9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog
April 27, 2008
HaraldJohnsen asks “As a quality control, what are the most important questions to ask before hitting ’submit’ / posting a blog post?”
Great question Harald - I actually think that most of us as bloggers could improve many of our posts by pausing before hitting ’submit/publish’ and asking a few basic questions about the post. Here are a few questions that I ask myself:
- Does this post give something useful and unique to my readers?
- Will it enhance their lives in some way or is it ‘fluff’?
- Is the spelling correct?
- Does the post make sense grammatically?
- What could I cut out of the post to make it more concise?
- How could I make the post easier to ’scan’ for readers (headings, formatting, images etc)?
- Is the title engaging? Does it draw people into the post?
- Could I give this post a little more time before publishing to ‘mature’? Would coming back to it tomorrow help me to add depth to it?
- Have I written on this topic before and can I link to it?
Write Your Business Book Resources: NAWW Global Telesummit
April 27, 2008
- Secrets to Getting Celebrity Endorsements: How To Get Fabulous Celebrity Endorsements for Your Business, Your Book and Your Products
- Standing Ovation: How to Own the Platform
- Hire Your Very Own Journal Keeper for Expanding Your Creative Voice
- Copyright And Your Creativity
- Creating Your Memoir
- Creativity on Call-Become a More Productive Writer.
How to Establish Trust Online
April 27, 2008
@eMarv asks - “how do you establish trust online?”
I’ve touched on this with a few of my other answers this weekend but let me share three thoughts:
- It’s not something that happens quickly - I wrote a post a while back titled ‘Do you kiss on the first date? The Art of Courting as a Blogger‘ that explores how you need to work up to taking your relationships with readers to the next level. Trust takes time to build and you should see every post you make as a way to grow the relationship.
- It is something that is earned - you’ve got to put the runs on the board somehow with your readers to show that you’re worthy of trust. This includes blogging for the long haul, showing that you know what you’re talking about, demonstrating your transparency, going the extra mile for readers etc.
- The recommendations of others are really important - while I can tell you why you should trust me you’re far more likely to actually trust me if someone else tells you that they trust me and recommend that you do too.
Should I Have a BlogRoll on my Blog
April 27, 2008
@SalesBlogcast asks - “What’s the difference between haveing “links” vs. a “blog roll?” Benefits? Chosing wisely?”
Ultimately the word ‘blogroll’ is just a different term used to describe a list of links, usually on the sidebar of a blog. It’s just a different label for the list of links I guess.
When I first started blogging everyone had a blogroll but these days I don’t see as many. One of the problems with them when your blog grows is that they can become quite political to maintain. I ended up giving up on having one on ProBlogger as I had so many requests to be on it - now I just have one with my b5media co-workers.
The other thing about blogrolls is that I hear people trying to get on them because of the SEO benefits of doing so. I’m sure there is some Google juice passed from blog rolls but suspect it’s not massive. Google seem to have more of an emphasis on links in content rather than links that appear on every page on sidebars/footers from what I can see these days.
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Hiring Virtual Assistant to Help Administrate Your Blog
April 27, 2008
@jb108 asks - “how do you feel about VA’s, do you use any, how many, how much work and what type do you delegate to others.”
I love the idea of VA’s (virtual assistants) and can see a lot of tasks that I could potentially have one do for me - however I’ve never really felt completely comfortable with the idea and don’t currently have budget set aside for one.
I do have Lara help me with comment moderation and a little other admin work when I have a project going on that I need assistance with but apart from that I don’t personally delegate much work.
Of course at b5media we have quite a sizable team of staff to do a lot of the administrative stuff to keep our blog network running (I think at last count there were 12 full time staff).
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Google Grants: Google Adword Grants For Not For Profits
April 26, 2008
How to Grow Beyond Blogging
April 26, 2008
@itravin asks - “you’ve gone from blogging to b5 to become an author now, can you do a post on blogger growing beyond blogs”
You know it’s never really been my long term goal to write a book or even to start a blog network. In fact when I started blogging I didn’t even think it’d be more than a hobby! So I guess without going too deeply into the topic my advice would be to go into whatever you do with low expectations but with eyes wide open to the opportunities and possibilities that might present themselves to you.
b5media came about as an opportunity as a couple of other bloggers (Duncan and Jeremy at first) approached me to ask if I’d like to explore what working together might look like. None of us had any real idea on what would come out of the discussion but we all entered into it open to the possibilities.
The book was similar in that Chris and I started out to write an ebook together. This evolved into a ‘real’ book one day when a publisher at Wiley dropped me an email to see if I’d be interested in publishing something with them. It was out of the blue and unplanned but when I began to explore it it felt right.
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How Do I Make Money Fast Blogging?
April 26, 2008
@eMarv asked - “how can one make 25K in 2 months by blogging? :) I know, I know… “
I think you know the answer to that question from your last few words. But when it comes to blogging it’s not a get rich quick thing. I don’t know too many (any) bloggers who made $25k in their first two months. Having said that - I did meet a blogger this week who started a blog and 2-3 weeks later sold it for $3k - so I guess there are some ways to build them quick and sell them off (but this is probably an exception rather than the rule).
My philosophy of building money through blogging is that the secret is in trending up over the long haul.
If you’re after fast money head to the casino - but don’t hold your breath there either!
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Full or Partial RSS Feeds?
April 26, 2008
@SeanBannister asks - “on Problogger your RSS shows the entire post but on DPS it only shows a teaser”
Whether to post excerpts or full feeds is something I’ve grappled with on and off for years now. I used on only do excerpts here on ProBlogger too but in the end decided to switch. The main thing that held me back from switching to full feeds on ProBlogger was the issue of duplicate content. I see a new blog scraping my content every day or two so there must be many sites with the same content as ProBlogger out there. This is frustrating and while I try to track down those who do so without any acknowledgement of source I can’t possibly stop them all.
The good thing now is that ProBlogger has authority in the eyes of Google as it’s been around for a few years and I’m pretty confident that Google ranks us as the original source of all the duplicate pages. I’m a little less confident of this with DPS so have kept it as an excerpt feed. Having said this - I’ll probably switch DPS to full feeds at sometime soonish as it’s got a fair ranking in Google now.
Further Reading on Full vs Partial RSS feeds: Read more
How Many Blogs Do You Write On? How Many Posts Per Day?
April 26, 2008
@SeanBannister asks “how many blogs do you write for and how many blog posts a day you make?”
These days I only write actively on two blogs - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. At one point I was writing each week on around 25 blogs - but a lot of them were pretty much just watching what other blogs wrote and attempting to aggregate that content. The blogs have little original thought on them and didn’t take off so I didn’t continue to put time into them. I do also work for b5media as the VP Training - but this is just a part time role as my two main blogs take up considerable time.
In terms of posts per day - these days I try to publish one post per day on DPS. These posts are written largely by bloggers that I’ve hired. I was writing all of the content for this blog until a few months ago so now my role is more ‘editor’ although I do average 1-2 posts still a week. On ProBlogger my post frequency varies from day to day but I do have a minimum post target of 2 posts per day. I don’t mind if this drops to 1 post on weekend days but on weekdays stick to it religiously. On top of that I add other ‘newsy’ posts so probably average 3-4 posts a day on ProBlogger.
OK - so that’s my answer - I’d love to hear how many blogs you write on and how many blog posts per day that you average writing? Read more
