blogs are ‘learning’ blogs – the author writes about what they are learning rather than what they already know. But whatever you write about, it’s important to have real-life experience behind your posts. Hollow writing makes for a hollow readership.

Have a Strong Message - A message is not just great posts – it’s also the message that you send in between the lines. People pick up on little details – sometimes not even consciously. Make your blog an “experience” by creating and fostering community and interactivity, keeping your template in line with your topic, and writing posts that stick to your niche. Too much randomness can create confusion and undermine your outcome.

Build a Strong Brand - You wouldn’t show up to a networking meeting in a torn up pair of jeans and plain white t-shirt. Yet your blog is your “outfit” that people see and they will immediately make snap judgments – in about 2 seconds or less. Great content is crucial to a successful blog, but if your site is difficult to navigate, ugly, or doesn’t work properly, people won’t stick around to find it. It also says to your visitors, “I don’t really care about my site” – if you don’t, your readers sure won’t, either.

Be Human – Blog readers don’t want to know that you are super-human – they want be entertained or learn something that you can teach them. Not every blog is personal, but the more you get to know the people behind the words, the more your readers can relate to the content. The more they can relate, the more they want to read.

Mingle with the Masses - A successful blog is not a successful person – it is a successful community of smart people who know how to add to the conversation with great insights, great questions, and great blogs in their own right. Responding to reader comments, links and questions tells blog readers that they are important – which they are.

Put the Readers First - If you study the great copywriters of our time, you’ll find that they use a few words very sparingly, especially “Me, Myself and I”. It’s important to remember the golden rule of marketing, which is to constantly answer the question, “What’s In It For Me?”. Blog readers are a super-savvy audience – let them know you value their time by adding value in your posts.

Make Your Readers Famous - I first heard this from Darren Rowse at the San Francisco Elite Retreat – and he is the master at putting his site visitors front and center. By linking out frequently, giving readers control (by suggesting topics) and through his group writing projects, Darren proves that there is plenty of room to share the spotlight at the top.

Rapport, Rapport, Rapport - In many ways, your blog is a constant sales pitch – you’re either pitching products or pitching ideas. Great sales people don’t sell to leads and prospects – they sell to friends. Building a relationship with your readers takes time, but without it, you’ll never ‘close the deal’.

Write from the Heart - Although last, this is the most important of all. Passionate people are infectious – they are the ones that bounce into a room filled with energy. They are the ones who make a difference just by showing up. People who come from the heart can touch lives through a computer screen – even if they are just talking about blogging. And it’s this kind of person who will be successful no matter what they do – because their message from the heart is more important than the messenger.

"Help me, my mom is my blog's only reader!"-By Darren Rowse

Expert: Darren Rowse, Problogger.net

#24 of 30

How do I get my blog beyond the initial launch phase and actually find readers beyond my mum, girlfriend and work mates?

Launching a blog and getting a few regular readers (usually friends and family) isn’t the hard part of blogging (although it’s not ‘easy’) – the challenge comes in trying to find a way to take things up a notch and hit some sort of ‘tipping point’ where you hit a new level of readership.
In this post I’d like to explore some basic techniques on how to grow your readership beyond your circle of friends and family.

Before we begin – One little ‘secret’ for you before I give some ideas on how to grow your readership – no matter how big your blog gets, there’s always another ‘next level’ that bloggers strive for. I spoke to a blogger this week who has 70,000 daily readers who asked me how to go to the ‘next level’. Blog readership is like money – no matter how much you’ve got, most people seem to always thirst for more.

So how do you get out of the plateau that your blog is in (whatever that level is)?

There are many answers that could be given to this (for example I wrote 19 tips for finding new readers previously) – but as I’ve pondered the question today two main ideas came to mind.

1. Learn to Leverage Big Traffic
When I first started blogging, I had romantic notions of an incoming rush of traffic hitting my blog. A couple of months in I began to realize that that wasn’t going to happen.
I remember the light going on in my mind one day – the rush of traffic just wasn’t going to ‘appear’. Of course there was a trickle of traffic that did just ‘appear’ – but if I wanted traffic in large numbers I was going to have to find some way of going and getting it.
I began to ask myself a question:

‘where is my potential traffic?’

At any given moment, millions of people are using the Internet – a certain percentage of them were interested in and even searching for the information that I had written – so where were they and how was I going to get them?

So where are your potential readers?

I can’t answer that question for each of you (because it varies, depending upon your blog’s topic) but here are a few suggestions of where your readers may already be gathering:

1. Forums - yep, they are Web 1.0 (or 1.3 maybe) in many ways – but the reality is that people are probably discussing your topic every day already on a forum somewhere in large numbers.
2. Social Sites - sites like Digg, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace are generating massive traffic at the moment. Many of them won’t have the kind of traffic that will naturally relate to your site – but increasingly social networking and bookmarking sites are arranging themselves around specific topics and verticals.
3. Bigger Blogs - on most topics there is already a blog that is at least covering a related topic.
4. Bigger Sites – don’t just look at the blogosphere – doing so will limit yourself so much.

Ok – the above list is pretty general but it’s hard to be more specific without knowing the topic at hand.
The key is to find those places where your potential traffic is already gathering and then to think about how you can become a part of those sites/communities in a way that draws traffic to your blog.

In general I find that other site owners are more than willing to share a little link love around IF you provide them with some value too.

Notice I said IF you provide them with value. It doesn’t mean:

• sending an email asking for a link or offering to trade links
• spamming their site’s comments/forum
• manipulating their site or readers into coming to your site

Find out a way of genuinely enhancing their site and becoming a valued part of their community.

• Write them free content
• Genuinely participate in comments in ways that add value to the conversation
• Use a signature in your communications with people in the community (as long as it’s within the rules to do so)
• Provide them with some link love (even if it’s not returned)
• Get to know the authors – thank them for anything that they do do for you

Over time (and this isn’t usually an overnight process) you’ll find that the more you add to and participate in larger sites, the more you’ll personally get out of it.

2. Get discovered one reader at a time
The second piece of advice I’ll give is to not get caught up in finding the big incoming link that will bring a rush of traffic.
Yes you should be on the lookout for these opportunities – but don’t forget the readers you’ve currently got and don’t forget the small trickles of traffic that you already have from smaller sources.

Google and other Search Engines - millions of people start their search for information here every day – while it’s a long term thing to grow SE traffic it does add up over time. Learn some basic search engine optimization techniques and incorporate it into the way you blog. While search engines like Google will only ever send you one reader at a time – they can do so in very large numbers over time.

Reader Recommendations - one of the most powerful forces at your disposal as a blogger is your current reader. 10 readers who each find two new readers for your blog each month who each find two new readers for your blog each month will see you end up with a readership of over 40,000 within 12 months. While that might not be a reasonable expectation – the fact remains that blogging is by its nature a viral medium. Tap into this – concentrate on providing value to your current readers and you will find over time that you could be on the receiving end of some viral growth.

Smaller Blogs - Getting a link from a larger blog or website can be a huge rush (for example last week I got a link from the front page of Yahoo.com as a featured article and it was a fun thing to watch) but sometimes it’s the links from smaller blogs that have a more lasting impact upon your blog. Build relationships with other blogs in your niche (not just the powerful ones) and over time you’ll find that the traffic that they send will not only bring you new loyal readers but that the links will help your search engine ranking.

Bonus Tip – Live with an Attitude of Openness to Opportunity
A few years ago I had a business coach. The main thing I took home from the time I spent with him was that he was someone that was constantly on the lookout for synergy and opportunity with those that he met. He didn’t do it in a manipulative way – but he had this ability to connect with people and spot potential connecting points between what he did and what the other person did.

Almost as if every conversation he had led to a new mutually beneficial business partnership, customer or product idea. The result was that his business grew.

As bloggers, I think this is an attitude that all of us could learn from.

Don’t expect the large rush of traffic to land in your lap – it rarely comes.

DO look for opportunities and DO be willing to act quickly upon them and in time you’ll find the growth will come.

This post was inspired by a question that one of my readers (thatedeguy) recently asked at ProBlogger.

Finding Your Direction with Google Analytics -By Dan Allen

Expert: Dan Allen, LoveAccess.com

#23 of 30

So you’ve created a website or started a blog, but do you know who’s visiting it, or more importantly, why they’re visiting it? With the help of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to answer those questions and many others. It’s free, quick and easy to set up, and provides information that you probably won’t find anywhere else. So what’s the big deal? Why should you use it? Here are a few ways you can use it to improve your content:

Overview
When you log into Google Analytics, the first thing you’ll see is the Executive Overview. This page gives you a quick glance at four useful pieces of information:

• Visits and Pageviews – this section shows you how many visitors you had for the week, and their average amount of pageviews. This is a good way to watch your site/blog’s performance over time.
• Visits by New and Returning - with this section, you can see the balance between people coming back to your site and people coming to your site for the first time. As your site/blog grows over time, you want to see your New Visitor percentage slowly decrease and Returning Visitor percentage increase. This will show that as you’re getting new visitors, many older visitors keep coming back for more.
• Geo Map Overlay - this section shows a small map of the world, with yellow dots to show where your traffic is coming from. Knowing where your visitors are coming from can help you with marketing and keywords if you write about local or global content.
• Visits by Source - this section is a great way to see how your visitors found you. This will let you see the balance between new organic traffic, returning visitors, people that found you by word of mouth, and marketing campaigns if you have any.

Marketing Optimization
This section has more in-depth reports than the overview. While they are all useful in their own ways, here are the ones you’ll want to check:

• Visitor Loyalty – you can find the Visitor Loyalty report under the Unique Visitor Tracking section. This page will give you a better idea of how many visitors keep coming back to your site/blog. Remember, SEO is a good way to get traffic, but you need good content to keep them coming back for more.
• Visitor Recency - you’ll find this report right below the Visitor Loyalty one. Of the returning visitors you saw above, this page will tell you how often they’re coming back.
• Referring Source - this report is under the Visitor Segment Performance section. This page will show where your traffic found you, how many visits you got from each, and their average number of page hits. This can be a great way to get an idea of the types of sites you want linking to you.
• Overall Keyword Conversion – this report can be found under the Search Engine Marketing section. This is probably the most important page for checking how your keywords are performing. This page shows how many clicks you got for each of the search terms shown, and the average number of page hits for those visits. This will give you an idea to the importance of each of your keywords, and how they relate to the rest of your content.

Content Optimization
This section will give you a good idea of how visitors are spending their time on your site/blog.

• Top Content - you can find this report under the Content Performance section. This page shows how many times each of your pages are visited, the average amount of time someone spends on that particular page, and how often people leave your site/blog from that particular page.
• Length of Visit - this report can also be found under the Content Performance section. This page simply shows the average amount of time people spend on your site/blog.
• Entrance Bounce Rates - this report is under the Visits by Source section, and will show you not only the first pages that your visitors are seeing, but also how often they’re viewing that one page and then leaving. This can let you know if you need to improve your site/blog’s navigation.
• Top Exit Points - this report is right beneath the Entrance Bounce Rates page, and will also show you how often visitors are leaving your site from particular pages. This can give you a heads up on pages that may need improvement.

There is a lot more info available than the sections that I mentioned, and you should decide for yourself whether or not they’re relevant to you. The sections above will not only show you how your site/blog is performing over time, it will also give you hints as to which keywords to expand on or drop, and which pages out perform others. This can point you in a direction that will make your site/blog stand out from the others. Rather than molding your writing style after someone else’s, it lets you see how your own writing style works and how to improve it. Remember, keep your content unique, easy to read, and most importantly, keep it interesting.

Give Your Blog An Edge – Get the Scoop! -By Tom Foremski

Expert: Tom Foremski, SiliconValleyWatcher

#22 of 30

Getting a scoop in the news business is extremely difficult and extremely desirable.
If I have a scoop I have news that is completely unique, nobody else has it, and that creates a distinction that very few others can match. In the increasingly crowded online space you need exclusive content to distinguish yourself and rise above the white noise.

Here are some of the benefits in going after scoops:

• A scoop is one of the best ways of building readership. People will want to come back again and again to see if you have anything new that nobody else has.

• Scoops are a type of exclusive content and exclusive content builds on itself. Journalists or bloggers who have developed a reputation for scoops become magnets for exclusive content.

• Companies and individuals with news to release will often release it exclusively to that person or organization with a reputation for exclusive content because it becomes a highly effective distribution platform. You can see that happen with sites such as the Drudge Report, and in sectors such as Web 2.0 where Mike Arrington from TechCrunch will often have exclusive content because companies release it to him first, knowing that he has the reach and readership to distribute their news.

But being pre-briefed by a company on their news is not the same as a scoop. A scoop is news information that has been gained by hard work and through experience.

So how do you get a scoop? And how do you continue getting scoops?

The answer is in knowing your subject matter. If you write about the medical industry then:

• You know the companies.
• You know the individuals.
• You have established relationships with people in that industry.
• You are known by people in that industry.
• You have established trust in that community.
• You spend time in the industry and understand the dynamics of that industry.
• You talk to people in the industry on a regular basis.

Scoops are found by:

• Following leads or tips from contacts.
• By noticing something that others haven’t noticed in public information.
• By following a unique angle in news stories.
• By trading exclusive information with your contacts.
• Sometimes a contact has information that they don’t know is a scoop. That’s why you have to know your subject matter extremely well.

Sometimes you will be told information that makes a great scoop but could get your contact into big trouble, they could lose their job. Or they will never speak with you again.

You need to be careful in those situations because if you “burn” your contact you will lose the opportunity to gain future scoops from that person. But sometimes, the scoop is so important, or so huge that you may have no choice but to burn your contact.

In the newspaper world, when someone is talking with a journalist, everything is on the record unless agreed otherwise. Everyone knows the rules of the conversation and knows the consequences.

But in the “blogosphere” the rules are much grayer and the consequences of saying the wrong thing are less well understood. So the blogger has to be aware of this and act in a fair and proper manner with their contacts.

Staying connected: The secret to keeping those loyal readers –By Liz Strauss

Expert: Liz Strauss, Successful-Blog.com

#21 of 30

Chitika:
You have 20 years of experience in print, online publishing, and you’ve worked for various companies, out of all the career paths you could have chosen, why did you pick blogging to showcase your writing talent?

Liz:
Why not? Blogging is wonderful. I have this blog post that I’m using for my presentation and it’s called “Why Every Blogger Is An Entrepreneur” and why every blogger is a business person whether they monetize or not. Because blogging is publishing. There is a reason that button is called “Publish” not “Go”, “Send” or any other number of words it could say. It really is publishing.
I started blogging because I wanted to leave education publishing and not stay a product person. I was standing in an education publishing conference talking to a friend of mine who is the vice president of a very good educational publisher. He asked why are you blogging? And I said, “There are three product jobs in this whole industry that are left and I don’t want any of them. I have all this marketing experience and I don’t want to be in product job anymore. But if I handed you my resume, you would tell me I’m a product person.”

He said “I think you’re right.”

So my response was, “Now I have a 1600-page resume on the Internet that says I am a marketing person. So, that’s what my blog does for me.”

Chitika:
Your blog encourages such a warm relationship with your readers and you really know how to get them glued to your site. Since cyberspace can be such a difficult medium to communicate in, what is your secret to keeping them coming back for more?

Liz:
When I changed the blog design, it was really important to me how my blog was designed. If you can see behind me in my picture, the blinds were closed, and I thought to myself, I would like to open the blinds so that the outside would show, this would give the impression that you were “inside” my house, giving a very warm, personal feeling. There is also is a harbor behind me outside that I wanted to show but it didn’t work. So I chose a picture of the stars, but it has the same effect of making users feel like they are inside.

One of the things I did before I settled on the blog design, I went around and looked at other blog designs and I thought I wanted one of those AJAX designs with a lot of white, and I love those. But when I went to the comments, I felt like I was in a truck stop at 4am, and the last thing you want to do when you are in a truck stop, is give a person comment.

Right now at the top of my blog post there’s a header in handwriting, I decided to do this because I wanted to climb down from the podium and talk more personally instead of like a teacher. I put the handwritten headings there as a reminder to myself and as a visual reminder to my readers that I am going to say what I am thinking. So they would think of this as more of a conversation.

Chitika:
How do you go about consistently maintaining such a personal tone in your posts?

Liz:
When you write a blog, you have to be yourself. You can’t write a blog and try to be Darren Rowse, and Darren can’t write your blog either.
You have to know who you are. Bring yourself into what your passion is. It may take some time to sort that out the same way it takes time to find out who you are. I don’t walk in a straight line, but I do have enough consistency that readers know that if they come to my blog on Friday, they will know that it will be something to take them into the weekend. If they come on Friday afternoon they will find the SOB Cafe. And if they come on a Saturday they’ll find the successful blogs of the week and it will be the blogging questions because a little bit of structure is good for the both of us and makes life easier.

There’s a pattern to what I do that kind of keeps me going. If I send you to the world’s biggest mall to buy a white shirt, you will be stunned, because there are so many different choices. But if you put a few rules on it, it makes it a lot easier. So I do put a hand full of rules on every day just to make it easier to breathe.

Chitika:
After reading your blog, I noticed one of your posts from August 2006 where you talked about “10 Reasons Readers Don’t Leave Comments”. You have 167 comments on that post! Should bloggers worry if they receive comments or not? How should they go about handling getting readers to participate in their blog?

Liz:
Getting comments is a real art form and it has a lot to do with forming a relationship with your readers. Your first comment in your blog is the most important. The one who posts the first comment is the brave one, being the second to comment is easy. I put up a post the other night, the entire post was simply a question, and it was, “What are you afraid of?” and the one who put in the first comment, I believe the reason he wrote the comment was to get the conversation going, because his comment was “what are you waiting for?” After that followed about 42 comments, but I believe that if he hadn’t put in that first comment, there may have been none.

I am really sensitive to what the atmosphere is on my blog. My sense will be like, “oh gee it’s been about 3 days since someone has been here, and that happened last year around this time, and I knew something was little bit off. I wrote a post called, ‘An open thought, take the keys’.” It was Sunday afternoon, it pointed to someone who had made a comment, a good reader, a good friend, and he told me that the reason he sometimes won’t leave a comment on my blog is because “I was such a beautiful writer” the only thing he really had to say was “wow that’s great.” In that post I asked questions about what I did wrong and right — if I tied up my stories too tight, and after that I got comments telling me, “no your articles are great.” So I asked “What am I doing wrong?” and a good friend of mine, wrote me 5 bullet points, which kind of broke the ice for others to add more bullet points. Eventually it came down to “leave a little room for us to talk, don’t play the whole blog post out” and “gave us a point to give out.” They just came right out and told me what I was doing wrong in 42 comments. Basically get down off the pedestal and start talking to us. That changed a whole lot about the blog, I stopped being an instructor and started being a member of the community.

Chitika:
I found something unique about your posts; sometimes you share your personal life with your readers. When do you draw the line between becoming too personal?

Liz:
That’s interesting. I don’t tell anything that would actually embarrass my husband, I don’t use actual names, the stories that I tell are stories that I would share with anyone. And if anything they are at my expense. They are stories of human life, usually.

Chitika:
You are such a great writer, are you planning on publishing your own book?

Liz:
Well no, since I came from publishing, I have contributed to many books.. I am just having so much fun blogging, my thoughts and exploring the conversation and having real conversations on the blog. I’ve turned my blog into such an event in which sometimes, there is no blog post but its just conversations. Why write a book?

Chitika:
If you were to give one tip to the average blogger who wants to be at your level, what would that be?

Liz:
Be yourself. That’s really got to be it. Know who you are, add value to who you are. Because the internet has no eraser.

If you put too much out there, or the wrong stuff out there, you’ll be handing it to your grandchildren, or your future self, and its always better not to. The more you feel like you want to run, you should walk.