Should Your Business’ Blog Profile Industry Leaders?

One method of raising your blog’s profile is to profile other blogs or bloggers. This can be a very successful approach, like it was for blogger Ben Spark on his I’m Not a Famous Blogger site (link below). But what if your blog is for a business? Profiling industry leaders — i.e., your partial or full competitors — might make sense, though profiling their personal or company blogs could be misconstrued as an attack on the slightest wrong word, unless you’re extremely careful. In which case, is it a good idea to cover competitor sites at all?

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, linking to the blogs/ sites of competitors is actually a good search engine strategy, provided you’re linking to quality sites, and quality, relevant content. Search engines want to provide relevance of content; they don’t care about your business politics. So linking to topically relevant sites scores you points. On the other hand, profiling your competition could have one of two negative results. Firstly, it could backfire on you. As mentioned above, competitors might be leery of you profiling them. Or, you could do such a good profiling job that you send away clients. Neither one is a win.

Still, there’s an opportunity to implicitly show why you’re better, without actually saying so. If you feel the need to profile an industry leader, make sure that you do a series. Keep everything business-like and neutral, if not positive; leave out the personal stuff. Next, make sure that you have some additional compelling content that you can give away — such as an ebook, report or whitepaper — which not only shows authority in your niche but to which you can link to from each profile post. Have this extra content available for download at the same time that you publish the first industry profile post. Give readers a directive at the end of each profile; suggest that they download the report or ebook to learn more, and that they can contact you with relevant questions.

This approach is more likely to bind interested parties to your site rather than sending them away to a competitor.

Ref: Ben Spark/ a I’m Not a Famous Blogger.

5 Time Enjoyment Tips for Home-Based Bloggers

One of the toughest things about blogging from home is being able to separate work and pleasure time. If you’re just starting out and not earning quite as much as you would like to, you might be accepting as much work as you can find, regardless of rates. Which could mean long work days. Or you maybe you’re spending extra time researching your niche or blogging it on your own until you find more clients. Either way, you’ll likely be more productive on a long-term basis if you allow yourself to recuperate each day. Otherwise, the work you love will turn into a chore and you’ll end up resentful. Now the other day I talked about time management tips for bloggers. Here are some time enjoyment tips to help you differentiate work and play time and you keep grounded.

1. Have a schedule. This is easier said than done. If you’re like the typical creative person, you tend towards being a night bird — or worse, sleeping whenever. However, having a routine helps to differentiate work time from everything else: personal tasks, play, family time, etc.
2. Use a signal. If you watch any of the financial TV channels, you already know that 1pm EST marks the end of the trading day in the stock market in N. America. Some of the stations play a clip of the clanging bell from Wall Street. You could do something similar, though not necessarily so loud. So if you find it easy to get engrossed in your blogging but want to keep a consistent schedule, give your self an end-of-day signal. It could be implicit, by putting up a large analog clock in front of you. Or you could set an alarm on your phone, or use Google Calendar in a Web browser. For the latter, you get a default browser popup 10 minutes before the start of a new scheduled activity. So schedule something in, even if it’s “enjoy the evening”. So if you want to stop working at 4 pm, put in a dummy (or real) event in Google Calendar that starts at 4 pm.
3. Schedule non-blogging activities. Schedule real non-blogging events, even if it’s to read a book, watch TV or whatever. This helps to reinforce in your mind that your work day will end. Your workflow will adjust to to the time you have, and you might even find yourself getting more efficient.
4. Involve friends and family. It’s easy for those around you, such as those you live with, to forget that just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you have leisure time all day. This can be a touchy issue.  Even innocent text messages can turn into a drawn out digital conversation and break your workflow. You have to gently remind chronic interrupters who either forget or just don’t respect your work time that you are working, that you can schedule some time with them after your work day is over. In the worst-case scenario, if they won’t leave you be, turn off your phone and only check your email at scheduled times each work day. On the other hand, if they can enter your work area and disturb you, you’ll just need to learn to be more assertive about time. Send them a bill, with reminders to pay up, and see if they don’t stop. (Or leave you, depending on whom we’re talking about here.)
5. Split your work day. Sometimes a straight 7am – 3pm, 8-4, or 9-5 work slot just won’t work. Hey, you’re working from home. If your client work allows it, you could always split a particular day (or every day), to take advantage of your most creative times of day but enjoy a chunk of time inbetween. Go see a movie, sit by the pool, or whatever.

Ultimately, you want to do what’s necessary to make a distinction between your work time and the rest of the day. Working somewhere other than your bedroom is a very good idea, if you can manage it. Now that my wife and I are finally in our own apartment, I’ve appropriated the guest room for my work area. I set her up a nice desk on rollers in the master bedroom. However, she’s pretty good at managing her work-at-home time, though it probably helps that she’s a film producer, not a blogger.

As a final bit of advice, I suggest that you read a great post at Smart Passive Income that offers some tips on keeping your work and life balanced and yourself healthy.

Image: Flickr.

Will the New Digg 4.0 Bring Back Bloggers?

Digg used to be one of the foremost ways to promote Web content, though after a series of changes in algorithm, many users who were bloggers, publishers, or SEOs fled. While it may not be used as much for content promotion as in the past, at least amongst my blogging and Web publishing colleagues, it still has some life in it yet. There’s a brand new version around the corner, Digg 4.0, and it has a number of new features, including several that tend to the social. But is it enough Will it bring back all the lost power users? Can it gain ground over the volume of content sharing done through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter? Or is it too late?

How Digg Used to Factor in Blog Content Promotion

As someone who used to write 3-5 anonymous linkbaits per week a few years ago, Digg was crucial to the success of my work; if my content didn’t get the home page, I’d be in less demand. As soon as people started gaming Digg, and Digg reacted to that by changing their algorithms, there was a domino effect. Many smaller publishers and bloggers felt that they were getting cheated while certain sites still got their content on the Digg homepage, even if a lesser known site had a better post on the same topic. Incidents of domain banning also seemed to go up.

In other words, things had just gotten worse for some bloggers and publishers. So why use Digg for promoting content, wasting time, money, effort?  My own services became less and less in demand, at least at the rates that I used to get, because publishers were not willing to spend money on campaigns that might fail on Digg. That ushered in cheap linkbaits cranked out with little quality (though some still do well thanks to voting networks). I in turn stopped using Digg regularly, as did many of my colleagues. I’m not bitter; I just don’t use Digg all that much anymore unless someone asks me.

A typical approach a few years ago, to promote content, might be to use some combination of Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Stumbleupon, Delicious and other social voting/ bookmarking sites, depending on the niche. Regardless of the combination and the sequence of submission, Digg was often a crucial part of the promotion for some publishers, and it wasn’t working for them anymore.

How Blog Content Gets Promoted Now

Meanwhile, those who discovered the power of Facebook and Twitter for content sharing went that route. These two social networks (yes, Twitter is one, not just a microblogging service) have potentially greater power for creating viral content than social voting and bookmarking sites. Why? Because of a number of reasons:

1. Trust factor. With Facebook at least, your social network tends to be comprised of people who know you, even if only online. That isn’t always the case with a voting site, even if it allows for “friending,” because Facebook allows for conversation that helps you get to know someone better. Obviously, you’re more likely to re-share web content posted by someone you know than to vote up content submitted on Digg by someone you might know not very well, if at all. Digg did have limited interaction through their “shout” feature, though I think that was dropped a while back. But it wasn’t the same as conversation. The “conversation” is on Facebook, and to a lesser degree, on Twitter.
2. Wider audience. With 400M+ users, Facebook has a broad range of users, and ultimately, we’re all much more connected than on voting sites. I’m definitely more connected to other users on Twitter than I ever was on Digg or other social voting and bookmarking sites.
3. Ease of sharing. It’s easy to share content from a range of topics and have someone re-share it, on both Twitter and Facebook. Facebook even gives you a nice little snapshot of what to expect. That means more people are likely to share interesting content.With voting sites, before voting buttons were available for placing on blogs, if you wanted votes, you had to convince someone to sign up for one or more social voting/ bookmarking sites. The probability of success was low then and I’m not even sure it’s that great now, even with the availability of voting buttons. Now, even if friends did sign up, getting them to spend time daily checking on Digg to see if you needed a vote or ten was an uphill battle. If you voted too fast as a group, or if the same people voted en masse, or if you frowned at Digg the wrong way, Digg might punish you — unless you were one of maybe 10-15 sites that seemed untouchable.
4. Better viral infrastructure. Facebook doesn’t the restrictions Digg imposed, when it comes to sharing content, nor does Twitter. As such, interesting content can go viral sooner, and having the shortest viral loop is crucial for content to become viral. Even just a half-dozen retweets in short order of shared content can help bring in Web traffic and thus be a more valuable approach than using a voting site full of rules. If you cross-promote on Twitter and Facebook, without managing to p*ss off your friends/ followers, the potential for the success of Web content is even higher.

The Return of Digg?

But Digg has been reinvented. Founder Kevin Rose is at the helm again, and there are a slew of new features, many of which are “social.” I’m not going to get into all of them, but the relevant stuff is that you can import your social graphs from Facebook and Twitter. You can also log in with your Facebook profile, though I believe that was there before Digg 4.0′s release. You can also import contacts from GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL, though I don’t know when these features were added. The other features of Digg 4.0 (which by the way is not live yet) are described in a recent Techcrunch post, but as many people are saying, they seem to be copying some of the better features of Twitter and Facebook?

Will these features be enough to bring lost users, especially bloggers, to Digg? I’m willing to keep an open mind, though don’t have the time to invest again. But before completing this post, I thought I’d synchronize my original Digg account with my Facebook account, in preparation for Digg 4.0 going live. Unfortunately after going through three or four registration screens, I got a “Yikes, we just had an error.”

The voting/ bookmarking flavors of Social Media can still work, provided you follow some simple tips, but I’m not sure Digg will be in my arsenal anymore. Me, I’m sticking to Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Delicious and a few others. Still, if you ask me to Digg and I like the content, I probably will. You can add me on Facebook; just remember to make a mention of why you’re adding in the message area or I’ll ignore the add.

7 Time Management Tips for Bloggers

You want your writing to be inspired, but that in itself can be an obsession, and selecting a topic to blog about can take up a good chunk of your day, if you let it, and work still has to get done. Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some tips to manage your blogging workflow, choose blog post topics, and make efficient use of your time.

The Problem

One of the problems with having Web content aggregator tools at your disposal like Google Reader, AllTop, YourVersion, or TechMeme (for tech topics) is that you can easily get caught up in cataloging or bookmarking every new post — especially those with breaking news from a few minutes ago. If you do this, yes you’ll be aware of all kinds of breaking news and other trends in the blogosphere, but if your objective is to blog, you’re no closer to your goal if you’re spending hours looking at what’s going on online. Just like the saying “writers write,” be of the mindset that “bloggers blog.”

Nip Idea Acquisition Obsession and Pick a Topic

To make efficient use of your time, develop the skill of choosing suitable topics for your blog posts and get writing. Here are some suggestions to help you filter your choices.

1. Stop searching.

First and foremost, stop scanning your aggregators and adding new items to your list of references. Close your Web browser tabs – or at least the ones with your aggregators. Trust yourself that if you’re reasonably knowledgeable about your niche, you have enough references to trigger some ideas for a blog post.

2. Check your editorial calendar.

If you have one, use it as a filter for your current list of “hot topics”. Maybe something one blogger wrote coincides with an item on your editorial calendar and you can add to the “conversation” of that topic.

3. Check what’s trending on Twitter.

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, see what the trending topics are on Twitter. The new home page makes it easy; you don’t even have to have a Twitter account (though you should).

4. Look at Google Trends.

If you want a more long-term view of popular topics, use Google Trends to compare the search frequencies (on Google) of two or more keywords/ keyphrases.

5. Pick at random.

If tips #2-4, above, don’t help you, just pick at random. Assuming you have already been selective about what’s in your list of references,choosing a topic at random from the list is far better than wasting time trying to decide what to write about.

6. Set a timer.

If I have a large daily quota of articles and I have a client who needs news-y posts, setting a timer for each post helps me immensely. Sure, I might be able to write 800 words on some celebrity’s passing, but if 200 will do and the priority is to get the news out fast, then I can revisit a longer post later. Think of it as a link-building opportunity: write a shorter post now and link back with a longer post later.

Another area of obsession can be choosing the “right” image for your post. I use Flickr and filter for CC-licensed content. Sometimes certain keywords just don’t turn up the “right” image. If not, use a “first fit” approach: change search keywords and take the first image that works. It doesn’t have to be perfect, else you can easily get caught up in browsing for something “better”. Worst case: browse at most 3-4 pages of Flickr search results and pick the best one from each page. Compare the selections and pick one so you can get on with your day.

7. Write.

Just write.

• Don’t cripple your creativity by mentally imposing minimum word limits for your blog posts. You might have those, but don’t write as if you do. If you learn efficient blogging, there’ll be some time to edit to length.
• Don’t cripple creativity by worrying about SEO. As you become a better writer, you’ll learn to copywrite in a way that gives you good anchor text for both internal and external hyperlinks. But if you obsess your wording for the sake of one or two links, then you need to go back to Tip #6, above.
• Don’t cripple your creativity by trying to write linearly. If something compelling comes to mind, just write it down. You can rearrange sections of your post later. That’s what editing time is for. (Of course, if you have 15-30 minute deadlines for posts, there’s not much time for that. But then that’s a whole different issue. Hopefully you don’t have a client who expects quality in 15 minutes, but if you do, here are some tips for writing effective news posts.)

How do you keep your blogging time in check? Or do you let it dominate your entire day?

Disclosure: I have share options in YourVersion, a real-time Web content discovery engine.

Image: Flickr.

Is It Too Easy to Blog?

There’s an interesting anti- blogging op-ed rant in the Baltimore Sun by Garrison Keillor, an amusing American writing icon who’s known for classics such as Lake Wobegon Days and A Prairie Home Companion. In the rant, entitled “When everyone’s a writer, no one is,” Keillor gives an entertaining slap in the face to blogging and microblogging, suggesting that the Internet has made us both literate in terms of increasing reading interest, though simultaneously reduced the value of writing. I mean, who wants to pay for something when you can probably find it for free or which is easy to steal? [Via Writers Write.]

That sounds about right, but the irony that the Baltimore Sun’s web page has Google AdSense ads smack-dab in the middle of Keillor’s op-ed piece isn’t lost on me. If this is what traditional publishers think they have to do to survive, then so be it. Now, I just had an email conversation earlier today with someone who wants to buy a few old sites that I’d previously bartered from someone else. The potential buyer wanted me to also add more content, which I wasn’t interested in even before he tipped his hat by making a mention that you can buy 10 posts for $20. That was because I’d mentioned to him that when I had tried to find writers for my sites, that was what I was quoted, by people who knew the niche well.

The $2/post might be available for some niches, but you will get exactly what you pay for: writing that’s likely unreadable and would take you far too long to edit than just write yourself. Specialized niches, on the other hand, require you to stay on top of the market, do extra research. I won’t give away the niche, but let me put it this way: if I have to watch a 1.5 hour TV show just to do some research to write one single post for $2, there’s something seriously wrong with the industry. You can’t live off that kind of workflow and rate. Worse are those who think everyone should now write for that rate, regardless of where you live. (One guy from Buffalo, NY, a few years ago, offered me a $1.50/post even though I repeatedly said I lived in Toronto, Canada. I’m now in Silicon Valley, California, and even if I can still work from home, life is expensive here.)

The culprits, as Keillor suggests, are probably the otherwise fantastic blogging systems such as WordPress, MoveableType and Drupal, that have in one sense revolutionized publishing because they allow anyone to easily write and publish at minimal cost, and in another sense are destroying publishing because they allow anyone to easily write and publish at minimal cost. And claim to be a writer or blogger. Even when they’re not. Keillor says, “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.” Again, that sounds just about right. In fact, to add to the potential demise, Barnes & Noble have a new e-book publishing platform, Pubit!, for independents and self-publishing writers, with the distribution vehicle being through B&N’s e-Book store.

Still, let me reassure you aspiring bloggers who actually have or can develop real writing skills, who have inspired writing (though not day in and day out), that you can make living. I doubt most of you will achieve blogging success if you blog for advertising dollars, but if you align yourself with clients who sell products and/or services — or sell your own — then it’s possible to make a living writing online, even excel at it. Just don’t let the ease of blogging subvert you from building your writing skills. Blogging platforms like WordPress are merely writing tools, just like the now-ancient IBM Selectric typewriter was that I first started cracking out my short stories and poems on.

On a side note, it’s the seventh birthday of the WordPress blogging system — one of the key propagators of the online publishing revolution. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic, shares some thoughts about this occasion and mentions that version 3.0 is near (it’s available in beta form). He also notes that that WP development community now numbers over 1,500 active members contributing to what the GPL software is today — that is, much more than a blogging system. Happy birthday, WordPress.

Image: Flickr.

What Are Some Traits of Blog or Blogger Success?

Upon browsing the “about blogging” segment of the blogosphere, I came across a number of posts about what it takes for a blog or blogger to succeed.

Diana Adams offers a list of 22 traits of successful and happy bloggers over at Ink Rebels. Have a look and see how many of the traits you have. What’s your score? At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’d say I have most of the traits but waver from time to time on one or two of them. What about you?

If you think you have most or all of those 22 blogging traits but feel like you’re still floundering, read Glen@ViperChill’s reflections on things he wished he knew about blogging four years ago. They’re very straightforward and might disappoint some of you who are starting out, but being armed with these ahead of time might help you get through the difficult early period of your blog or blogging career. If you have just one take away from Glen, it should be the first item (at least it is for me): it takes time to build your blog’s readership but it gets easier after the “hump”.

Of course, each blog has it’s own hump period that’ll probably feel interminable, depending on numerous factors, including what niche you’re covering, your publishing consistency, content promotion consistency, and of course the value of the content on your  blog. Then again, there are things people don’t want you to know about blogging, as Ideas Bubble puts forth — some of which are amusing, others which are a bit depressing, but all pretty close to the truth. To paraphrase a common saying, knowing them is half the battle.

Ultimately, it’s worth knowing all of these traits and factors, but don’t let them stop you. Move ahead but don’t get blacklisted or ruin your blog with poor planning.

Performancing Blogosphere Roundup – May 26, 2010

If you’re a blogger on the go, you might know that WordPress is available for a number of mobile devices including iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry. SplashPress Media’s Darnell Clayton discusses the Blackberry edition at Blog Herald. I’ll be covering the iPhone and iPad versions in the future. (The simple summary is that the iPad-specific version of WordPress beats the iPhone version, and it’s great to be able to monitor a blog when I’m about and can’t carry my laptop around.)

Are you looking forward to the release of WordPress 3.0? It’s been delayed slightly to later this month or early June because of bugs, but the second beta release has been out since early May. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet but Six Revisions has a guide to the new features. Amongst them are a new interface for installation, a new default theme with both header and background customization, a link shortener feature for better micro-blogging integration, a merge of the single site version of WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-user), and tons more. On a related note, Drupal 7 is in the works, though no release date just yet.

While a non-Mac computer is just fine for blogging, I’ve made a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (and iPad) an important part of my multi-computer blogging setup. From May 25th until Sep 7, 2010, Apple is offering a freebie for qualified people within the educational market. Students (college and K12), faculty/ staff members, parents, and PTA/PTO executives might all be eligible to take advantage of Apple’s educational offer: buy a Mac and you’ll get a free 8 GB iPod Touch (basically an iPhone without the phone capability, just the WiFi). Note that this is a rebate offer. You do actually pay for the iPod Touch upfront but get credited within 90 days of making your claim. Please see their qualifications details.

Adapt or die. It’s a common refrain, and it applies to bloggers as well as online busineses. While newspapers are not online businesses per se, that’s the direction some traditional publishers are tending, but what they’re offering isn’t just digital content. A few are now selling SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services — an important aspect in building a strong web presence for a blog or website. For example, Gannett Newspapers, who are behind USA Today and other publications, are one of several publishers going in this direction, though they are targeting local markets individually. I guess in terms of adapting, it’s in an interesting approach, but who would associate newspapers with those sorts of skills? Search Engine Land has the details.

5 Tips to Leverage Free Mobile Apps for Link-Building

WebTrafficROI has a very interesting link-building tip: create an iPhone Web app. They’re not talking a native iPhone app, which would take a lot more time and money, but rather a Web app that would run in the iPhone Safari browser. Why? Well free mobile apps (native or otherwise) are today’s hot freebie, assuming you’ve done a good job. So WebTrafficROI suggests that you create a mobile Web app for the iPhone and then submit some PR to various sites that review or feature such apps. Their logic suggests that when a site covers your app, you’ll get an inbound link. Do this with enough sites and your search engine ranking will build.

Now while they’re absolutely right about that, and this is definitely a legitimate link-building technique, don’t be so sure you’ll get a lot of sites following through. I know from researching for my own mobile apps startup that while there are a growing number of mobile app review sites, many are either backlogged, some are not interested in mobile web apps. They also mention Apple as a site that features mobile apps. Again, this is true, though it’s not that easy getting featured. (I’ve heard tell that wooing some Apple employees with dinner might get you a contact name for getting featured, but that’s not necessarily true, and you’d have to live in Silicon Valley.)

Some Mobile-Related Link-Building Options

An iPhone and iPad are part of my blogging computing setup, and I think WebTrafficROI’s mobile approach to link-building is still a legitimate and good approach. They give you some mobile Web-specific tips for code to detect when an iPhone/ iPod Touch device is requesting a web page. However, I wanted to add to the conversation, and suggest a slightly broader approach. When it comes to what you can offer in the mobile space, here are some options, possibly overlapping with what WebTrafficROI wrote:

1. A mobile version of your site with the same or similar functionality, but obviously geared towards a specific mobile device, possibly an iPhone. This is the simplest approach and often the least expensive.
2. Offer a native mobile app with the same or similar functionality as your website.  There are some things your mobile Web app just cannot do, depending on what smartphone(s) you are targeting. (If you are promoting a blog, offer an app that provides a mobile view of your content. There are some development tools that make this very easy to do, provided your site has an RSS feed.)
3. Offer both a mobile Web version and a native app. Presumably the latter would have additional features not available to the mobile Web version.
4. Offer a mobile Web or mobile native app related to your niche.

For example, I’m working on two iPhone/ iPad apps that I’m hoping to give away in the future. One is for bloggers in any niche, a very broadly-scoped app. The other is Twitter-related but geared to the social media marketing side of things, so it should appeal to web-based entrepreneurs and small business owners. Each app’s release will have a different market but the same objective: build brand presence and back links for my mobile apps startup.

Considerations for Leveraging a Free Mobile App

If you do want to release a mobile app, Web or native, as part of a link-building strategy, here are some things you should consider, especially if you plan to offer a native mobile app instead of a mobile Web app.

1. Partner up. You can partner with other bloggers to help cut the cost of development, or if the scope of your app is broad enough,  you might even partner up with a mobile app development studio (I’m partnered with two). In fact, you may need to partner if you don’t want to go through the effort of registering with Apple or Palm or Google, etc., as a developer — which in some cases costs money. The cost of using an app development studio can be defrayed by bartering your writing services, or offering advertising, or something else entirely.
2. Target one platform. I might be biased but I’d say go with the Apple iPhone OS platform, which includes the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. (As a starting point in your research, you might want to check out SplashPressMedia’s AppleGazette blog and my CallStyle blog. I’ll share other links in the future, as appropriate) While the Google Android platform is gaining ground, the problem as I see it is fragmentation, with far too many handsets with different screen footprints.
3. Go beyond free. If you’re giving away a free mobile Web or native app, great. But consider a paid premium native app with additional features. This might be one way to pay for development costs. You might not make a profit directly from the paid app, but if you achieve your objective of building back links, which in turn bring indirect revenue, then you’ve succeeded. Don’t forget that your blog can be your marketing vehicle.
4. Brainstorm your app. Be sure of your objectives for the app. Who is the target user? What will it do? Will you support it by offering upgrades? Why are you creating it? For the latter, be completely honest with yourself. Just like web designers were giving away free WordPress themes in hopes of getting backlinks to their site, it’s okay if you’re doing this for the for the purpose of link-building.
5. Have a marketing plan. Oh you didn’t that “they” would just come if you “built it”, did you? Create a list or spreadsheet of all the mobile sites that might feature your mobile app. They don’t have to all be about mobile apps or smartphones; they could be niche-specific. Have a press kit for your app, and include screen shots or links to video, a description of the app, your intent, your contact info, and whatever else is appropriate. Then systematically contact each site and offer them interview time, if they want it. While you are waiting to be covered (don’t necessarily expect a response to your email), move on to the next site in your list. Promote your app in Facebook and Twitter.

This is a very nutshell overview of how to leverage a mobile app for link-building. If there’s enough demand for covering more mobile topics as they relate to blogging and building an online presence, I’ll do so. I do have a couple of mobile-related posts up my sleeve for the near future, so keep an eye out.

Via: WebTrafficROI.

Writing Inspiration: Blogging the Intersection

You’ve heard the term “thinking outside the box,” but how do you actually do that? How do you go outside of a niche and produce inspired thinking? Answer: you combine two or more disciplines, like Frans Johansson suggests in his recent book, ‘The Medici Effect.’ Johansson puts forth the idea that the really interesting, innovative and inspired concepts come from the intersection of two or more disciplines. This is true for architecture, music, art, mechanics, and pretty much anything including writing and blogging — something you can learn to apply.

Ever since Johanson’s book came out a couple of years ago, I’ve been more conscious of finding the intersection of niches as a source of writing inspiration. It’s really nothing I haven’t been doing as a writer for years, and coaching other aspiring writers to do, but it took his book to make me really conscious of the possibilities.

His book is named after the Medici banking family, who were the driving force behind the Italian Renaissance. They funded various arts, architecture and finance in and around Florence, Italy, in the 15th century, and the net result was a mingling of disciplines as people in these disciplines made their way to the epicenter of the Renaissance movement. I won’t get into the book here all that much, except by way of providing some examples of how you can combine two or more niches into inspired blogging. But even if you don’t write, Johansson’s book is highly recommended. You can still get the ebook free (link at bottom), or buy a print copy from your favorite bookstore.

Self-Improvement

Some niches just lend themselves to crossovers, and many bloggers already blog at the intersection of disciplines. Seth Godin is one such blogger. Can you guess at the niches he covers? Business is one, marketing is another — but you could say that marketing itself is all about applied psychology and how to stir up the desire to improve our lot in life, ourselves. The desire for self-improvement is a constant target of marketers — though their approach is to tell us we’re “not worthy” if we don’t buy product A. This desire was probably always part of the human psyche, but with two powerful mediums, radio and TV, for leverage, it’s become an even stronger desire in us, whether we know it or not. That means there’s a market for self-improvement blogs which help us find awareness in the non-superficial aspects of life.

The problem is, self-improvement blogs are all over the place, and lot of them dish up the same suggestions self-help books have been saying for decades (having read many dozens of them since the early 1980s, it’s easy for me to say that). If you want to jump into this busy and competive niche (and feel you’re genuinely qualified), there are a number of ways you could go, to stand out. One way is to crossover with celebrity news. If any group of people have their personality flaws and quirks front and center, it’s probably celebrities. They’re popular and successful, or they’re “aspiring”, and they got there “above” us despite all their flaws. It’s easy to pick on them or feel jealousy towards them, but the fact is that they are human and they do have neuroses, image disorders and illnesses. With a little bit of work, you could intersect celebrity news with either self-improvement or health and fitness.

How you do this really depends on your objective. If you want to write pure celebrity news, fine. But if you want to write self-improvement blog posts with a difference, consider some sort of intersection. It does mean more research; however, it could be an approach that makes you stand out. Think it can’t be done? Michael Gray’s SEO blog Wolf-Howl talks about a different kind of improvement: that of websites through search engine optimization. He regularly injects celebrity references into his content, and he does it well. Figure out a way to do the same for personal improvement.

Another direction is the learning niche. Learning is of course a type of self-improvement. On one of my older blogs, I unwittingly combined learning and education with self-improvement topics. While I haven’t put much effort into the site, it is my most-commented blog. It struck a chord with a number of people. If I had more hours in the day, it’d be a site I’d put more effort into, but until I found the inspiration for it, I didn’t want it to be yet another self-improvement blog saying the same old thing.

Personal Finances

Depending on how you define self-improvement, there’s another direction you could go to find a blogging intersection. One of my earliest self-improvement blogs, Rich Man, Poor Man, cast a philosphical eye on personal and societal prosperity. It was an outgrowth of my old PunkMonk “tough love” blog of 2002 — a time when my life and career was in total upheaval and I was trying to “find myself.” While the posts required a lot of emotional energy to write, typos aside, they were amongst my most inspired writing ever. I occasionally re-read those posts simply to see if I can recapture the incredible feeling of inspiration I enjoyed while writing those posts.

Prosperity is tied with attitude (self-improvement) but it’s also tied with personal finances. Your finances dictate your entire life, even your style. Marketers would have us believe that we’re not worthy or stylish if we don’t wear certain clothes or drive a certain car. While we may have our car preferences and desires, and while some people may go into debt just to have the car they really want, the more financially practical citizen buys the car they can afford. There may already be a lot of car blogs out there, but one which offers practical tips on saving money on the purchase, care and general ownership of a vehicle potentially has an edge over general car blogs.

Caveats

Now the concepts in ‘The Medici Effect’ is really nothing I haven’t been doing for years. I’ve always coached aspiring writers to learn as much as they can about everything and anything. Unfortunately, that way also lies a lack of focus. Reading books and magazines, watching TV, movies, theater shows is easy. The hard part is focusing on just a handful of niches, and what you pick is dictated by a few factors:

1. Your current skills.
2. Your interests.
3. Niche profitability.

If you can combine all of these factors, fantastic. Writing about current skills gives your writing confidence. If your current skills are something you want to get away from, then your interests are key because writing about them generates passion. Confidence and passion are two key ingredients of the best writing, and what really attracts loyal readers. Profitability really should be secondary; if it’s your focus, you’re more likely to forget the other two ingredients and will thus lose readers.

Of course, writing an “intersected” blog might take more effort, since you have to stay on top of two or more niches. On the other hand, if you combine multiple interests, it will not feel like work. If the effort inspires new ideas or viewpoints on topics that everyone and their proverbial brother are writing about, then it means you’ll stand out, primarily because of the inherent passion it takes to pull off an intersected blog.

Does your blog intersect topics? Tell me about it in the comments.

Notes: The Medici Effect [PDF, 224 pages]
Image: Flickr.

Wear a Mask, Cut Loose Your Inner Blogger

Don’t or can’t use your real name when you blog? You can still build a personal brand, albeit around a fictitious character. Or maybe that character doesn’t have to be all that fictitious, and can be based on your interests, reveal a facet of you. Thus, it may be worthwhile choosing a Web moniker and building a persona around that.

Why a Web Moniker?

Blogger “Johnny B. Truant” is obviously a real person using a fictitious name. He discusses on Copyblogger today what prompted that choice, and how “Johnny” is just as real as the person behind the name. While in some blogging circles it’s believed that blogging is very personal, one on one, and real names should be used, others believe differently. I’m of the belief that if there’s no moral or legal hitch to using a moniker, then why not — except possibly when a business executive writes on a company blog? If blogging involves telling stories, as so many bloggers have written, then cutting loose a persona based on a moniker might free you up to say what you’d really like to say, without the concerns you might have about being judged by friends, family, or colleagues.

A moniker and Web persona, as Johnny B. suggests, lets you loose to write real copy, and gives you the freedom to stop censoring yourself. The moniker gives you the license to create a persona that you want to be known as, and thus gives you the confidence you need for blogging.

I’ve coached many aspiring writers over the years, and confidence is one of the fundamental roadblocks that stops people from just writing. Cutting loose with a few monikers also lets you explore different writing styles on an ongoing basis, letting you naturally choose one to build a persona around. This is the number one reason I’ve cultivated different monikers since I first started blogging in 2002, though I’ve essentially tried to build only one persona.

Picking a Moniker

Unlike Johnny B. and others — especially the Fake Steve Jobs types — my monikers were not intended to stay secret; nothing stays secret online for long. Rather, when I really started blogging seriously in 2005, with the intent of making it part of my career, I was not sure how widely blogs would be read, nor what topics would be popular. I have always had multiple interests — a fact that sometimes means I have a hard time deciding where to put my efforts. (There’s also a fear that I’ll pick the wrong niche.) As a result I’ve ended up with multiple monikers over time that revealed a different facet of the real me. But as far as a persona goes, I’ve usually tend towards favoring just one, Talespinner — though as of late, that has morphed into the UltraGeek.

In choosing your moniker to build a persona around, brainstorm off of your niche as well as your personal interests. Maybe you have a nickname you’re know by, or an interest you’re known for. Try word games that combine your interests, your nicknames, the names of celebrities, rhyming words and so on.

For example, I’ve had a long-standing interest in food from a cultural standpoint. It just so happened that in my Toronto days, I went through a long hybrid Rockabilly-Punk phase and thanks to my Elvis Presley hairstyle and the clothes I wore, I used to be known by some friends as the Punk Elvis or Elvis Parsley. The name is a double play on words. First, parsley is a common ingredient in East Indian cooking. Second, Parsley is a play on Elvis Presley’s name. Result: my “Curry Elvis” persona for my cooking blogs, when I was still pursuing the idea that I might launch a Web-based cooking show. (During my computer career hiatus, just before I started seriously blogging, I went to cooking school and worked in a dozen or so restaurants for a few years.) So this persona potentially suited me, but in reality it didn’t suit my ultimate online objectives.

Building a Persona

I never built up the Curry elvis persona, mainly because publishing cooking blogs didn’t seem capable of paying the bills, but also because it gets hard to maintain an Elvis-like persona as you get older — something that might be necessary were I to appear in video. My subsequent monikers were due to my personal interests morphing through different niches, including self-improvement, music, writing, etc. For example, Curry Elvis became Punk Monk.

I don’t want to or need to bore you further with my other monikers and personas. They’re not that hard to find, if you’re interested, but the gist is that you can use a similar approach to choosing a moniker and building your Web persona as I did. Though decide on your online objectives before you pick your moniker.

Once you’ve picked a moniker that you like, you can build a “personal” brand, a persona, around it through blogging, creating new jargon, and promoting the persona through social media — just like you would do for the “real” you. I wouldn’t recommend trying to build more than one persona; it just takes too much effort. Brainstorm a few monikers, even use them for blogging different niches, but ultimately focus on just one persona. Johnny B. suggests that you should actually become your persona, at least online — which is difficult to do if you fragment yourself into too many personas. Fragmentation, as far as I’ve experienced will hold back your blogging success.

Caveats

Now, some niches — such as entertainment, design, photography, writing, music, marketing and anything else creative — are well-suited to having a blogging moniker because they can and do often involve storytelling as well as “personalities.” The choice of a blogging moniker might not suit if you’re blogging for clients, though you never know. It really depends on the client and their niche; just ask your clients.

Image: Flickr.