Thursday, September 16, 2010

How to Blog Like Bond. James Bond.

image of martini glass

When it comes to being a badass, few can hold a candle to good old 007.

Calm, cool, and collected under pressure, Bond is known as much for his seductive personality as he is for his incredible ability to get himself out of any situation in one piece.

What he isn’t known for is writing a successful blog.

But everyone’s favorite fictional, womanizing secret agent has more to do with writing killer copy and running a great site than you might think.

Here a few things you can learn about great blogging from everyone’s favorite snappy dresser/sex addict/paid assassin.

Know exactly who you are

From the specific type of drink he orders (martini, shaken not stirred) to the unique presence he commands when walking into a room, James Bond always knows exactly who he is (yes, I realize I sound like an American Idol judge, but it remains true).

When you’re dealing with James Bond, you know what you’re going to get. If you’re a psychopathic villain bent on world domination, you don’t want to find out that Bond is on your case because you’re most likely going to end up dead.

Readers should know exactly who you are within minutes of coming to your site.

  • When you visit Copyblogger, you know you’re going to learn how to write great content that builds both your business and your reputation.
  • When you visit The Art of Nonconformity, you expect a point of view that challenges the status quo. You also learn very quickly that author Chris Guillebeau has made it his mission to visit every country in the world.
  • When you visit Man Vs Debt.com, you know you’re getting a guy trying to destroy his debt.
  • Spend three minutes on any of Gary Vaynerchuk’s sites and you feel like you’ve known the guy for years.

Your reader should know not only who you are but also what you’re providing within just a few lines.

It took me nine months of writing every day before I finally found the right “voice” and felt confident enough to use it. Once I finally embraced my personality and injected it into each post, my site really caught on with new readers and became much more enjoyable for me to write.

Recognize the importance of style

Other than his killer instinct and love of women, James Bond is probably known for one key attribute:

Style.

Bond always looks fantastic, no matter how recently he’s escaped the clutches of an evil villain. He knows how to dress, he knows how to drink, he knows the right watch to wear and the right car to drive. He presents impeccable manners at a dinner table and in conversation. He makes a calculated show of his best possible side in every situation.

Can you offer that kind of consistence in your presentation? Does your site’s color scheme and visual style match the tone of the content? Is your site loaded up with misplaced ads that distract rather than enhance your site? Does your About page accurately and quickly tell the reader what they’re getting?

Most importantly, does it all work together?

I hate to be superficial, and I would much rather tell you that it’s what’s on the inside that matters most. But in today’s instant-gratification, StumbleUpon, YouTube culture, you often have less than five seconds to make your first impression. Make the most of those five seconds.

Hook them with good looks, and then keep them with great content.

It’s okay to be witty

James Bond has a dry one-liner for every situation.

Bond: That looks like a woman’s gun.
Largo: Do you know a lot about guns, Mr. Bond?
Bond: No, but I know a little about women.

Domino: What sharp little eyes you’ve got.
Bond: …Wait ’til you get to my teeth.

A witty comment can help you make a point more clear, keep readers engaged, get them thinking, or provide some necessary comic relief in an otherwise somber situation. Life’s too short to be serious all the time. There’s no crime — and a lot of style — in making your readers laugh.

Stay cool under pressure

When Bond jumps between two high-rise buildings, he knows he can make the jump. He simply doesn’t allow any room for doubt.

If he goes to a gunfight with six terrorists, he knows he’s going to win. There’s always a villain trying to kill him; there are always members of his own government who question his motives and tactics.

Bond moves forward with confidence, and he gets the job done.

As your blog increases in traffic, it’s easy to start doubting yourself and your abilities. Sure, you felt comfortable when it was just your mom and friends reading. But as your readership starts to grow, you might start to question yourself.

Here’s the thing. You got where you are thanks to your talents and abilities.

You will hit roadblocks, and you will have villains of your own. Don’t let them take you down.

I’ll never forget my first negative comment left by a random stranger, on an article of which I was extremely proud. I spent the next four hours freaking out, researching his claims, and crafting a response that I agonized over before finally posting.

The commenter eventually emailed me the next day and said, “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way, I was just in a bad mood.”

It takes time to develop some perspective about the negativity. If you are confident in your abilities, if you know what you’re doing is right for you and your readers, you will learn to take constructive criticism from the right people and ignore the villains.

Shoot to kill

James Bond knows that a single bullet can kill or incapacitate an enemy. To use any more firepower than necessary could be the difference between life and death in the next shoot-out.

When he sees a room full of enemies, 007 thinks to himself: “Six bad guys, six bullets. Perfect.

Words are like bullets — don’t waste them. If you can say it in 500 words, why spend 1000?

Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits writes an article and then continually refines it until the message is clear, quick, and concise. After writing something, go back through it, line by line, and decide what’s necessary and what’s superfluous. Embrace the art of brevity.

Aim for the kill by picking words and sentences that drive your point home immediately.

A little modesty can go a long way

Think back to any action scene from a Bond flick. He wipes out an entire army, drives a car off a cliff, saves a woman, and then brushes off his tux and moves onto the next task.

You don’t see him pulling a Ron Burgundy, claiming to be “kind of a big deal.” You’ll rarely hear Bond discuss his accomplishments or accolades — he doesn’t have to. His actions already speak louder than his words ever could. Restating the obvious would just tarnish the cool.

In today’s online world, bloggers are constantly trying to one-up each other, promising the BEST CONTENT EVER or announcing they’re the WORLD’S GREATEST AUTHORITY ON LIFESTYLE DESIGN. Hyperbole, exaggeration, and gratuitous self-promotion have unfortunately become commonplace.

Let’s imagine for a second that 007 ran his own blog.

After catching your eye with terrific design and blowing you away with incredible content, Bond’s blog would get the attention it deserved without him having to shout from the rooftops how great he is.

If you are sharing content that is worth reading, you don’t need to be your own biggest cheerleader. Leave that to the people you just wowed: your fans.

Your Mission

Take what you’ve learned from this secret agent and apply it to your own Web site. Build your style, be confident in your abilities, shoot to kill — and then tell them it’s all in a day’s work.

Good luck.

Related Articles

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Freakonomics Guide to Making Boring Content Sexy

image of orange with skin of an apple

It’s easy to write about certain topics, like celebrities, or technology, or even social media. Everybody wants a piece of it.

But what if your passion is botany, supply chain logistics, or cognitive psychology?

How do you get noticed with a compelling story when your subject is … well … boring?

In the summer of 2006, an economics book was on the New York Time Bestseller list. The title was provocative and promised to be anything but a boring read.

Even my hero Malcolm Gladwell said, “Prepare to be dazzled.”

Since I really can’t stand economics (hated it ever since college), I skeptically handed over my $25 and took Freakonomics home.

From the very first page, I was treated to a wild ride through the most bizarre stories I’d ever encountered. I learned about cheating schoolteachers and self-sacrificing sumo wrestlers. Why drug dealers still live with their moms and how the KKK is like a real estate agent.

Every story taught a boring economic principle in a way that made me want more.

I realized that Freakonomics was an instruction manual for transforming boring blog posts into sexy must-read masterpieces.

Check it out:

People love “dot connectors”

Our world is getting more complicated by the second. Every day your readers are trying to get a handle on what happened yesterday, what’s happening now, and what will happen tomorrow. If you connect the dots for them, you can get popular in a hurry.

Freakonomics is built around connecting dots in an interesting way. For example, it’s long been an economic principle that almost every choice we make is connected to incentives. Pretty boring stuff — until author Steven Levitt used a story about daycare centers to show how some incentives backfire.

Since parents were showing up late frequently, the daycare center started a policy of a $3 fine to incentivize parents to show up on time. Unfortunately, the fine wound up incentivizing parents to pay $3 for an hour of babysitting and not feel guilty for showing up late!

Giving your reader’s these “aha” moments is a great way to keep them reading a so-called boring topic and have them asking for more.

Headlines still matter

Even with all of our shiny social media tools, good ol’ standby skills like writing a great headline still matter.

You can be a masterful storyteller and write killer posts, but you still lose if no one reads them.

Titles are the closest thing us writers have to a “silver bullet.” Don’t waste ‘em. Do you think that Freakonomics would have been a New York Times Bestseller with the title Aberrational Behavior and the Causal Effect of Incentives?

The quickest way to give your boring blog a facelift is to put some eye-hijacking power into your headlines. In fact, write your headline first, before you even start the rest of the post. It’s that important.

Numbers are a blogger’s best friend

One common complaint of blogs is that they can’t be taken seriously. We are accused of playing fast and loose with the facts and being weak on proof. It’s easy to avoid hard numbers and focus on writing the soft stuff, but Freakonomics shows that this is a mistake.

Many bloggers are afraid that statistics, equations, and hard facts will scare away our readers, but that’s not giving our readers enough credit. The problem isn’t the numbers — it’s that we stick numbers out there without a story.

Freakonomics uses numbers to reveal a hidden story. Levitt looked up the numbers on standardized tests for Chicago students. On the face of it, this was pretty boring data. This district got such-and-such a score, this district got such-and-such a score. Yawn.

Until those numbers revealed that teachers were cheating.

In some districts, teachers received salary boosts when their students performed better on standardized tests — motivating them to fill in a few additional correct answers for their students.

The story makes the numbers interesting. The numbers make the story credible. Give it a try.

Everyone loves a mystery

Why would a successful sumo wrestler throw a match? The obvious answer would be that he’s getting paid to do so, but Levitt quickly discovered there was a much more mysterious motivation that drove who won and who lost in Japan’s sumo contests.

The answer is buried in psychology, probability, and incentives, but the only thing that I care about is that there’s a mystery. Any mystery begs for gumshoe detective work. We can’t leave well enough alone and we want to know why — especially if someone else is going to do the legwork of figuring out the answer for us. That’s why the CSI series has spun off more offspring than a jackrabbit.

You can use this quirk of human nature to make your topic enticing. Look closely at your topic and uncover some old-fashioned mysteries. Now write a post that presents the mystery and leads your reader through the investigation to its incredibly satisfying conclusion.

Provide a better way to solve common problems

Freakonomics uses a powerful set of tools to explain the way the world works. By the end of the book, you can’t help but think that every problem imaginable can be solved with the right incentive, data analysis, or storytelling. When you’re finished you feel that there is a better way to tackle your problems.

This is what “added value” means. Simply restating a problem is boring. Offering new tools and perspectives to solve problems helps your reader get closer to their goals — and that makes you someone whose content they’ll want to read every time you come out with something new.

Freakonomics: The Movie is coming out soon, and I’ll be first in line — because reading the book was so valuable to me I can’t wait to see what else the authors have to offer. To get devoted fans who’ll anticipate your every output with the same enthusiasm, give them some solutions.

Time to get freaky

Have you ever used any of these techniques to make your content sexier? Can you see how to apply some of them to your own blog?

And if you read Freakonomics yourself, tell us in the comments about any other blog-enhancing tips you picked up!

Related Articles

Monday, September 13, 2010

Sell Ad Space with AdSella Marketplace

Go with traditional ad networks and you can expect them to take a 50% cut. Go with affiliate marketing and you have to work hard to increase your conversion rate. Take out private advertising and you have to deal with all the administration of the ad placements. There has to be a better way to monetize your blog.

Designed to make both the ad buying and ad selling experience easier for everyone involved, AdSella has just launched into its beta testing and you can sign up right now. Is this the right deal for your website?

Buy and Sell Website Advertising

The vast majority of beginning bloggers will turn to networks like Google AdSense when they first get started. The barrier of entry is low and they can start making money right away. However, they quickly learn that private advertising can be much more lucrative.

Handling private ad sales can be very time-consuming, however, and that’s where AdSella can come into play. In short, AdSella is an online ad space marketplace where site owners can list their available ad placements and advertisers can buy these spots.

A variety of different ad types and banner sizes can be used and AdSella takes care of all the administration. Publishers are paid once a week and they really do just “set it and forget it.”

How Does It Work?

From the blogger’s perspective, the ad marketplace from AdSella is very easy to understand.

Site owners create a listing on AdSella for every block of ad space that they’d like to offer for sale, setting whatever price that they’d like, whatever duration they’d like, and whatever size they’d like. A simple line of text is then inserted into the space on the site where they would like the ad to appear.

A placeholder ad block appears immediately on the site. Ad buyers can then click directly on the “buy this ad” banner, proceed through the checkout process, upload their banners, and have the ad go live almost immediately. From the blogger’s end, no additional code needs to be added or altered; it’s automatic.

When the purchased ad time expires, the ad block once again becomes available through the AdSella marketplace for new advertisers to purchase. Once again, the blogger doesn’t have to do anything. There’s no management of expiry dates and advertiser banners; the AdSella engine takes care of all that.

Sifting Through the Marketplace

Each time that a blogger sets up a new available ad slot, it shows up in the marketplace for buyers to browse. Basic information is displayed in the main listing, including site name, URL, PageRank, run (duration), status, and price.

Clicking through to an individual listing, the buyer can then get a little more information about the advertising opportunity, ad location, acceptable formats, ad run time, website category, and other related details.

However, the purchase process cannot happen from this page. The ad buyer has to go directly to the seller’s website, find the available AdSella ad spot, click on the blue banner, and proceed through the checkout process that way. This ensures that the advertiser knows exactly where the ad will be placed.

After uploading the ad creative, the advertiser can log into his or her AdSella account to make changes. Once again, the site owner doesn’t need to do anything. The same code stays on the website.

What’s the Catch?

The good news is that it costs nothing for site owners to list their available ad placements through the AdSella Marketplace. Naturally, though, AdSella has to take a cut when a sale is completed.

The commission rate is 20%, meaning that the site owner receives 80% of the total ad price. If a one-month ad placement is $50, then the ad seller receives $40 of that and this is sent out every Sunday via PayPal.

That 20% is certainly worth avoiding all the extra administration required to sell ad space privately, not to mention the extra exposure the site owner receives through listing in the AdSella Marketplace.

Link: AdSella Marketplace

Related Articles

5 Ways Your Blog is Undermining Your Business

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners start a blog to support their business. A blog, they figure, will allow them to illustrate their knowledge to clients, build a reputation and brand, get people to check out their work, and take the place of that pesky enewsletter they started a year ago but never seem to have time to write these days.

But in many cases, the errors or glitches that these bloggers can make end up undermining their owners’ businesses in subtle ways. Ultimately, their blogs actually serve to lessen the blogger’s reputation among clients and prospects. Here are the most common errors I’ve seen.

1. Technical errors.

Technical errors include everything from typos to broken links and missing images. To my mind, they also include the my-13-year-old-cousin-was-the-designer blog skins. Given the usable nature of most blogging platforms today, these kinds of errors shouldn’t exist — and the vast majority of web users know this. If your blog contains technical errors, it reflects very poorly on you and, ergo, your business.

Apart from using all the tools at your disposal to ensure that the content you publish contains no technical inaccuracies, bloggers may need to periodically review old content to ensure that, for example, the links still work.

After a given period — say, a year — few users will expect to be able to rely on the links in your content, but if they’ve arrived at that content directly, through a search engine, they may not realise that the content’s old, so a broken link may still undermine your credibility. If linked content is crucial to a given post, you might need to consider building a regular review of those links into your content management plan to ensure that the post remains usable.

2. Factual errors.

Factual errors are a separate issue from technical errors. If technical errors are a baseline of business competency, factual errors mark the baseline for industry or discipline competency. The first might make you look slap-dash, but when users spot factual errors in your work, your professional reputation slides downhill very quickly.

The only way to avoid factual errors is research. Don’t trust any single source — research to find at least two unrelated sources for the same information every time, and cite or link to them in each case. This will obviously impact the time it takes you to produce a blog post, so you may need to alter your writing and research approach accordingly.

Factual errors are problematic, but they’re even more of an issue when the blogger uses them as the basis for opinion pieces.

3. Ill-informed opinion.

When you use erroneous information as the basis for an opinion piece, you do yourself a serious disservice. It’s one thing to report information that, while you’ve seen it presented elsewhere, is inaccurate. But to build that information into your world view suggests to astute readers that you’re gullible, or ignorant, or both. Now the problem isn’t just a matter of misinformation; it’s a matter of personalities.

Opinion pieces should therefore be carefully researched and planned, and their possible implications considered at length. To me, planning an opinion piece is a bit like playing chess: you need to think ahead as many moves as possible to ensure that, whatever happens as a result of the piece, I’ll have a strategy that lets me respond with grace and intelligence. The problem is, if your opinion piece is based on poor information, readers may simply disregard it — and your blog — as garbage without bothering to comment.

4. Poor comment responses.

If it’s your blog, you need to manage it — and its readership. Failing to respond to comments is poor form; responding off the cuff to negative or controversial feedback can be extremely damaging.

Blog comments represent a huge exercise in PR: this is a very visible forum in which you’re responding to your business’s public. So it pays to think like a PR consultant and plan careful responses to negative feedback that show your professionalism, honesty, and genuine interest in what your readers have to say. After all, your clients and prospects are reading this thing — perhaps they’re even the people commenting. Your responses aren’t just a question of good manners; they may have real financial implications.

5. Poor content planning.

Poor content planning shows on business blogs, and can make the blogger seem flaky. If your blog is unreliable, it’s all too easy for readers to extrapolate that to mean that you’re unreliable. And no one wants to do business with someone who’s unreliable. Readers don’t just need to know what types of content or information themes to expect: they also need to know when to expect updates. As we all know, there’s nothing that’s more disappointing than going to a much-loved blogger’s site to find that they haven’t updated it since you were last there.

Of course, the other question of content planning relates directly to your goals for your business-supporting blog. Do you want to use it to direct clients and prospects to freshly-released projects or your updated folio each time you have something to show? Will your clients have any issues with your discussing their projects publicly? What kinds of content and posts will you use to communicate directly — and productively — with prospects? These questions all come down to your blog strategy. If you haven’t got these kinds of issues straightened out, your readers may find it difficult to work out whether your blog is intended for them.

There are, of course, other content questions you’ll need to consider. Do you want to cross-promote special offers on your blog through your Facebook page? Will you tweet every blog update, or provide a blog RSS feed, so that readers know when to visit? If so, you’ll likely need to consider how your blog updates will fit with the other content your feed through these media. Obviously, having a decent content plan will help support your blog’s — and your — professional appearance.

These are the five most common pitfalls I see on business-supporting blogs. Have you fallen into these traps? What other problems — or pet peeves — do you encounter as you rad business blogs?

Related Articles

The 3 Basic Funnels to Blogging Success

Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16 year old entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, subscribe to his blog for more great blog posts.

I am sure you would have heard the word funnel once or twice before in relation to making money online. I’d like to define a funnel (in relation to making money online) as a system with which you can cash in income from your online business or as the basic steps you need to go through in order to get the best from your online business.

This post will be explaining the system used by many successful bloggers and internet marketers to make money online.

1. Build a Great Blog

The first and most important step in this funnel is to build a great blog for your online business. It is very important to note that setting up a blog is not only what it takes but having a blog that fulfills all the characteristics of a successful blog.

How Do You Build a Great Blog?

i. Quality Content: There are several things to consider when building a great blog for your online business and one of the most important things that should not be neglected is your content. Your content has a great way to affect the results you get and I’ve seen blogs that went from nowhere to overnight success just because of the valuable content they provide.

There are many benefits in writing great content when trying to build your blog, and one of those benefits is that it helps people develop trust in you. If you blog about a product, the factor determining the number of sales you will make is not only your audience but the type of trust you’ve developed with them.

Another great benefit of writing great content on your blog is that it makes people spread the word about you.

ii. Great Design: Another important aspect of your blog is your design. Aside from a great design being a very important aspect of a successful blog, it is also a very important aspect of our funnel (you’ll know why later).

One great characteristic of a great design is that it is easily navigable. You shouldn’t let your design make it difficult for your readers to read your content and you should also make it easy for them to locate everything they want.

If you take a look at the design of most successful blogs, aside it being unique and elegant, you will also discover it makes it easy for a reader to subscribe to their blog.

2. Attract Traffic to Your Blog

This is where many bloggers miss it, they will give the best of their content and expect people to come and read it without them doing anything to create awareness. Your content has no life of its own, except it is being read.

Even if your content will go viral, it still needs people to make it go viral.

There are several ways to get traffic to your blog and I will be listing 3 of the most effective ways to get traffic to your blog below:

i. Social Media: Making effective use of social media is one of the best ways to get traffic to your blog and this can explain why many social media sites are the top in the world.
ii. Guest Posting: Another great way to get the word out for your blog is by guest posting for other blogs in your niche and if done effectively, guest posting can be a great way to get traffic to your blog. When trying to guest post for other blogs, you don’t need to submit junk content because the blog is not your own. If you do that, several things may happen: either your post will get rejected by the blogger or you get little results from your guest posting efforts. Always try to give your best when guest posting for other blogs.
iii. SEO: Another great way to get free high quality traffic to your blog is by optimizing your blog for the search engines. Search engine traffic is a great type of traffic for several reasons. First, because it is highly targeted, and second, because it only requires little efforts from your part after which you can be getting results on autopilot.

3. Have a Backend

This is one thing I have noticed among every successful blogger, they all have a backend.

My definition for a backend is “a system that makes it easy for you to repeatedly get in touch with your readers after they stop visiting your blog”. There are two major types of backend namely “Your Mailing List” and “Your RSS Feed”, with the most effective one being a mailing list. There are several reasons why it is very important for you to have a backend. First, it makes it easier for you to get in touch with your readers anytime you want, and second it helps reduce your reliance on other forms of traffic. If you have a solid backend, you won’t worry about any fluctuation in search engine traffic and you won’t be afraid about losing traffic if you don’t post on your blog for a period of time. Another great importance of having a backend is that should anything happen to your blog thereby requiring you to start all over; you can still build upon your previous work since you can easily get in touch with your subscribers.

I will be writing about the 2 major types of backend below and which is the most important.

i. Your Mailing List: You would have heard it once or twice that the money is in the list. Having a mailing list is really very important and it is the best type of backend you can have. You can still do well with a lot of RSS subscribers but you will do better if you have a mailing list.

One great advantage of having a mailing list is that you can easily personalize the message your subscribers receive and you can easily send any message you want to them.

There have been many misconceptions to having a mailing list lately and this is why many people think having a mailing list is no longer effective. Having a mailing list is not the most important thing but how you deal with your mailing list; I will be giving some tips on how to get the best from your mailing list below.

- Trust Matters: One major thing you should focus on once you have successfully gotten someone on your list is building trust with them. Having a mailing list is not about you promoting offers every now and then, but you have to manage it effectively to get the best from it.

One of the best ways to build trust with your list is by making sure you provide value in every email you send. If you keep on helping people solve their problems and giving them high quality information in every one of your mails, it will be easier for them to take action anytime you recommend something to them.

- Frequency: While building trust with your list is very important, it is also very important to make sure you have the right frequency with your mailings. Don’t just be bombarding your readers with emails everyday but make effective use of every opportunity you have. You might truly be offering valuable information, but when you are bombarding your readers with too many mails (to add to the high number of daily emails they receive) they will begin to find it difficult to open your emails.

The frequency of your mail and your level of trust with your subscribers is really very important and if you could prove to them that they are in the right place, they won’t find it difficult to do what you say.

ii. Your RSS Feed: This is another form of a backend (especially for those who don’t believe in having a list – which is a very dangerous thing). It is very important to focus on building the number of your RSS subscribers because they are the ones who will be receiving each and every one of your posts.

One major way to increase the number of RSS subscribers you have is by making sure you have a visible subscription form on your sidebar (above the fold) and if possible, below your posts. It is also very important to educate your readers about it thereby letting them know the importance of receiving content using RSS feeds.

Conclusion

The above are 3 basic funnels to online business success and once you could put the above tips into practice, profiting from your blog wouldn’t be a problem.

[Image Credit: HardwareAndTools.com]

Related Articles

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Tyranny Keeps Fighting The Losing Battle

After the questionable elections and subsequent protests in Iran a while back, it seemed clear tyranny was fighting a losing battle against the tide of free speech riding the Internet.  It was inspiring to see protestors with cell phones high in the air snapping pictures the way another generation raised their fists in protest against their government in 1960s America and who could forget Neda and her horrible death in front of the new media that rivaled those horrible pictures from Kent State?

Sadly, the struggle continues for many people in other countries where freedom of expression is far from an unquestioned right.

Bahraini authorities have arrested blogger Ali Abdulemam again. The National Security Agency arrested the family man after he was called to their headquarters. He is a campaigner for peace and an activist for democratic speech in the Arabic and Muslim worlds. Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia described his colleague as someone who uses the Internet to work for peaceful reform.

Here’s another report that’s sad but not really a surprise and it comes from…..you guessed it, Cuba. Luis Felipe Rojas is a brave Cuban blogger who was arrested and detained by the authorities there. He’d done some human rights writing on his blog and was subsequently arrested and detained for the better part of a day recently.

“One day, I will not return home so quickly, I know it. Now, I write while I can,” he writes.

Oman is another country that makes this infamous list. They’ve taken steps there to ban virtual private networks that would allow people to use VOIP phone systems. In a related story, Egypt has just released a Christian blogger that spent two years in jail for posting a link that the authorities there didn’t like.

I’ve tried to save the best for last here and that means the worst offender when it comes to jack booting freedom of expression.  It should be really no surprise that China tops the list for all of their apparent duplicity when it comes to encouraging Western economic growth on one hand and squashing freedom of speech on the other.

Here’s a few new smudged medals they can pin on their tunics:

  • You can buy a mobile phone in China but you need to supply your personal ID. Sounds innocent enough you might say. One could argue that these rules that are in effect in many European, North American and Asian countries already, and they combat the use of unregistered cell phones in the commission of crimes, but most of those countries allow their citizens to read 1984. In China, the government uses the famous George Orwell book as a manual to watch and control people.
  • Sites that offer micro blogging services in that same country will now need to hire censors. The Chinese are calling these people ‘self-disciplined commissioners’ in a the same strange way that people doing the same work in the old Soviet Union were called Comrades.

Let’s all hold out hope that all these places are just holding their fingers in the information dyke and that very soon now the wave of technology and human spirit will wash up and over the dams they’re trying to keep in place. I grew up in an era where we help up signs, grew our hair long and tried to change the world. Now it looks like the placards to really accomplish that goal are the computer screens we have in our homes.

Related Articles

1 Easy Solution to 3 Big Blogging Problems

Guest post by AnnabelCandyfrom Get In the Hot Spot

Over the last 13 months 63,548 people from 165 countries have visited my blog and left 1,637 comments thanks to my friend Teresa. In fact it’s really all thanks to Teresa that I’ve enjoyed so many amazing opportunities since I started blogging. These are a few of the highlights of my short blogging career:

  • meeting like-minded people from around the globe;
  • being flown to China for a social media conference;
  • earning money online;
  • getting new clients for my copy writing and web design services;
  • meeting best selling authors;
  • writing for print and some of the most popular blogs on the Internet like Problogger.

You’re probably wondering who Teresa is and where you can find this great blogging guru. You may be imagining the female version of Problogger ~ an experienced bloggers who’s been coaching me and feeding me her best tips but the funny thing is Teresa doesn’t even have her own blog. She doesn’t know anything about blogging apart from what I’ve told her, and she wouldn’t normally read any blogs, but when I started blogging she read mine because she wanted to support me.

That’s because we our friendship is based on supporting each other to achieve our goals. We do also have shared interests in poker, dancing and white wine, but that’s another story. Teresa and I met in Costa Rica and started a writing group there based on a shared goal of wanting to improve our writing skills. Teresa liked my writing and I loved hers but mostly we enjoyed each other’s company.

In fact, we liked each other so much that after considerable debate we didn’t invite anyone else to join the writing group. It was just the two of us at Teresa’s kitchen table every Thursday night with a bottle of wine and our writing.

The idea was to encourage and motivate each other to write anything at all when we could have just as easily been surfing, practising our spanish with the friendly locals or hanging out in the jungle with the monkeys and sloths. We were accountable to each other and we agreed never to criticise and always keep the feedback positive.

Our exclusive writing group wasn’t just fun. It worked and we both wrote lots. Then I spoilt it by moving to Australia and soon after that Teresa moved to England but she still carried on encouraging me to write and she did it in a public forum by leaving comments on my new blog for all to see.

There are almost 100 comments from Teresa on my blog now, even though she hasn’t left many recently because she moved back to Costa Rica and getting online is tricky there.

3 Big Blogging Problems For New Bloggers

I didn’t realise at first but Teresa’s comments solved these three big problems for new bloggers:

1. Low motivation

60-80% of blogs are jettisoned by their authors less than 30 days after being started. Knowing that Teresa would be checking up on me motivated me to keep blogging even when I was tempted to give up;

2. Lack of social proof

It’s human nature to want to be where other people are. Having comments on your blog shows other readers that your blog is read, enjoyed and engaging. Teresa’s comments made me and my blog look cool, interesting and loved;

3. Complacency

When your blog is new and you don’t have many readers there is a tendency to think that it doesn’t really matter if some of your blog posts are a bit off topic, badly written or of limited value to your readers. Knowing someone read my blog made me keep trying to improve my blog. Teresa made me keep trying to put only my best writing up there.

The Power of Blog Comments

In short, Teresa took me from being a depressed new blogger with only a handful of readers to a blogger with scores of posts, an established blog and an engaged community of appreciative readers. She single handedly fixed those three big problems most new bloggers have.

Here’s an excerpt from Teresa’s first comment ever:

“You’re sooo funny!”

Four posts later, and she commented on every one of them, she left this comment:

“Go Girl! Your best ever piece…passion, enthusiasm, encouragement…I love it!”

Comments like this one poured in from her:

“Wow I didn’t realise just how much I loved receiving your blogs until I thought I had missed one.”

It’s easy to see why those glowing comments kept me motivated but they also made me strive to publish only my best writing and showed other blog readers that I had something good to offer.

Blog comments are essential to a new blog’s success to:

  • motivate you;
  • give you ideas for other posts;
  • provide social proof.

I love getting comments on my blog posts because they;

  • let my readers have their say
  • turn a monologue into a conversation;
  • make my posts more interesting and deep;
  • let blog readers add their tips;
  • let me and readers find out about other blog readers;
  • build a community.
  • Show the post is well read, useful and enjoyable.

A blog without comments is like a party with no people. You can’t get out of there fast enough.

But when your blog’s new you probably won’t have many readers, let alone comments. Just by reading my blog and leaving comments Teresa kept me motivated, made me try my best and made me look popular.

1 Easy Solution: Blogging Buddies

You can’t have Teresa but you can solve these problems for yourself by getting a blogging buddy who leaves regular comments on your blog.

Finding a Blogging Buddy

First try asking your friends or relatives. I was lucky that Teresa just took it upon herself to comment on my blog regularly, but if you tell a trusted friend or relative what you’d like them to do and why, they’ll probably help out.

If that’s not an option then find an interesting blog that’s similar in age, style or topic to yours and leave the lucky blogger a comment. If they then visit your blog and leave you a comment, keep reciprocating and see where it leads. It could be the start of a beautiful blogging buddy relationship.

If you want recommendations for people with interesting, growing blogs check out the people who comment on Problogger – they’re obviously dedicated to blogging success and might like the idea of getting a blogging buddy too. Or seek out like-minded bloggers on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist.

If you another blogger leaves a comment on your blog go back and leave a comment on their blog. With luck the blogging buddy relationship will grow naturally from that. If you find a friend who doesn’t have a blog but wants to support you with yours I recommend you help another budding blogger by commenting on their blog. Giving something back to other people really does make you feel happier in yourself. I love leaving comments on other people’s blogs and it’s a great way to start networking with people.

The more blogging buddies you can get in the beginning the better. You can tide each other over until you really do build up a good community of readers who care about what you write and leave you comments.

Have fun finding a blogging buddy. I hope they’ll be as enthusiastic and supportive in their role as Teresa was and that you’ll be able return the favor. I’ve got a few blogging buddies now and I’m still trying to get Teresa to start her own blog and share her writing with the world. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to kick start her blogging journey as she did mine.

What do you think? Would you like a blogging buddy or have you already got one? If you haven’t, check out some of the other commenters’ blogs and leave them a comment. You never know, it could be the start of a beautiful blogging relationship and a long-lasting, successful blog.

Annabel Candy covers business, success, writing and blogging tips at Get In the Hot Spot. Subscribe free by email or

Related Articles