On one hand, you have the burning desire to create something remarkable, memorable, and of sheer quality. It takes time, love and hard work, and you run the risk that it will go unappreciated, for after all you are pandering to your own notion of what needs to be said and done. After all, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, you don't do art to make money, you do art to make your soul grow.

On the other hand, there's the real, gut-wrenching need to make money (or any other metric of success - search rankings, pageviews, awards, booty). This is the drive to optimize, to tap into market consciousness, measure what works (and what doesn't), and to ruthlessly churn out content (or products - define your own output) according to your scientific formula of success (usually translates into PageViews = Money).

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Thord (he of Swedish descent and bearing a reputation for 'crack' design skills) writes about the two most important skills a blogger can have.

#2 is knowing how to blow your own horn ('toot' is so politically correct it gives me a shiver). Thord discusses it in some detail, and I like this part best:

Some of us have some kind of roadblock built in that stops us from promoting ourselves. Get over it. Or get run over.

The #1 skill Thord talks about is knowing how to write good blog posts. Seeing as how T left the door open there, here's my two (or three) cents on how one may go about writing 'good' blog posts.

Like all good 3 step lists, this one is a model of simplicity:

1. Define what 'good' is - use concrete measurements instead of an arbitrary feel-good factor
2. Learn how to achieve the results defined above
3. Execute (and then some).

If it was as easy as writing it above, no blog consultant would have a job. As things stand, there's a lot more to it under the surface although as I've discussed below, once you internalise this formula (or you start writing for a blog that gets tons of traffic) it becomes effortless.

So let's get started with step 1 - defining what a 'good' blog post is.

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2007 has been the year of consolidation and building brands - and with that we're seeing more and more people understanding that to build a successful business you need to move away from 'push' marketing and work more on positioning your product / service and attracting attention by building a powerful brand.

In this article on building brands, Ryan talks about first setting big goals for your blogs and then working hard on building the brands to match those goals. It's easy to say this (dream big, then work your ass off to achieve those dreams), but how do you go about doing it?

Pick Goals Worthy Of You

95% of the people in this world think the other way around - they look at their own circumstances and then allow them to shape their goals. If you follow this route, your goals will be limited to where you are at present and will in fact trap you into the same place, not allowing you to grow and prosper beyond a certain point.

Shed the mental shackles, silence that dissenting voice in your head and go as high as you can go. At worst you'll fail, but let me tell you one thing - working hard for something impossible and failing will get you much farther than working within your means for something that is within your reach.

Marketing = Branding

If you are promoting yourself, then remember that everything you do in a public setting is marketing - the way you talk to clients / prospects / press / employees / competitors / colleagues, the way you interact online through your blog / comments / forums, the quality of your work, your attention (or lack thereof) to detail, your ability to keep your word - everything you do is marketing.

If you are promoting your blog / your business, then everything - from your customer service to your blog design to the error message your readers get if they enter the wrong URL - is marketing.

Branding is often defined as an organisation's representation of what it stands for - I'd like to flip this around. Branding is what your customers - your target audience - think you stand for. A strong brand is one that is consistent, focused and easily identified. Your brand is how your readers, your clients identify you. Your brand is what prospective clients will base their buying decisions on. Your brand determines how people talk about you in your niche (or if you're big enough, outside it).

Marketing = Branding. When you're promoting your blog (or your company), you're essentially building an identity in the minds of your target audience. That process is branding.

3 Simple Steps to Strengthen Your Brand Right Now

Brand-building is often thought of as a difficult exercise that somehow involves lots of brainstorming and boardroom meetings. It can be as easy as following three simple steps:

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As I approach four years of problogging and my tenth year of being a full time work at home mother, one of the most difficult challenges I have faced is allowing for the natural evolution process of my primary blog.

When I first set out to develop MomGadget, the intention was for her to become a mutual project that several family members would work together on. The plan was conceived following a baby shower. So many new gadgets were gifted and in my eyes, they made being a mom seem so much easier then my own personal new parent experience 13 years prior.

Until Momgadget, most every other blog I'd ever written was so well defined, there was no natural evolution to consider. In reality, this particular blog was serving as my own parent in this new world of blogging that I was born into.

Just when I thought I had a plan together and began blogging according to that plan, I saw a whole different model taking shape, based on the habits my visitors were sharing.

On a local level, my immediate area of Indiana had experienced a tremendous depression after the loss of thousands of jobs in the auto industry. For the first time, I was seeing moms having to leave their children to secure additional income for their families. This disturbed me deeply. Having been fortunate enough to be a successful work at home and single mom since my twins were four - I wanted to share that success and help devise ways for local parents to have the choice of working outside the home or not.

MomGadget quickly evolved into a training tool for local would be bloggers. The truest compliment any writer could receive came when I saw my efforts helping people in my local area and far beyond. Again, I listened to the demands, and followed.

Just when I became comfortable in the new purpose, the winds of change began to blow yet again.

Again, based on the statistical habits of my visitors, I see another change taking place and this time, this time I wasn't going quite so willingly. The next phase of evolution appeared to be taking shape and to be more on on target with the original purpose - this time, I'm seeing a demand for reviews, gadgets and holidays. I'm not really a Martha Stewart type, but apparently it's time to learn.

It's not been the easiest journey, considering I'm a steadfast creature of habit. Only with the amazing support network of professional bloggers I have to lean on, have I realized that evolving isn't something to fight - it's something to be embraced. Evolution is the way your readers help you become the blogger you're meant to be.

Are you listening to what your readers want?

Are you prepared to take a completely different path if your calling should change?

This week, after two and a half years, I moved Freelance Writing Jobs from Writers Row to its own domain. I’ve been considering the move for a while, but out of loyalty to my friends at Writer’s Row, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. With almost 3,000 visitors every day, I find myself with no choice. It’s not easy hosting a popular blog on a subdomain, and my recommendation is that anyone who is serious about blogging consider using one’s own domain from the very beginning.

The benefits abound.

1. You’re not at the mercy of the site administrator. What happens if the site administrator forgets to pay the hosting bill? Or what happens if she’s playing around and somehow knocks the site offline? Or what happens if the site goes down? If you’re part of a subdomain, you most likely don’t have all of the contact information necessary to get things going yourself. Moreover, if you can't get ahold of your site administrator you're screwed.
2. You have more space. With your own domain, you don’t have to worry about exceeding your bandwidth and can do more with images and video if you’d like.
3. It’s more professional. Your “brand” is more believable if it’s not associated with a .blogspot,.wordpress or another subdomain. If your host doesn't have a very good reputation, you'll have that stigma attached to you as long as there's an association..
4. You can have all the link love to yourself. When I was associated with Writer’s Row, many of the people linking to me linked to the Writer’s Row home page. From there, interested parties would have to click on my link to see gigs and writing advice. Now I don’t have to share the link love.
5. You can have a clean url. Things just look neater without all of those slashes and dots.
6. You’ll have better search engine ranking. Especially if the URL is well optimized.
7. You don’t have to follow as many rules. Not to stay you’re looking to do bad things with your blogs, but some subdomains comes with silly rules. Having your own domain allows you to be your own boss.
8. You have access to all of your own stats. This is one of the main reasons I left Writer’s Row. I didn’t have access to the site’s stats, only that of my blog. I have no idea how people got to the main page or forum. Were they coming to Writer's Row to look for job leads or for another reason? I only know what happened after they landed on me.
9. You have your own page rank,Alexa rating, etc. (For what it’s worth).




10. More advertising options. Many advertisers don’t want to deal with a subdomain and some blog hosts won’t allow you to place ads on your blog.
11. You can do more with your blog. You have access to your own style sheets and files. You can create your own templates instead of using the few that are available to you.
12. Your blog is more valuable. Even though FWJ has a PR5, if I wanted to, I couldn’t sell it. Not with the URL http://writersrow/deborahng. Who wants my name on their website? Now, with the new address I have a better chance of selling my blog if that time ever comes.

What you give up

If you were enjoying someone else handling technical issues, be prepared to give that up. With your own domain, you’re responsible for pretty much everything. If you’re technically challenged like me, that can be a problem. I do have people to help, so I’m not worried.

Plenty of bloggers are happy with a blogspot or Wordpress subdomain. And many, like me up until recently, were content to have a subdomain hosted on someone else’s website. What happens when your blog grows? What happens when you start to bring in a lot more traffic and revenue? It’s a lot easier to start out with your own domain than it is to move everything later.

Things are a lot different now then they were even a few years ago. Web hosting packages are cheaper and it’s hosting a Wordpress, or even Blogger blog on your own domain isn’t difficult at all. Don’t find yourself at the mercy of someone else’s site outages. Blog on your own domain.

Serve your readers.

Or so goes the popular blogging mantra. In theory, you should always keep the reader first in your mind, because just like the consumer is always right, your blog is nothing if it doesn't serve the desires of your much-valued readers.

In practice, there's such a thing as bending over backwards too far to accommodate your readers at the expense of compromising the objectives of your blog - which, in case you haven't taking Blogging 101, is a big NO-NO.

For example, let's take the case of Hugh Macleod's excellent blog, Gaping Void. I, like many others, hit that blog up only for his artwork. Not to be rude, but I'm not interested in the projects Hugh is working on, or what's going on in his personal life (I would if we were friends, but that hasn't happened yet).

Now if a lot of readers were to ask Hugh to setup a category / tag / special feed for just his comic posts, would that be a bad idea from a "be user-friendly" perspective? I mean, if there is a significant portion of your readers who are coming only for the comics and emailing you (like I've emailed Hugh 3-4 times before I realised why it would be bad for his blog) to setup something separate, wouldn't it make sense to serve their needs better?

The thing is, Gaping Void is not just about comics drawn on the back of business cards, despite the tag-line. Over the years it has morphed into something more - if I were to venture an uninformed guess, it's a public forum for Hugh to discuss his views on a variety of issues, most of them tied together with the common thread of marketing / the Internet. You might not care about what Hugh thinks, but that's what his blog is for.

Who should compromise here? In my view it's the readers who should bite the bullet and learn to skim the blog for cartoons (it's surprisingly easy to skim over text and look just for the pictures :) ) - for Hugh, a lot of these readers will also end up reading what he writes, and this way his views and his projects get more eyeballs than they would if he siphoned the comic-only readers off to a special feed / section of the site.

Serve your readers, but not at the expense of sabotaging the reason why you blog in the first place.

If you've ever hired a blogger (or 20), you'll know that it's not an easy task to get the type of blogging work that you want out of your new people. This is especially the case when you're an experienced blogger yourself - the urge to micro-manage may be too great to allow you to train your blogger(s) properly.

So what methods / strategies do you use to train bloggers?

Currently I'm using a combination of strategies to bring bloggers up to speed. The first step is to help them find their blogging voice, their personality. To be blunt, it's just like real life - if you're an interesting person (a good story-teller), people will enjoy listening to what you have to say. On the other hand, if you're boring, people will nod their heads politely.

As a blogger, the anonymity offered by the Internet allows our nasty sides to come out and people are far less charitable online when you're boring (or anything other than a rock star). The key to be successful as a blogger is to develop a unique voice and style - and to polish and keep improving it.

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If you're a good writer (and a good communicator), you should be able to talk the talk when it comes to blogging about a particular subject.

But can you walk the walk? For a blogger dealing with subjects that involve practical application (self help, any skills-based area (SEO, web design, wood-working, photography, fitness, self defense, etc), competence in your chosen field goes a long way in establishing your credibility.

For example, suppose we're talking about a lady teaching self-defense techniques through her blog. Now short of actually seeing her in a live, unscripted situation, how would you judge her competence in the field that she is teaching? There are several ways to do this (and I'll discuss 5 key steps of doing so in a bit), but the most obvious has to be to show evidence that she practices what she preaches and is successful because of it (social validation works even if the person selling you the idea is showing that it works for them).

This lady should accompany every blog post about a technique or pointer with a video demonstrating how that works. If this was someone doing SEO you'd ask him to show proof that he can actually rank websites highly using his 'suggested methods', and if this was someone talking about digital photography you'd want to see snaps taken by them. Proof in action.

What if you don't have a blog on something that uses practical application? In that case you must show your competence in knowing your field of interest and show your expertise in different ways.

Let flesh this out and look at a 5-step model for demonstrating competence in your chosen field - whether you're a car blogger, a copywriter or a web designer, being "good enough" is NOT good enough. To truly succeed, you must aim to excel, and with that excellence comes natural credibility that oozes through your blogging.

1. Show Up Every Day

Are you still waiting for opportunities to come knocking at your door? There's a saying: "All good things come to him who waits." Unfortunately all that's left by that time is leftovers from people who got there first and took initiative.

In blogging terms, don't just do what is expected of you (by your readers, by the niche, by people who are giving you advice about blogging) but go one step further. Be there working on your blog every day, and instead of taking the option to slack off once or twice a week, show up with your "game" on.

Whether you're blogging or promoting your blog, it's not enough to just go through the motions - give it your best shot; give it 100% every time.

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At Performancing and especially after working with Ryan I've become a fervent believer in being lazy AND in experimenting and finding new ways to give myself and my blogs an edge over the competition.

It's not a contradiction - If you're lazy, you'll wait and pick out the techniques that give maximum benefits for the least amount of effort (on the other hand you can't be good if you don't practice hard, so you'll always be in a situation where you have to work hard, which kind of sucks and again underlines the need to pick the stuff that really, REALLY works).

My goal today is to give you a surefire, money-in-the-bank method to be a better blogger. And since 'better blogger' is too vague, let's pin it down to the holy trinity that bloggers crave:

• Clarity

  You have to get your point across, or you are wasting your time (worse, you're wasting your readers' time).

• Impact

  What you say must matter to your readers, otherwise you're wasting....you get the story.

• The Velvet Cord

  In direct marketing / sales writing circles (where I first heard this, and I know I've probably gotten the term wrong), the velvet cord is that thread, that plot line, that ties the whole sales pitch together. In story terms, it's the unifying theme, the binding idea, the basic gist. In blogging terms, it's the purpose of your blog (knowing "why you're blogging" is very important).

If your writing doesn't get your message across, if it doesn't have an emotional impact on your readers and if it's not in sync with what you aim to do with your blog, you're wasting your time, etc etc.

How to get these three skills nailed down to the exact centimeter?

Tell Funny Stories.

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When you are planning a new blog, the first thing you do is define your purpose. Why are you blogging?

Once you answer that question, a rough image starts to build your mind about how your blog would be like. One of the key distinctions at this point that you'll be making is figuring out how much of your blog is going to be a traditional resource (timeless content) and how much of it is going to be a blog (updated news and a collection of (almost) daily thoughts).

To make things clearer, suppose that we are setting up a blog on ... dating advice. Notoriously tough niche to get into but considering the ultra-popularity of it, why not? After you select your topic, you move on to the content that you are going to put up on your blog.

And here's the rub - there's only a finite set of topics (basic or advanced) that you can talk about and give advice on in any niche. You may go deep into subthemes but on the whole, there's a limited amount of foundational topics that you can start off on and write about.

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Bloggers practice varying levels of privacy when revealing personal information on their blogs. Some people are comfortable revealing their names, contact information and pretty much everything else, while others can go to the opposite extreme, use pseudonyms and in general be very protective of their identity.

In many cases privacy concerns arise out a greater fear of revealing too much personal information in case someone decides to come after you in anger (if you think that's ridiculous, you haven't been the target of such incidents - it's very real, if not frequent).

However, as professional bloggers, there's also another concern - do we want our names attached to our most controversial opinions / most personal thoughts?

I wrote about this last year in an article on managing reputation in which a lot of people gave good advice on how to deal with a situation where your personal blog can become a liability when people search for you online (especially if they're looking to hire you).

In the comments, a Performancing reader linked to an article he'd written in 2005 about the same problem, albeit from a different perspective. Of note:

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There are two ways that you can outsource the non-essential chores of running your blog (and this includes promoting as well).

The obvious way is to hire help - we've talked about this in the past here on Performancing and we even have a Blogger Jobs forum dedicated for this purpose. Depending on what tasks you need done, you might be paying anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month per hired hand (it all depends on how much work you are outsourcing - for design / marketing / lead blogging gigs, you might pay more than $1,000 per month).

The second method is to ask your readers for help. Depending on how much of a fan following you've built up (and whether you have dedicated blog readers who can spare time or not), this can really help you outsource a majority of your work, for free, thus giving you more time to grow your blog and take it to the next level.

Examples of the type of work I've gotten done, for free, in the past 3 months:

• Free banner and minor theme editing

  I've had a reader send in a professionally-designed banner for one of my sites (Newcastle United blog). I've also had people drop in and email me advice to fix a couple of styling / display problems on Soccerlens.

• Comment moderation

  If you moderate first-time commenters and try to weed out abusive comments on a sports blog, it can take up to 30 mins a day (more if you want to moderate them as soon as possible). What could you do with an extra 30-60 minutes per day?

  I have a blogger friend who moderates all comments for me. Thanks a lot mate :)

• Research on topics for linkbait / resource articles

  Sometimes I've just put up an article asking for links / resources, and within a few hours I've had all the hard work and research done for me. Other times I've asked guest bloggers to help me out with big resource articles, and they've usually come out trumps and helped me quite a bit.

• Brainstorming for new topics

  This works via email or by simply putting up a post asking people what they want to read.

• Guest blogging

  I've cut down on this a bit (partially because all the good bloggers are now running their own blogs as part of my fledgling network), but there was a time earlier this year when I would have 2-3 submissions a day - imagine the time something like that can save you, even if you have to drop 1 article from it because of a lack of quality.

• Making money (by putting up affiliate posts, ads as content)

  See this page? It's a list of articles, each article covering a product (football kits for different clubs for the current season). I've written most of them, but several have been written by contributors. And of those articles that I've written, most of the hard work (finding the new kits) was done by readers and sent in as article tips.

• Basic site promotion

  Something that I haven't worked a lot on but am planning to do so in the future. Quite simply, you will have readers with their own blogs / websites or other blogs / forums that they frequent. Just write killer resources and ask them, subtly, to spread the word if they enjoy your work. In some cases you might have to nudge them in the right direction and ask them to promote something on their own sites.

  As long as you make sure that you don't overdo the asking bit, AND that you're promoting something that really kicks ass, your readers will help you out.

  Worst case scenario? They're too lazy to do it. No harm done, they'll remember it and might drop the link somewhere else if the situation presents itself.

As you can see, there is a whole lot you can outsource to your blog community, although it depends on how big your community is (but even small communities will help as much as possible).

What about you? What have you outsourced to your blog's loyal readers recently? Have you even asked?

I would strongly suggest that you do that (start off small, by inviting guest bloggers, for example, and then move on to assigning them topics and then asking one or two people to take on the role of editor) and see what happens. If you're clear from the start that it is a voluntary position for which the person will get credit but not payment, you will STILL get a decent response.

Before you go out and hire a second blogger / editor to take over your chores, find out first if your readers are willing to help you out, for free. Chances are that they will, and they'll be happier for it.

Collaboration between bloggers is very important when it comes to building blog networks or maintaining large, content-rich sites such like Blog Herald and Performancing. Not only do you get the benefit of sharing the load of blogging, but you have two (or more) different social and blog networks within which to promote your joint venture, which can only help your blog's promotion efforts.

For single blogs, partnering up with other bloggers (as long as you can resolve your differences, if any) can bring you plenty of benefits, especially if your skill sets differ.

For example, I'm involved in several blogs where my role is that of advisor and manager - I advise, help monetize and promote the blog and manage the design, while the other blogger does what they know best - write about what they love. As blogging partnerships go this arrangement is one of the best ones to have (most, if not all, blog networks work this way).

In one of the early posts on Performancing Chris Garrett wrote an excellent article on Co-blogging, which I highly recommend you read. In essence, the idea is that by sharing your blogging responsibilities, you take a lot of the pressure off you that goes with blogging by yourself.

The big question before you get into a blogging partnership, however, is whether you are ready for it or not.

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For a lot of people, blogging is more than just about the money. It's about community and sharing and making a difference in peoples' lives.

At the end of the day though, unless your bed is made of 100-dollar bills, money plays a key role in your blog's existence.

In a previous post we've already talked about how you should know 'your purpose / motivation' for your blog before you start - however since financial considerations are always there or thereabouts whether you have a commercial venture or not, it's crucial to understand the role money plays in your blog's fortunes.

1. Don't make your blog about the money

Focus your blog on people - your readers, on conversations, on building relationships, on sharing ideas and most of all, on positioning your blog at the center of the conversations in your niche (it's a topic for a whole different discussion, but in short, talk about what matters to people in your niche now, not yesterday or tomorrow.

The money will come, as a direct outcome of your site being successful, as long as you monetize it properly.

If you are fretting about 'making money' from your blog then you might have things the other way around. After a certain point 'optimizing your revenue streams' stops improving the bottom line. You just have to make your site the most popular site in your niche (or close enough) - that's when the big advertising dollars come in and that's where you want to me.

Provide value to your readers and work hard at making your site popular - the money comes as a by-product.

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It's 2am in the morning, you're tired and you can't even look at your blog lest you find something else wrong with it. You give up and go to bed, only to find out that you can't sleep because sleeping over it isn't going to make things better - the problems will still be there tomorrow morning.

So you trudge back to your laptop and get down to work, except that you're chatting on IM instead of working - and then someone tells you how cool your blog is, and it dawns on you: You have been too harsh on yourself and your blog, and instead of finding positive solutions and working on them, all you've been doing is focusing on what's wrong and letting that eat you up inside.

Moral of the story: Whenever your blog or your blogging hits a dip (whether it's a drop in motivation or traffic), don't go Postal on your blog and everything that you've worked so hard to build up. Find out the reason why you've spent thousands of hours working on your blog, and why you got started in the first place. And then make sure you talk to the people who regularly read your blog and get their opinion on what they think of it.

Chances are, all you need is a supporting shoulder when you're down, and nothing works better than your own readers telling you that your blog rocks and that you shouldn't give up.

Thank you, dear reader :)