Friday, December 10, 2010

Your Biggest Investment: Time and Dedication

One of the biggest problems we see when trying to teach and motivate others to make money online or start their own business, is that they won’t put in the time and effort. Usually it’s because their either too lazy and not dedicated, or just expect to see immediate results…. but why should you expect immediate results? Whether you run a retail store or a web site, business is business and the same principles always apply, you need a solid structure and plan to make anything work.

In times like these, a situation many of us have gone through, is furthering our education. How many of us will go to college for two, four or even eight to twelve years… then graduate, just to try and pay off the debt from the last several years for the remainder of our career, and maybe even lives? Imagine the amount of success individuals could have if they put this same work and effort into starting/running their own business or online marketing campaigns, as they had for college.

You can’t simply walk into a high paying career right after high school and expect a job, and running a business should be looked at the same way. College is a very expensive way of investing in yourself and planning for the future. The truth is, students graduating from college, now have more debt than ever. A recent report shows students graduating from college are now leaving with over $20,000 in debt. Double or even triple that number for higher education such as Masters and PHDs…

Am I saying college is a waste of money and time? No, but a great majority of affiliates and internet marketers have passed on college and even dropped out to bigger and better things. It’s take a certain mentality and drive to be successful in business, but those dame principles can be applied to anything you try and achieve. The point I’m trying to make, is that whether you are aiming to work for a fortune 500 company, or run you own business, they all require the necessary mindset and time/work investment to reach your goals.

Anyone who says money doesn’t make life easier is lying. Money is great, but your time and dedication is the difference between getting to where you want to be versus where you are headed.

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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Influence, Cash, or Hobby: Which Blogging Choice Is Right for You?

This guest post is by Brandon Connell of brandonconnell.com

When I first started a blog that I took seriously, it was to promote an ebook that I had published on Amazon’s Digital Text platform. Initially, I wanted the blog to be my “author’s headquarters,” but soon after, I realized what I really wanted to do with my blog. It was far from my initial goal, and I wish I’d made the right decision from the beginning, rather than reversing course.

The problems

Changing your blogging type after you start the blog causes problems. Those problems include, but are not limited to:

  • losing readers and subscribers that had expectations
  • confusing the search engines due to content changes
  • wasting time marketing your blog on the wrong sites.

Readers walk

When you change your blog style or niche, it’s common sense that your readers will most likely walk. Think about it. They came to your blog because they came across some content that intrigued them. Now that you’ve decided to change your content, what reason do they have to stick around?

It’s important to choose your blog style ahead of time, and think about it carefully. You can literally waste hours of your time approaching the wrong reader audience. You can also end up being bad-mouthed by another blogger who’s angry with your switch.

Search engines get confused

It is a search engine’s job to make sure it indexes and ranks relevant content. Let’s say you start a blog about your golf hobby, but then you switch course, writing a stock tips business blog. Search engines may have already given you good rankings for golf. If you change your content, you’ll lose those rankings. You may even end up being penalized by the search engines.

When you first publish your blog, unless you’re blog hopping and guest posting, search engines are likely to be the first ones to read your content. Make sure they leave as happy customers. How? Be consistent. Your niche and blogging style should never change once you start.

You waste time

Should you have done your research on blog marketing, you’ll know that blog commenting and article marketing are excellent ways to promote your blog and build backlinks to it. If you change your style or niche, you have to consider the fact that you wasted all that time writing irrelevant articles that don’t match your newly chosen niche. The audiences for those article sites, backlinks, and guest posts will no longer be interested in what your blog has to say. When they click through to your site, they’ll be disappointed.

Another wasted effort would be the fact that you now have to delete your mailing list that you may have built up, since your subscribers didn’t sign up for information on your new topic. They subscribed because they had an interest in your previous topic.

Style vs. niche

Your blog style is not your niche: a blog style reflects your reasons for starting the blog in the first place:

  • Did you want to make money?
  • Did you want to influence a certain type of group?
  • Did you just want to blog about your interests?

When choosing a blogging style, you need to think about what you intentions may be in the long term. There are many bloggers who simply want to make money—they heard that blogging can make that happen for them. There are others who don’t believe or care about making money blogging: they simply want to write about what they love. The influential blogger is a writer who wishes to have his or her readers care about what s/he says, and take action because of what s/he said.

A niche, on the other hand, is a topic that you’re writing about. You can fit your blog into any niche using any of the three blogging styles I just mentioned. My niche topic is making money blogging, and I write regularly about this topic. You could say that this niche reflects my target keyword—the topic that I want to be known for.

As we saw with the golf and stocks example above, it’s important not to change your niche after you start blogging. Most of the time, your niche is connected to your style. When one changes, so does the other in most cases.

Let’s look more closely at these blogging styles.

The influential blogger

The influential type wants more than anything to have control over the actions that people take. We can take medical marijuana as an example niche in which the influential blogger style might be applied. This blogger will either want to oppose medical marijuana laws, or support them. Whichever route they choose, they want to be able to get people on board to support their cause. Their cause may be a call to action: for example, to contact a congressman with a specific message that will generate support for the blogger’s desired law.

Influential bloggers are usually heavyweights because they touch on sensitive topics that gain a lot of attraction. An influential blog doesn’t usually have a lot of advertising, and although the blogger may ask for donations to support their cause, that’s usually the extent of their money0making agenda. This does not make them a cash-seeking blogger.

The hobby blogger

I love the hobby blogger because they don’t care about anything other than sharing their passion with others. They care about what they do for fun, and they want you to have fun reading about it.

Hobby bloggers are quick to gain followers because they’re not concerned about advertising on their blog. They love the idea of publishing their articles and having like-minded people comment on them.

The cash blogger

I would say that I am a mix between a cash blogger and a hobby blogger. My entire niche and style is to teach others and make money doing it. I have done well in my style and niche, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The reason why I consider it a hobby is because I love what I am writing about, and I love sharing it all with others. It just so happens that I make money doing it.

My niche isn’t a necessary one, and it’s flooded with new blogs every day. You can monetize a hobby blog in any niche. I would say that there are a lot of hobby bloggers who have unintentionally turned into cash bloggers too, just because they realized at some point that money can be made with their traffic. If you’re thinking “but that’s changing your blogging style!” you’re right … in part. It’s a sort of merging of the two, rather than a clear switch. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re selling out if you go down this path.

Which choice is right for you?

No matter what style or niche you choose, you need to take the decision seriously. The last thing you want to do is change course once you’ve made your decision. There are too many negative side-effects of changing your style halfway through the mission.

Look at your decision as a life choice. You wouldn’t just pick up and move from Chicago to Iceland, would you? The choice you make today will impact your life years down the road. Make sure it is a decision you can live with, and choose a style and niche that you love without a doubt.

How did you choose your blogging style and your blog niche?

Brandon Connell is a full-time blogger, web designer, and internet marketer in Illinois. Visit http://www.brandonconnell.com, where Brandon teaches you how to make money blogging.

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How To Build Your Credibility As An Expert While Blogging

credibility-expert

I don’t run ads on my blog; I don’t do a lot of affiliate marketing. The primary way of monetizing my blog is selling my own products and coaching services in the area of communication skills.

I’ve learned that when your strategy for making money with your blog is to sell something you have created or something you do, then your credibility as an expert is crucial.

People have to trust that you are a professional and that you can provide them something of real value before they decide to buy from you. The amount of traffic you get is not highly relevant if your readers don’t believe you are an expert in your field.

The good news is that there are specific ways of using your blog which reinforce your credibility as an expert. Being passionate about communication, I was eager to explore this topic and test various methods of building credibility as an expert through blogging.

Here are the methods that have worked best for me and I believe will visibly benefit any blogger:

1. Develop Your Expertise, Not Only Your Blog

I think many bloggers skip a step in their search for a source of income. They start blogging and growing their blogs, but they do little to actually be experts in the area they blog about. They revamp ideas they read in books or on other blogs, and then they wonder why readers won’t buy their products.

Up to a certain point, blogging in itself is a way to develop expertise, but I find it to be insufficient. If you want to become an expert, you need to also address this subject separately and use other ways to train yourself.

I worked with my first coaching clients for free and I also had another coach supervising me, before I started calling myself a coach and asking money for my services. Also, I only started blogging and promoting my services on my blog after I’ve already had significant experience as a coach. Putting expertise first did wonders for me and the quality of my blogging.

2. Go Against the Mainstream

In any area, there are ideas that are very popular yet any real expert knows to be wrong. This is why instead of reinforcing the same old ideas, many experts will oppose popular ideas in their blog posts and they’ll debunk them.

Do the same and you’ll develop credibility as an expert. Of course, in order for this strategy to be successful, you need to know what you’re talking about, to pick the right ideas to oppose and to back your claims with hard and smart evidence. Otherwise, you position yourself as a rebellious novice rather than a connoisseur.

3. Write with Depth

Almost anybody can write a blog and offer some general advice, much of which may be impractical or mundane. A real expert stands out because they can talk or write about a certain subject with a lot more depth and go into the fine details that make a piece of advice exceptionally valuable.

In my field, many bloggers write advice such as: “Just be confident”. This kind of advice is too superficial to actually help anyone. I write posts in which I decode the psychological process of acquiring confidence and describe it much more precisely. This is what makes me more believable.

4. Quote Scientific Research

Anybody can make claims on their blog. What separates experts from the rest is the fact they crave solid evidence and they put in the effort to keep in touch with the current scientific research in their area of expertise.

As a result, they often quote research to support their ideas or simply to discuss it, and they do so in a skillful way. One of the most important recommendations I can make is to practice reading and quoting scientific research, at least in some of your blog posts. The more you practice, the more apt you’ll become at using research.

5. Associate with Other Experts

Professionals in a certain field often tend to know each other and collaborate. Prove to your readers that you interact positively with recognized experts in your filed, that they appreciate you, and some of their authority will transmit to you.

There are many ways to do this: you can interact with experts using social media, you can guest post on their blogs, you can interview them for your own blog etc. While doing any of these, keep in mind that the main focus is on truly building trust-based relationships with experts, not on simulating them.

At the end of the day, the most important thing I’ve learning about building credibility as an expert is that it only works if it’s authentic. Expertise cannot be communicated with high impact by faking it. You can only do so if it is something you really have and you know how to tastefully reflect through your blogging.

About The Author: Eduard Ezeanu provides communication coaching and helps people put their best foot forward in communication both online and offline. He also writes on his blog, PeopleSkillsDecoded.com.

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Google, China, Wikileaks: The Actual Cable

Guardian Cable Google China.png

When the Wikileaks story broke, I wrote a short piece chastising folks for blogging the assertion that one of the cables proves the Chinese government was behind the Google hacking which preceded Google's pulling out of the country. The cable is based on single sources, who are anonymous and second-hand, and that doesn't pass the journalistic sniff test.

My colleague Matt McAlister at the Guardian has sent me the link to the entire cable, and while I stand by my original take on the story, it sure is intriguing to read. In fact, the details I find most interesting are the interactions alleged between Baidu and the Chinese goverment.

From the cable:

....

Another contact claimed a top PRC leader was actively working with Google competitor Baidu against Google.

....

Google's recent move presented a major dilemma (maodun) for the Chinese government, not because of the cyber-security aspect but because of Google's direct challenge to China's legal restrictions on Internet content. The immediate strategy, XXXXXXXXXXXX said, seemed to be to appeal to Chinese nationalism by accusing Google and the U.S. government of working together to force China to accept "Western values" and undermine China's rule of law. The problem the censors were facing, however, was that Google's demand to deliver uncensored search results was very difficult to spin as an attack on China, and the entire episode had made Google more interesting and attractive to Chinese Internet users. All of a sudden, XXXXXXXXXXXX continued, Baidu looked like a boring state-owned enterprise while Google "seems very attractive, like the forbidden fruit."

....

XXXXXXXXXXXX noted the pronounced disconnect between views of U.S. parent companies and local subsidiaries. PRC-based company officials often downplayed the extent of PRC government interference in their operations for fear of consequences for their local markets. Our contact emphasized that Google and other U.S. companies in China were struggling with the stated Chinese goal of technology transfer for the purpose of excluding foreign competition. This consultant noted the Chinese were exploiting the global economic downturn to enact increasingly draconian product certification and government procurement regulations to force foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) to transfer intellectual property and to carve away the market share of foreign companies.

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Niche Marketing Breakdown

Before jumping into your next ad campaign, or even starting a new web site or blog, take a step back and look at exactly who you are tying to target. We often come up with great ideas for new ad campaigns and site, then start getting excited with our ideas, without looking at the big picture and room for improvement. It’s not enough to target a niche, but it’s now more important than ever to focus on niches within niches.

An excellent example of a huge site in it’s own niche, is IGN.com, which is one of the largest video game sites on the internet. They don’t just cover computer games, they cover all games! Everything from XBox, Playstation, Wii, Computer Games and more. IGN has the massive exposure, staff and funding to take on this massive and competitive niche like many others can’t. Pushing out quality content and video on a daily basis isn’t a problem for them. With all of that said, do you think you would be able to compete with a player like IGN.com if you wanted to get into the video game space? Probably not.

You want to focus on video games, but how can you compete at the same time? Simple… break down your efforts and focus on a niche group. Instead of trying to create an ad campaign, web site or blog that focuses on all games, you need to be selective on your targets and ad copy. An excellent way to do this, would be to focus on one of the big three (Wii, PS3, XBox). To break down your efforts and increase your return on efforts, you can go a level deeper and select specific games which are only available on one of these system.

Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we can pull up quick reports on how many time the big three gaming systems are searched in a given month. Among the three systems, you have over 300 million searches every month. Even if you were to grab just one tenth of a percent (.001%) of this traffic, you would have 300,000 visitors to your blog… but the competition for these keywords is phenomenally high, as you can see from the “competition” bar below.

Break down each of the gaming systems to another level, such as the most popular games from each system. You can see we still have millions of monthly searches, and they vary heavily based on the game search. Competition is still extremely high, which usually means there is good money to be spent and made in this area… but the majority of these advertisers are probably big and well funded sites in the video game space.

One last time… let’s take one of the search results from above and break it down by itself. You are now given a selection of top keywords searched just on this one search term. Now you have a massive amount of search results and topics all on this one tight niche group. Had you created a blog on call of duty when it first came out, you would have reaped the benefits every time a new version of the game came out.

This breakdown is a perfect example of how you can take one niche and continually break it down til you have a super tight and high traffic topic. Instead of spreading you and your ad campaign or web site thin, why not focus on a single topic with a large following and search traffic? You will find that not only will you provide exactly what your customers and site readers are looking for, but they are also more likely to be in a buying / action mode, which increases overall revenue.

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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

10 Lessons I Learned from Gaining my First 1000 Subscribers

My blog, YoungPrePro, recently surpassed its first 1000 subscribers, and there are a lot of lessons I learned along the way. Below you’ll find ten that come to my mind right away.

1. Your Subscribers are Your Most Important Readers

I learned this lesson the hard way, and if I had knew this I would be having far more subscribers than I have now.

I didn’t focus on gaining blog subscribers when I started blogging. All I wanted was to be getting a lot of daily visitors. Later I started seeing the importance of having blog subscribers as opposed to having daily visitors. Your daily visitors can stop visiting your blog after a sign of inactivity from you for some time, but your subscribers will always receive blog posts from you as long as they’re subscribed. On top of that subscribers also have a deeper relationship with you.

2. Content is King

I have disputed this statement once or twice, but after seeing the effect of writing great content I realized how important content is.

I have discovered I get more subscribers anytime I write a great post that can impact the lives of my readers. Sure they take a lot of time to prepare, but the results are worth it.

I get triple my usual traffic anytime I write a great post and I also end up being featured and interviewed in so many places, and this eventually boosts my traffic, reputation and brings in more subscribers.

3. Your Design Matters

I am a a guy who didn’t want to spend any money building my blog, except for my hosting fees, I used a lot of free themes for my blog and I later become unsatisfied which led me to changing my theme several times.

I went on with this for some time and I decided to give a premium theme a try. After I started using a premium theme on my blog I noticed a significant increase in my traffic and in my subscriber count. So yeah the investment was worth it.

4. Marketing is a Must

I blogged for the first few months with less than 50 subscribers, I didn’t do much to promote my blog and this had a great impact on the success I had. After that I realized that content can’t do the trick alone, and that you have to invest in marketing your blog too.

I started guest posting as much as I could, and this had a very positive impact on my subscriber count. The good thing is that the increased traffic I get from promotional activities tends to stick around month after month.

5. Networking is a Must

You will have heard people talking about you networking with other bloggers or having blogging buddies. I also had some blogging buddies who I connect with on a regular basis and as a result of this I am included when they write a new list. This alone has helped me gain some subscribers and it also helped me gain thousands of dollars in affiliate sales.

It might feel weird to try to connect with other people online, but believe me, having strong relationships with people inside your niche can go a long way to improve your subscriber count and your blog overall.

6. Having Goals is Important

I might be a little bit ashamed to say this, but my goal was to have a minimum of 20,000 subscribers before the end of 2010. Even though this goal is unrealistic (now I know!), it still had a great influence on getting my first 1000 subscribers – first, it made me work harder to improve my subscriber count and second, it kept me motivated not to quit.

7. Traffic is not Everything

My subscriber count is only a fraction of the traffic I get and I have realized with time that getting traffic is not everything. Conversion is what matters.

Getting more subscribers to your blog is not all about you focusing on how to get more traffic but how to convert that traffic to subscribers. There are a lot of blogs with less traffic than I have yet they have more subscribers than I do. Why? Because they’re good at converting traffic to subscribers.

8. Social Proof Works

When I got over 800 subscribers I started displaying my subscriber count and I have since noticed a boost in the rate I am getting new subscribers.

People love to be involved and they don’t love threading a path alone, they want to be assured that what you preach works and there is no better way to convince them than to let them know that there are tons of other people already subscribed.

9. Making Subscribing Easy is Very Important

One thing that amazes me is that over 700 of my subscribers are email subscribers. It is a major mistake to think that enabling RSS feed subscription alone is the way to go. Many of your readers don’t know what RSS is but there is hardly any one of them who doesn’t have an email. Don’t let people begin to know what RSS is before they can subscribe to your blog. Rather, make subscription available in any format you think they will like.

10. Feedback Matters

Many of us only care about getting subscribers, but we hardly care about retaining them. Another lesson I learnt from gaining my first 1000 subscribers is that what you think about your blog is not what matters but what your readers think.

I once got an email from one of my subscribers who told me that he was about to unsubscribe and that particular email would be his last communication. He told me I have been writing a particular type of post lately (which is true) and that he was tired of receiving that same type of post. He also told me that it is important to be alternating the type of posts I write. I took this reader’s suggestion and I saw a boost in my subscriber count.

Conclusion

Your subscribers are the lifeline of your blog because if every other thing collapses, they will still be there. The above are 10 lessons I learned from gaining my first 1000 subscribers. I hope you can use them to increase your own subscriber count.

About the Author: Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16-year-old entrepreneur living the Internet lifestyle and the founder of the young entrepreneur blog, YoungPrePro.com. Make sure to subscribe to his blog to get all his updates.

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Blogging with Keyword Research In Mind

When you have a blog, it is one thing to post whatever is on your mind and then it is another to spend a little time to research your headlines so that they not only grab the attention of your readers but they also get the search engine traffic you need as a result of choosing the right keywords.

The problem is deciding if the keywords you want to use will be competitive or not and if you are a new blog choosing low competitive keywords is the better option, while if your site is older and has good authority backlinks than you can afford to chase higher competing keywords. It is known that if you research keywords properly for your headline and can get them under 100,000 competing pages you can rise to the 1st page fairly quickly and easily.

As a general rule I tend to stick to using keywords that have 1 million competing pages or lower and that have a growing search trend so they will get a good click through rate, the 3 main tools to use is Google Competition, Google Insights and Google Trends. The problem is having to go back and forth to these windows each time you write a blog post takes a considerable amount of time so for this I recommend you use a SEO plugin called Keyword Winner.

You can use something like Google Ads Tool which is also free but the problem is you might have good search count and than next month search count is down, so again remember Google Trends which can give you an overall search count over a six month period or so to see if the keyword is gaining more searches over the months or not.

There is no rule that you should stick to dense keywords in your headline meaning 4-5 words, sometimes I use around 10 words in my headline but are consisted of 2 or 3 sets of key phrases and again can rank well for each set provided I do a quick check on competition before hand.

By researching keywords properly and getting to the 1st page of Google for each blog post you do will bring an exploding amount of traffic to your site, particularly if you keep it consistent. In my experience I have been able to write blog posts that bring in sales using keywords with review or coupon codes and again make money this way too.

Many bloggers fail to spend time to make their headlines in their posts suited for Google and yet by neglecting a small but very important thing can be the main reason why they succeed or fail as a blogger particularly if they take blogging more serious or treat it as a business and a way to generate income.

Always remember having the right headline together with meta title and the permalink is the most important thing. The keywords you choose that go on the page itself is just the icing on the cake.

So what keywords will you use in your next post? Will they be keywords that get you on the 1st page or will you be simply left behind?

This guest post has been written by Daniel Lew - Australian Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, SEO Professional offering Blogging Tips and Ways to Make Money Online! Daniel Lew is the founder of GSEO.net, Blogger at DanLew.com and Creator of Keyword Winner.

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Monday, December 6, 2010

4 Scientific Tips that Help You Get More Blog Comments

image of scientific flasks

One of the most engaging features of the blogging platform is the commenting system.

Many bloggers believe there is as much or even more value in the discussion than the posts they write themselves. Comments are a classic form of social proof for blogs, and blogs that attract lots of comments appear more authoritative. Comments are also a great way to facilitate user generated content that is perfect for SEO.

Because of all this, comments can become addictive, and many bloggers want to know how to get more of them. While there is a lot of great anecdotal advice out there from experienced bloggers, I thought some might appreciate a more data-driven approach.

Fortunately for you, I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on more than 150,000 blog posts. And in doing that, I’ve identified four data points you can use to encourage more commenting on your site.

chart with data about blog comments

The first thing I noticed is that while articles published during the week generally tend to get more views, articles published on the weekends get far more comments. This may be because users have more freedom on non-work-days to take the time to share their two cents.

chart with data about blog comments

Then, when I analyzed the hour-of-day blogs posts were published during, I found that commenting peaked on articles posted in the morning, specifically around 8 and 9AM.

I believe this is because posts released early are in everyone’s inboxes and feedreaders when they check them in the morning and the rest of the day.

chart with data about blog comments

I also found some interesting things when I looked at words used in articles and how they correlated with comment numbers.

Posts that mention “giveaways” and “gifts” are commented on more than the average article in my dataset, as are posts that mention “recruiting” and “jobs.” In these tough economic times, everyone loves a present and many people need jobs.

The word “comments” also appears in this list, indicating that directly asking for comments on your post does work.

chart with data about blog comments

On the flip side of the coin, I noticed certain words were correlated with posts getting fewer comments than the average.

The list includes many technical, legal and financial terms like “settlements,” “derivatives,” and “franchise,” “investing.” While people are concerned with their own monetary issues, they’re not so excited about discussing the finance world at large.

How about you?

What does your data tell you about the factors that seem to invite more comments?

Let us know (in the comments, of course!) what seems to increase (or decrease) comments on your site.

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I Am Not a Blogger, I Am a Human Being!

This guest post is by Katie Tallo of Momentum Gathering.

I’ve developed a tweet. It’s involuntary and annoying. My vision’s distorted. All I’m seeing are the letters S, E and O. Worse, I think I’m losing my mind because I don’t know who some of my friends are—at all—no idea who they are. I play with my widget all day. I’m obsessively turning my plug-ins off and on, off and on. I’m stumbling and tumbling around most of the time and alarmingly, there’s a growth mutating out of the side of my name. An @ has attached itself to me wherever I go. I need help.

I think I’m turning into a blogger!

It all started way, way back, seven months and thousands of links ago. It was a tweetless, friendless, skypeless time in my life—a simpler time when my inbox was empty and my surfing, innocent and drifting. A blog was some kind of weird public diary that weird public people did. Like pole dancing—too revealing. And yet somehow intriguing.

Naively, I peeked into a blogging forum one day and was instantly hooked. Suddenly, I was swinging from the nearest web publishing platform. Before I could stop myself, I’d picked a domain name, created a blog, and then brazenly published my very first post for everyone to see.

I was out there, naked. And I liked it.

I joined a blogging club, hung around the forum, attended webinars, blogging bootcamps, skype sessions and even flew off to a big conference in Vegas. Soon, I was being invited to other blogs. I even had some guests on mine. I chatted, commented, liked, moderated, shared and tweeted like a full-on social media butterfly. I was up all hours of the night, creating post after post, strutting my stuff. I couldn’t stop. While I madly typed and wildly clicked, my avatar just kept on smiling.

But all this linking and lurking was taking me deeper and deeper into the web where I soon found myself being chased by an angry mob of marketing-guru-type-experts who could smell my newbie blood. They threw me scraps of promises and secrets, coaxing me with freedom, riches, subscriber numbers and success! I ate up their feeds. I bookmarked their manifestos, signed up for their courses, bought their e-books and grabbed every freebie I could download.

Blurry-eyed and completely surrounded, my fingers moving rapid-fire across the keyboard, my mouth dry with dehydration from hours glued to my laptop, my soul screamed at me to get up, stand up, to even look up … and that’s when it happened … I did look up. I looked into the monitor and saw my reflection. I was a hideous visage of my former self—unrecognizable. I rolled back in my chair, lifted my hands to my face and screamed in anguish,

“I am not a blogger! I am a human being!

Okay, maybe it didn’t quite happen that way, but you get the point. Being a blogger can feel inhuman at times—an existence that’s indifferent to even the most basic of bodily functions, like walking, sleeping, eating, and peeing.

Blogging can completely change you … if you let it.

I blame no one, but myself. I found my passion and that passion caught me by surprise. I felt like there was so much to learn and so little time. I was trying to catch up, trying to get where everyone else seemed to be, trying to make my mark, trying to be everything, all at once.

It’s impossible and inhuman and I won’t do it anymore.

Maybe some of you feel this way too. Maybe you’re burning out big time from blogging. If you feel like you’re twittering on the edge of the grotesque, then it’s time to pry your clammy fingers from the mouse and lean back for a moment.

It’s time to be a human being again.

This doesn’t mean you stop blogging—far from it. But the human being has to emerge again. I’m going to be a mother, a wife, a filmmaker, a vegan, a runner, a motivator, an organizer, a camper, a volunteer, a writer and then a blogger. I am all of these things. And it’s all of these things that inform my blogging. If all I do is blog, I’ll end up with nothing to write about and my blogging will implode.

You have to live first, then blog.

Seems obvious, but the internet will feed you an endless stream of wants if you want it to. So I will stop wanting so much and remember what it is I really need. I don’t need to be the best, to compare, to win or to succeed at all costs.

I will return to who I really am and get back to what makes sense to me.

I will make my own rules. I will say, “forget it!” to SEO (for now), get to know my friends, sell things worth buying, give away great stuff, make loads of mistakes and focus on having amazing conversations. Most of you will find your own way to be human and make your own rules. The best bloggers already have.

Take Darren Rowse, for example. When I attended that conference in Vegas and sat in the audience at the keynote presentation, there was a tear in his eye when he spoke of his son who peeked over his shoulder, while he was writing “to the world”, and whispered, “Make sure you tell the world something important.” That’s likely Darren’s number one rule.

What’s important is the human stuff.

The stuff we all have in common, our pain, our struggles, our challenges, our worries, our victories, our oneness, and even our blogging. Because that reflection in the monitor is most beautiful when we see both the human being and the blogger looking back at us together. So I guess that makes me both a human being and a blogger after all.

Katie Tallo seeks to inspire simple, joyful life change through her blog, Momentum Gathering. Subscribe to her blog and grab her Life Cleanse Starter Kit if you need a little help feeling human.

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4 Great Tips to Build More Links to Your Blog Posts…Based on Scientific Analysis

This is a guest post by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella. It contains data from his upcoming webinar “The Science of Blogging” taking place on December 9th.

Many marketers and small business owners see blogging, rightly, as an important aspect of their SEO efforts because of their ability to attract inbound links. And even beyond SEO, getting lots of links for your blog posts is key to establishing yourself as an expert and building traffic.

I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on over 150,000 blog posts and I’ve identified several ways you can optimize your blogging efforts to drive more incoming links.

Day of Week

I found that blog post published in the early and mid business week tended to attract more links than articles published on other days. This is likely because the “linkerati” (people who control and create links, like bloggers) tend to spend the most time working on their sites during the week, as opposed to on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Time of Day

When I turned my analysis towards the hour of publishing, I found that blog posts published very early in the morning (like, 7AM early) attracted many more links than articles posted at other times during the day. This is because most linkerati are looking at their inboxes and feedreaders in the morning to find interesting content to write about and link to.

Most Linked-To Words

When I studied the words that occured in blog post and how they correlated with incoming links, I found words like “recent” and “soon” that indicated linkers were interested in writing about timely content. I also found many words like “insights,” “analysis,” and “review” that told me people were interested in linking to content that expressed a blogger’s personal and unique point-of-view.

Least Linked-To Words

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Sunday, December 5, 2010

When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

This guest post is by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella.

Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.

The first time I looked at blog post timing was when I was analyzing retweets. I found that retweets exhibit a strong diurnal pattern, in that they’re more common during the day and less so at night. I noticed that retweet activity tended to peak around 4pm EST, suggesting that this might be the best time to tweet a blog post for maximum potential retweet reach.

When I looked at retweet activity over the days of the week, I saw that they peaked later in the work week, specifically on Friday.

Since I first published this graph, the most frequently cited piece of this research has been the idea that Friday at 4pm is the most retweetable time of the week. While your niche maybe different, this data was based on analysis of nearly 100 million retweets, so in aggregate, Friday at 4pm is indeed the most retweetable time of the week.

Moving on from retweets, I started studying Facebook sharing and discovered some things that surprised me about timing there, too.

First, while major news sites and blogs publish articles during the work week, articles that are published on Saturday and Sunday tend to be shared on Facebook more than those published during the week. Perhaps one reason for this is that (as Wired reported), more than 50% of American companies block Facebook at work.

Next, I looked at the effect that the time articles were published had on the number of times they were shared on Facebook. I found that while there is a fair amount of variation, articles published in the morning, around 9a.m. EST, tended to be shared more on Facebook than articles published at other times of the day.

Looking back at these four data points, it may seem that they’re contradictory, but thinking through them a bit more, we can see that they is not necessarily so. Both day-of-week charts tell us that we should experiment with publishing articles later in the week—on Friday and Saturday specifically.

And by publishing posts early in the day, but tweeting them later in the afternoon, we can stimulate both Facebook shares and retweets.

I recently did a survey of over 1,400 blog readers and I asked them what time-of-day they read blogs. Morning was the most popular, followed in decreasing popularity by the rest of the day. Most respondents reported reading blogs at more than one time, so this piece of data reinforces my suggestion to publish early in the morning.

The best timing advice, however, may actually be around frequency. Last week, I analyzed 1000 of the most popular blogs on the web, according to Technorati. I compared their posting frequency with the number of incoming links and visitors they had attracted (according to Yahoo and Compete).

I found that among very popular blogs, publishing multiple times per day led to a huge increase in a blog’s success. This tells us that rather than focusing one perfect day or time, we should aim to publish at many times, and on many days.

Have you experimented with post timing and tweeting? What has your experience shown about the best times of day or week to reach your readers?

Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s social media scientist. This post contains data from his upcoming webinar The Science of Blogging, taking place on December 9th.

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