Back in the olden days when I first started blogging. The words "Content is king," were said so frequently that you couldn't read ten blog posts without coming across them. You still see that sentence, though not quite as often.

Yet another word was said alongside that sentence that I don't hear much at all these days. The word is relevant. Relevant was what made content quality. Anchor text showed how one link was relevant to another. How relevant a blog is was measured by things like Google pank rank.

We seem to be losing track of relevancy.

I haven't said much about link lists. But I'm starting to see blogs of young friends that are build around contests or link lists every week. There is no ongoing content. The blogs are made solely to attract link after link.

This situation troubles me in a deeply serious way.

No content means that there are no readers in the audience only folks there for links. Inherent problems come with this.

• The audience is bought by links. They will disappear when the "payment" does.
• The blog is not for readers and therefore provides no service but to falsely inflate blog rankings that are link based.
• There is no conversation, nothing to discuss.
• Easy links like easy money bring out the lottery mentality.

When you see a meme or link list that offers nothing but a reason to pass on links so that others can collect link love, do the blogosphere a favor. Let it sit there. It won't add value to your blog. Your readers aren't getting anything from a list of blogs you haven't checked out personally.

Write solid content, rich in key words, high in quality with insights and a clever take on the idea. That will bring you natural links. Content will last and be worth something and be worthy.

To say it another way . . . when was the last time you stayed up until 3 in the morning to finish reading a compelling list of links? I thought not.

Write for readers -- not for link listers -- if you want to be a problogger. Writer for readers, if you want an audience who reads your blog.

Liz Strauss

Some folks have a habit of bookmarking feeds each time they read a post they enjoy. Soon they have hundred of feeds lined in their reader in no specific order.

If they don't watch out, their feeds could turn into that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. "Feed Me!" it says and it eats the time we have to write.

I suggest another approach to this overwhelming problem. Here's how you might go about taming that hungry Shop of Horrors Plant down to a manageable size.

• Visit five feeds a day -- feed already in your reader.
• Read back 20 posts or more to really get to know the blog and the blog writer.
• When you've read that far, decide for yourself what the blog is about.
• Place each blog into one of three categories:
  A+++ BLOGS -- These are blogs that inspire you with ideas, have superior writing, and are on topics that are near what you write about;
  BB BLOGS -- These are blogs that are fun to read and offer you a diversion, have great writing and are on topics that might interest your readers now and then.
  C BLOGS -- These are a rare few blogs, less than 20 that you think you should check on every few weeks to see what they are doing.
• Drop any blog that doesn't fit.
• Each day as you add your five blogs to the categories, rank what's there in order with those you most value at the top of each list.
• When you have been through all of your blogs, imagine that your feedreader is a physical bookcase that only has so much space. Decide on a limited number of blogs that you will allow in each category as a masimum number. Do this without looking at the lists.
• Then go back in and cut the lists. Keep the lists to your magic number from that point on.

We don't try to read every book in the library. We don't try to see every movie. There's no reason to try to read every blog.

Don't let that Little Shop of Horrors Feed Reading Plant eat up the time you have to write your blog.

Liz Strauss

Okay it happens. You and your blog have been together for a while. You see each other day after day. It's not that you don't care, but . . . um . . . the sex has gone out of your relationship and you both have just accepted that as the way things are.

What? Next thing you know, you'll be cheating on your blog, guest posting and a having a grand time on other blogs while your blog sits at home. Surely this blog relationship can be saved.

5 Things to Spice Up Your Relationship with Your Blog

Ah, remember when you wrote that first post and you hit publish. It was love. You can feel that again. Here are 10 things you can do to put the romance back into your relationship with your blog.

1. Change the header. Changing the header is like getting a blog makeover. You'll feel like a whole new publisher. Go for a radical difference. It will wake you up to new ideas. It will get the attention of new readers.
2. Find 5 ways to clean up things. In fact, clean up all of those things that have been irritating you for some time now. Clean out the closets. Open the windows and let some fresh air go through. Fresh air brings fresh ideas.
3. Do 5 days of beginning blogger behavior. Read only blogs you've never read before. Take time to comment on every one that says something that you find interesting. Go back to your blog, and post on the new ideas that you found.
4. Invite 5 bloggers to guest post. Ask them each to post one a week for five days in a row. Have them post on grand ideas -- ask them questions such as what they want to be when they grow up.
5. Rewrite your first 5 blog posts. i know this sounds silly. But if you go read them, you'll see how much history you and your blog have together, and what a great pair you make. Otherwise, how could you possibly have grown so much, and gotten all of the readers, you have since then?

Besides, after a closer look, isn't your blog just that much nicer than the blog next door?

Liz Strauss

When we we're children, doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like "the terrible twos." As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.

Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.

Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I'm thinking of today is when I used to think

that being good and smart is everything. Yeah I was that way once.

It could be a stage we all go through.

What Could I Learn from Them?

Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistics, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say "hello."

In other words, people in their world are as flat as baseball cards.

Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, "problogger," Search Engines don't read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn't stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.

People understand when we don't care about them.

What's more interesting is that, if we're looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.

First some will start to email, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back favors they've asked.
Whether we make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn't really matter. If we treat people as "less than," they will find a way to let us know. Here are some ways that they choose.

• They stop reading our blogs.
• They tell other folks how they've been treated.
• They remove links or stop linking.
• They post about whatever made them feel that way.

Let's face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can know even other ways that folks remind us they are people.

The fact is if we worry only about beating the system, and ignore the people who read us -- we have to wonder why we're blogging. It hard work to game the system and the gaming process never ends. . . .

But getting loyal readers and having strong relationships makes blogging easier every day.

So much so that I came back to this post -- just to write that last sentence.
Liz Strauss

Doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like "the terrible twos." As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group, easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.

Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.

Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I'm thinking of today is that people really don't count only the system does.

What Could I Learn from Them?

Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. They spend their lives gaming the system. They play digg and similar sites. They find ways to link to higher page ranks. They monetize their blogs within a an inch of overweighting the entire Internet. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistice, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say "hello."

In other words, people in their world aren't people they are stacks of statistics, flat as baseball cards.

Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, "problogger," Search Engines don't read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn't stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.

People understand when we don't care about them.

What's more interesting is that they find a way to let us know.

If we're looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.

• First some will start to emai, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back faors they've asked as our time, our credibility, and our willingness to treat them with respect by telling them what's going on takes away their generosity of spirit.
• Whether you make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn't really matter. If you treat people as "less than," as one-dimensional creatures who are all the same, we are reducing them to some lowef level of the food chain.
• People know when they are being treated as less than people. Smiling from strangeers does not make trust or credibility, especially when the issue is open for the world to read in a cathedral in Scotland.

• They stop reading your blog.
• They tell other folks about what a slick blogger you are.
• They remove your links or stop linking to you,
• They find a way to tell the folks that life without you works for them,
• They tell all of their friends about the negative experience they had while working with or for you.
• They post about whttever neative act you might do or they tell your boss.

Let's face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can think of even more.

The fact is if you worry only about beating the system, and you ignore the people in it, the people will find a way YEs, you would both know about it and feel that it happened. Hopefully, you'd figured out that the most complexs systems was guilt to serhumans durin hours that personnel didn't want to work.

So let's quite puttung people in those tiny little groups and soon enough you'll be ready so that you can make an appropriate apology and perhaps even start on building a real rapsody of singin each other's praises.

Liz Strauss

• 
• 
• 
• 

It never failed. When I worked in publishing training editors, it didn't matter what their background was. They could be college grads or ex-teachers. One thing nearly everyone had to learn was how to write for an audience of readers. So many people seem to write same email for a stranger their own age, the CEO of a major company, their boss, and their best friend from childhood.

What we write isn't about who we are. It's about who we want to communicate with. End of story.

As a blogger, we need to focus on our readers. That means knowing how they think, so we know how they are likely to interpret what we say. Here are 10 traits that are typical of bloggers that I've talked to, and you might know that I talk to at least one blogger a day.

10 Traits of Blog Readers

1. Blog readers are always clicking. They will click in to see us and just as quickly click away if we don't show that we know them.clarity.
2. Blog readers are fiercely independent. Like most customers in any industry, we can't force readers to behave as we might wish they would.
3. Blog readers range in temperament from the shyly introspective to the wildly notorious. Our readers tend to reflect us in some traits, but not every one. We need to remember that every reader is an individual, not part of a group of identical "anythings".
4. Some blog "readers" are spammers in disguise. It's sad to approve a comment only to find that another one comes in from the same "person" saying the same thing on another heavily spammed article.
5. Blog readers have their addictions. Readers have favorite blogs. Find out your readers favorites and you'll get significant insight into how they think.
6. Blog readers have to be earned back every time we write. The Internet is hard on the eyes. Readers don't relax with the screen. They have to want to read, or they'll skim and click right past what you're saying. Even my most loyal readers have on occasion gotten caught commenting in some way that showed they didn't read the entire article.
7. Blog readers don't tolerate pretenders. On the Internet the only safeguard we have is that we have tacitly agreed to be forthright, authentic, and transparent with each other. Be a fake, and readers will figure you out. Then they will never trust what you say.
8. Blog readers like lists, but not lists of unexplained or un-researched links. In the same way that we wouldn't serve bad food to our guests or offer them a plateful of random raw food we hadn't checked (or worse plastic fruit), readers want content that we pre-select. What we offer speaks to who we are. A list of links with no descriptions is like a tray of styrofoam popcorn -- empty and most useful for taking up space.
9. Blog readers have a voice worth listening to.

The fact that they read our blogs is a good sign that they read other blogs. That means they know tings about us in relation to other bloggers that we do not. If we listen, they will tell us what they know.

10. Blog readers will be generous in proportion to the generosity we show, but we have to go first. If we show that we know what we're blogging about and who we're blogging for, our readers will appreciate us for appreciating them. Everyone likes to be cared about.

That's a staring point -- 10 Traits of Blog Readers. how long can we make the list? More than that, how will we use it to center our blogs around our readers?

Liz Strauss

A hit on digg, reddit, or any of the vote-em-up sites, will bring traffic, but that traffic is worse than fickle. Most such visitors click in and out faster than we can measure. They don’t stop to read. They don’t look around. Some don't stop even to glimpse or gander.

A great blog builds traffic from loyal readers who keep coming back. Those returning readers help to form the blog's identity and give it a sense of place that is more than just a page of content. Get to know those readers and they become your core fans, and even better than that -- they tell their friends that they have found the blog of blogs.

Blogs where readers take the time to what we write have one important trait in common -- they make readers the center of the blog. The blog is designed and configured to support the readers' experience. Readers aren't asked to adjust for the blog. Instead they find a place they like and without thinking they begin to hang out there.

Core fans are those who travel hundreds of miles to see a rock group. Folks who hang out at our blogs are our core readers. They are the leaders and influencers. They build the community for the folks who visit next. Here are six ways to build that same core loyalty in the readers of your blog.

1. Know your brand and your vision. Blog with a passion for your vision, and make sure that it has room for readers. Folks will take notice of your passion, and some who share it will become your greatest evangelists. Plan a role in your blog's vision for your readers to have a part. Share your vision and ssk for their feedback –- get their ideas not their votes. No blog needs to be a popularity contest. Yet, it silly not to tap the information that our readers know about our blogs that we don’t.
2. Promote your readers. Talk about them and what they do. Link out often to them, showing that you support their work too.
3. Blog your best ideas. Being free with information and generous with the time you spend helping readers solve problems. A generous resource that has their interests in mind is a place where folks feel at home, even when they don't have problems.
4. Empower the leaders and influencers among your core fans. Offer natural leaders opportunities to help you plan. Collaborate with them on projects that involve their blogs and yours. Participate in ideas they suggest and offer ways to get their participation more deeply in workings of your blog. You might invite them to start a regular posting on a topic of their expertise or interview them in ways that show off their best skills. People who feel like they belong talk about the places that make them feel that way.
5. Blog generously –- link love is for sharing. Link out on every post. Link for relationships, not just for traffic, and link to draw your blog closer to blogs like your own. Be generous. A link is really just a bit of code. Link blogs who will grow with you. You'll get your Google juice soon enough.
6. Prove that you are their greatest fan. Talk to your readers in the comments. Listen to what they have to say. People remember how you make them feel. Let them know that you’ll always choose for them before Google and before an easier way.

Put out the backstage pass and invite readers to hang out for a while. Smile at the folks who click and go, but concentrate on those core fans who'd drive 200 miles to see you play.

Liz Strauss

Great bloggers are always on the lookout for opportunities to link to other blogs. Linking for traffic and incoming links is a good thing. Sometimes an idea offers more than one opportunity. In like manner, often a blogger has a choice of ideas to write about.

The very word linking implies a relationship, but I'm talking about more than a one-link stand. Long-term relationships with other bloggers offer support and visibilty that short-term, high-traffic links will probably never deliver.

Many bloggers begin their blogging day by reading feeds. They link to the article that sparks the idea they will be blogging about that day. If this is your style of blogging, take a moment to review your feeds. Add in blogs at your level that have the same values and quality standards as those you hold for your own blog. Remove all that don't meet your standards. Have a 70% ratio of blogs at your level or one level higher -- don't read only A List blogs.

Sometimes we blog in the opposite direction. We write the article. Then we look for a links and quotes to support what we have said. Use the same standards to choose the links you'll share with readers. Find the strongest example from a blog that you hope to have a relationship with as your blog grows.

Here's how to put this relationship linking strategy in action.

If you've chosen well, soon you and a new blogger friend will be exchanging post links when appropriate and sharing thoughts and ideas through the comment box, email, and even voice.

As each of your blogs grows, you'll both be stronger for the links. You'll introduce that blogger to your readers, and the same will happen for you. This one long-term relatiosnship will add lasting value to your blog long after a one-shot link to a blog that has interesting content.

Liz Strauss

I'm blogging at a reasonable speed. The thoughts are coming down the blogging pike blissfully. I'm making point after point, like a basketball player. I'm in the zone. I should be in the Blogger 500 on Blogger TV.

Then I go and ruin all. I stop to read what I wrote. Blogger TV, yeah. The horror channel, maybe. I could play the character with a schizoform discorder and the severe ADD.

The problem is that the words I wrote so well and so quickly, for some reason they all don't belong in the same piece. What kind of mess have I made here? It looks like the Blogger 500 has had a horrible 3-blog-post wreck.

I have four sentences there that work perfectly well. Three sentences there that make a beautiful point with clarity. Those two sentences next are genuinely clever. Each set of thoughts just belongs on its own.

How did this happen? It happens quite often when I write without deciding first what I'm writing about.

It sounds simple, doesn't it? Know my point. Know my message. Know what I want to say, before I hit the keys.

It works for everybody that way. It's the same as "If you don't know where you're going, you won't get there."

When I trained writers, it was a usual thing. About once a month, a writer would come to my office, plop in a chair, and throw his or her hands in the air, saying, "I'm sorry I tried for days and I can't write this piece."

My answer would always be, "What do you want to say?"

Then we'd talk to find the point the writer wanted to make. The piece would be done within the next hour.

Ah, that's the point I want to make here.

It's easier to write, faster to blog, simpler to get a message across, if we take time before we start, to figure out that one thing we want to say.

Liz Strauss

Long posts or short posts, I’m sure you’ve encountered the question. Longer means more content to reed the spiders and the deep readers. Shorter means casual readers are more likely to stay longer and read deeper.

Readers, those readers, unlike spiders, can’t be configured to do what we think they are supposed to.

When readers glance or glimpse our blog page, we’ve got a blink to draw them in. A blink isn’t long enough to read, or even sample, the content. A blink is exactly that – a blink. We're talking a matter of seconds.

Being Blind to the Old

If we’ve been with a blog for more than two weeks, unless we’re in a redesign, we're used to how it looks. Our brain filters out what is no longer new, so that we can concentrate the changes in our blog environment that are useful to us.

Read the rest of this entry

No One Has Passion Every Day

Maybe it was that party last night. Maybe it's I'm getting old and cranky. Maybe I'm catching a cold, getting the flu, or maybe folks just irritate me.

Immitation is the highest form of pissing me off. Quit stealing my content and violating my copyright. -- Jen T. Verburmessor

It doesn't matter, if I'm feeling mean and puny. Blog posts are waiting to appear on that blank screen. Why do we do that? It's hard and it takes so much investment. Then if we're lucky folks read it and comment, and the comments, well the comments, . . . and if we're lucky folks write helpful comments that make us think.

1. There's one reason to write -- the comments we receive can make us see our ideas. Sometimes folks interpret what we write in ways we never expected.
2. Speaking of which, writing is a chance to say something uninterrupted. If we take the time to think through a thought we can present it fully, completely, and entirely.
3. Writing gives our tiny voice reach around the world. No one I know can scream that far, even though my older brother said I could.
4. Writing tends to keep our feet our of our mouth. Those things we say that embarrass us -- the proverbial foot in our mouth -- doesn't happen much when we're typing out the next thought we usually think about it.
5. Talk floats away, but our writing stays for tomorrow. In the case of the Internet it stays longer than we will. That's a legacy, boys and girls, Folks will know us long after we can say anything about it.
6. Every - single - word - of - quality - content - we - write - is - promotion. Relevant content converts to audience attention which makes it more relevant which means that search engines value it more and more so that it becomes even more relevant.
7. Look at how each post makes us more visible.
8. Writing is a great way for people to get to know our goals, our skills, our aspirations.
9. Writing makes us think through and organize our thinking. By articulating our ideas in writing, we force ourselvess to pinpoint our meaning. A goal that isn't written is a speeding train soon to run over us and the goal we have been planning.
10. Here's our chance to tell our story loudly and clearly so that folks can hear it.
11. Don't forget what we write brings people who comment back. Some of those people are destined to be with us in the summers and all of the seasons.

Whew! I'm feeling less cranky, less mean and puny. I'm feeling more like writing those blog posts now. I've got those 11 good reasons. Of course, I have a whole lot more reasons. They are the folks who read what I write. You know them . . . some of them write spy novels -- or, like me, that's what they say they do.
Liz Strauss

Ah Raj,
We really outght tell them the rest of the story. . . . :)

If you're thinking about being a problogger, folks don't tell you everything you might want to know about it. You might see what looks exciting. Take a looke a little closer.

Glamour is only glamorous from far away. I sit at my keyboard writing this at 10pm tonight.

Those 940,000 hits I just looked up by my name on Google aren't fun or interesting when I want play or read instead of write another post that's due tomorrow.

If you become a problogger you will find

Read the rest of this entry

• that you have to explain what you do to every person you know over and and over and over and over again. . . . I tell my mother-in-law I write spy novels. It's easier.
• that every job you get will take longer than you thought it would. I don't know how this happens. . . . It's a Murphy's law thing.
• that occasionally folks who become your fans will send you email and expect you to stop your work to answer them over and over and over and over again. . . . . Unfortuantely, telling them you're in the middle of blogging a spy novel won't work with them.
• that you'll still have the same problems with traffic and stats that you had before, escept they'll feel bigger because now you think about losing money.
• that no one will be as excited as you are that you're finally a problogger.

When I first started blogging, it was easier. Technorati indexed something near 12 million blogs, not the 60 million it does now. Blog Networks hadn’t really started. Content theft wasn’t a major problem. I had 20+ years of writing experience. I had managed major print and online publishing efforts that were produced for International markets.

It still took me 21 days to get my first comment.

I left a few of my own, and few people followed me home. One was blogger who beautifully described what the blogosphere was like back in summer of 2005.

I'm beginning to find that having a blog is akin to having a village store. You have the regulars that stop in on a regular basis to get their usual wares and to catch up on anything new. And then there's the new person in town who stops in for a look see. The new person might get a couple of the regulars curious to the point where one asks, "Who's that." To which the reply is, "Don't know, someone passing through I guess." As for my blog, I'm glad you stopped by to have a read and for your kind response.

That’s what it was like, back in days when we had time.

But now . . .

In just a brief one-twentieth of a second–less than half the time it takes to blink–people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.

–Kamakshi Tandon
REUTERS, Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink
Jan. 17, 2006

A twentieth of a second.

Today everyone is a reluctant reader. Publishers who waste our time with text that is

too dense to read without a machete,

too broken up by ads to have the energy to find our way through,

• too distracting to hold our attention
• too apologetic, self-serving, or link-begging, self-promoting, “give me a break” unaware
• too many colors, too many type faces, too many gizmos, gadgets, and widgets, to attend to what’s being said

have no idea how fast we click away leaving their content unread.

My career for the last couple of decades has been getting readers to want to read.

I’m going to show you how I do that.