Blogging

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.

The default approach bloggers use when ‘reporting news’ is to follow the same pattern as journalists do in their newspaper columns.

Sara Christensen, from Pajama Professional, puts it best:

Breaking news on your blog is great, but that doesn’t mean your posts have to sound like news. If readers want news, they will head to CNN.com. They are at your blog because they want your original viewpoint. The fastest way to lose readers is to start regurgitating news content in a really boring fashion.

For my news blog, I often get contributions from writers who try extremely hard to copy the style of reporting shown on BBC / Times / Guardian. That’s not why readers are coming to my blog, and chances are, that’s not why readers are going towards blogs in the first place.

If you want your readers to stick around, to become a part of the community, and most of all, if you want your blog to stand out and actually build a fan base, you need to infuse your blog (and blogging) with:

• An original viewpoint (no regurgitated news, ever)
• A personality

More from Sara’s article:

The thing to remember is, popular blogs become popular because of the blogger. A good blogger shows personality even when he/she is writing about an impersonal topic. Regular readers start to feel like they know the blogger personally. Once this happens, readers form attachments and loyalties that are achievable only in a venue like blogging that highlights a writer’s personality.

Don’t make the same mistake that 99% of the other ‘news’ bloggers are making. If you’re hiring people to write for your news blog, make sure they read Sara’s article and learn that the success of the blog depends on your writing style and content – if you’re going to go down the ‘safe’ (bland) route of traditional reporting, you’ll miss out on creating a community and on building a strong, loyal readership.

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.

I’ll admit it. In the past, I’ve been stingy with my links.

And I’ll also admit that I’ve been stingy with my links because of Google’s PageRank algorithm.

But Google’s PageRank is a theory surrounded by too many epicycles at this point. And now I realize that I’ve been hurting my websites by being stingy.

No more stinginess.

Here’s why you and I should be liberal with our linking:

1. Linking to other sites in your niche draws attention to your own blog
2. Bloggers are lovers. They need some love to give some love.
3. Free-linking breaks up your stale link-network and dissolves bad patterns
4. Quality linking adds value for your readers and establishes you as an authority
5. Quality linking adds value to the Internet

So forget about PR leakage. Forget about monetizing PR. Start linking out like a loose lemon (a loose lemon is one which is not sour).

The idea is simple – do not open your email, visit forums, hit your blog’s comments, open your rss reader, visit your favourite websites…in other words, do not ANY type of ‘input’ in your working hours until you have the time allocated to ‘ACT’ on that input.

For example, it’s common practice for bloggers to open up their email inbox several times a day to ‘scan’ for important emails. Depending on the amount of emails one gets, this can mean a few quick responses and then leaving those emails that require a longer response lying in wait till late night. At night, you might not have the time / energy to write long responses and those emails get left on next day.

Or, when we hit up our RSS reader without scheduling time to blog about any news item we find interesting. What happens if we come across something worth blogging about? It goes in the bookmarks, and those bookmarks keep adding up until you have to do some spring cleaning or the load becomes so overwhelming that you have to dump them and start afresh.

Or…when we hit forums where we network frequently only to browse and not to comment / reply on threads.

All such activities take up time – valuable time – from our daily routine. Instead of checking your email 5 times in 4 minute segments, you could easily check it once a day in 20 minutes, and in that time you will respond to more emails and get more things done than in the 5 short breaks during the day. The same goes for blogging (you’ve already read an article once, and if you leave it for later, you’ll have to read it again. It maybe only a few minutes of time but once you add that time up you can build an amazing debt of time.

I get distracted easily, so it’s a continuous battle to avoid such time wasters, especially when I’m not going to ‘do anything about them’.

If you really need a 5-10 minute break, get off your butt and excercise – if you’re a blogger, you probably need it more than a quick trip to your inbox to check your mail for the 3rd time in the day.

We bloggers are a friendly breed. We are always looking to find new readers, and do whatever it takes to build relationships with other bloggers.

Regardless of what people say about online relationships, I believe that online friendships can learn a thing or two from the real world relationships. It’s not like online relationships are a mere networking between faceless computers. There are real people behind computers who share this 3 dimensional world with us.

Considering how difficult it is for many bloggers to make friends through blogging, I’ve made a list of things to do and avoid that will help you make new contacts in the blogosphere.

Things to do and avoid on your blog

Don’t speak authoritatively – Although I believe that having authority in your voice is vital if you want others to take you seriously, it is not wise to assume that you are the boss. It’s your blog, all right, but your readers are not your employees. Whether they visit your blog or not is their personal choice. Nothing is stopping them to quit visiting if they find your words condescending. After all, you don’t pay them to visit.

Be polite and friendly if you want your readers to treat you as a friend. No one really likes to befriend bullies.

Reply to every commenter in person – It ticks me off when I make a comment on a blog (especially when I ask a question) and the blog owner does not care to reply back to me. Comments section on blogs are there for a reason – use them to interact with your readers. There are bloggers who have turned off the commenting option for some silly reason they give, but it’s still understandable. They tell me straight away: read this and move on. No comments allowed. But if you have enabled commenting, you should consider replying to those who take the time to comment on your blog.

As I said, virtual world is not a whole lot different from the real world. In real world, if we talk to someone and get a blank stare in reply, we assume that either that person is too arrogant or a bit on the other side of sanity. This is exactly what I think of the bloggers who don’t care about my comments. I think of them as too proud or too reserved. So, on I move.

Speak in a conversational voice– As opposed to conventional writing, blogs are supposed to be conversational. None of your formal business-like writing rules hold anymore. Therefore, if you want to elicit replies from your readers, talk to them as you would talk to them in the real world.

This is the beauty of blogging. You can be conversational and yet avoid the mistakes you make in real world conversations. It’s writing because you can edit your words and decide what to say and what to hold back. It’s a conversation because you are talking to your readers and you want them to respond to you. You get the best of both worlds!

Call your readers by name – Hearing someone say our name makes us all tingly with excitement. And believe me, this rule holds even in the online communications.

Whenever you reply to your commenters, use their name freely, e.g. “You are right Chris”, “Are you sure Matt?” This gives your comment a human touch, and your readers are delighted to see that you care about them.

Sometimes a commenter leaves his website name instead of his own name, so to find out his real name, visit his website and look under his post titles, in the post meta-data section, or go to his ‘About’ or ‘Contact ‘ page to dig out his real name. Come back and address him by name!

Kick off discussions – Most bloggers do reply to comments but they don’t push the discussion forward. The discussion pattern in comments usually goes like: comment-reply, another comment-reply and so on. If you reply to a commenter and he replies back to you, this is what I call a discussion, or a conversation. But how do you do that?

Simple. Ask questions. Encourage them to reply back, ask them to clear up a point, solve a riddle, expand on their previous comment, etc. This way, you get to know your readers better, pile up comments, make relationships, and get all other social benefits associated with comments.

Things to do and avoid on other blogs

Don’t leave short comments – It’ll only take a moment longer to come up with something worthwhile to say. Comments like “Nice post” and “Good tips” are not helpful. If you are out there to network and build relationships with other bloggers, you’d better add value to their blog.

Reply back – You go out in the blogosphere in commenting frenzy, leave comments on tons of blogs and never check back to see if someone replied to you. Not nice. When you reply to a post, you engage in a discussion, and it becomes your responsibility to keep up with the discussion till the end, or at least as long as others are replying to you.

Return the favor – If a blogger adds something valuable to your discussion, you go and add something valuable to his discussion. If a blogger has been voting you up on all social media/bookmarking sites, you should check out his blog and return the favor. If a blogger has been linking to many of your posts, you should mention his blog in one of your speed-linking posts (if you don’t do such posts, do them). You’ll enjoy giving back as much as you do receiving.

Blogs are platforms for discussions, and the social web thrives on the give and take rule on equality basis. To make friends, and have successful relationships in the blogosphere, you have to be a giving, caring, listening, and a talking human being, not a mere bot who types away post after post incessantly in a hope that people would come in hordes and form a fan club around you.

What’s been your experience in terms of building relationships through blogs?

Mohsin writes at Blogging Bits.