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10 Things You Learned in Kindergarten that Make You a Better Blogger

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I bet you didn’t know that a lot of the things you need to know to be a good blogger were taught to you before you could even write your name.  It’s true!  A lot of the things you learned in Kindergarten apply to blogging and other aspects of your social web activities.

Don’t believe me?  Keep reading to learn about 10 of those things you learned in Kindergarten that make you a better blogger.

1. You need to be polite.

This one is a no-brainer.  If you want to build your audience, then you need to do what your Kindergarten teacher told you and be nice and respectful to others, even if you don’t agree with them.

2. You need to share.

At 5-years old, we learned to share toys, but as bloggers, we need to share each other’s content, ideas, conversations, and so on if we want our blogs to grow.

3. You need to take your turn.

In Kindergarten, we learned not to cut in line, and as bloggers, we can apply that lesson to allowing others to have their say.  While you might not agree with a comment left on your blog, let others have their turn to share their opinions, and then enter into an adult-conversation to discuss the issue further.

4. You need to say thank you.

This goes without saying, but showing your appreciation is extremely important to helping you build relationships across the social web.

5. Don’t run with scissors.

Be careful what you publish on your blog and follow the written and unwritten rules of the blogosphere to ensure you don’t put yourself in a bad situation.

6. It’s not nice to take other people’s stuff.

Don’t scrape content, don’t use images without permission, and don’t try to pass off any kind of work that you did not create as your own.

7. It’s really hard to get gum out of your hair.

Your words live online.  Once you publish them, you might not be able to remove them.  Always think about how the content you publish will affect you and others now and in the future.

8. Don’t hang upside-down on the monkey bars while wearing a skirt.

Avoid getting too personal on your blog.  It might seem like a good idea to publish those funny pictures of you doing a keg stand at a frat party on your blog, but if a hiring manager sees them a year from now, you might think differently about putting those pictures out there for the world to see.

9. I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

People will say mean things about you online.  It’s inevitable.  You need to have a thick skin to be a blogger.

10. Raise your hand.

Write about what you know and don’t be shy about it.  Be confident and don’t be afraid to share your knowledge, opinions, and yourself on your blog.

Image: stock.xchng

Should Your Business’ Blog Profile Industry Leaders?

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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.

7 Time Management Tips for Bloggers

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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.

What Are Some Traits of Blog or Blogger Success?

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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.

Do You Disclose Relevant Info in Your Blog Posts?

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If you’re an American blogger, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) might be watching you, to see if you’re disclosing any information in your blog posts that suggest you received some benefit, whenever you mention some product, service or company. That’s due to their blogging and new media disclosure guidelines that went into effect last year. Yes, it’s more work for a fast-paced workflow, but it simple once you get into the habit. The basic rule of thumb: don’t keep secrets if you’re trying to influence readers.

Now by disclosure, I don’t mean things like, “I had sauerkraut on a hot dog today. With lots of French’s Dijon mustard. And liked it.” Well, actually, if your blog is about food, for example, and you regularly mention a particular brand, the FCC maybe analyzing what you write. Presumably they’re wondering, “Is French’s giving this blogger freebies?” If you only mention a brand in passing here and there, no sweat — unless all the brands are from one company. But if you do a full on review of a brand, or write about them so often that you raise a red flag, they might want to talk to you. Then, if they find out you indeed received a lifetime shipment of free mustard in return for occasionally or regularly blogging about their product, you had better have disclosed this information to readers at some point.

How to Disclose Relevant Info in Blog Posts

Disclosure can be awkward, but you do have a few fairly simple choices. Now the following tips are only suggestions, based on my common sense, and what I’d want other bloggers to disclose to me on their blog. I haven’t read the reportedly ambiguous FTC disclosure rules that have been in effect for bloggers since Dec 1, 2009.

1. Disclose relevant info.

Disclose only what is relevant to the post in question. If you own shares in multiple companies but only mention one, what does it matter? If you received free products from different companies, no one cares unless you’re mentioning the products in a blog post.

2. Disclose information when necessary.

Disclose even if it means repeating yourself from post-to-post. If you’re always writing about a company, product or service in every single post and have received some benefit in consideration, then find a better way to disclose such info, such as prominently in a sidebar. Or you could create a Disclosures page for your blog and link to it either from your sidebar or from relevant posts.

Keep it simple.

Try to summarize your benefits, not go into great detail. For example, I spent a few months being lead blogger and inbound marketing manager at YourVersion, a real-time Web discovery engine that I think is a great tool for bloggers trying to find the latest references for one or more topics. My work with YourVersion was unpaid but I’m entitled to some share options, though I don’t get any extra benefits in continuing to promote the company — unless of course the company goes public in a few years and I’ve exercised my share options. If I do additional work for the company, outside of tech evangelizing, I could be eligible for additional share options.

Sounds pretty complicated, right? Since it’s awkward to disclose the exact details of this info without rambling, I usually just say, “Disclosure: I’m an unpaid tech evangelist for YourVersion and have share options.” (While we’re on the topic of shares, I should note that PF — aka Personal Finance — bloggers have the tendency to disclose most often. If they talk about a stock, they’ll mention ownership of shares. Some even mention lack of ownership in companies mentioned, just to be above board.)

Separate disclosure text.

For one-off disclosures (even if they’re a repeat), you have a couple of options:

  1. Place the disclosure in brackets, close after the mention of a product, service or company.
  2. Place the disclosure at the bottom of your post.

Disclose on your personal blog.

Sometimes clients don’t want disclosures of other products, or at least not on a repeated basis. What I’ve done in the past is published a disclosure within a review on my own blog, which I use to write about my clients and topics relevant to the Web and Mobile blogging and consulting work I do.

For example, I bought a copy of Mindjet‘s MindManager 6 mind mapping software back around early 2007. Mindjet loved the fact that I loved MindManager and wrote about the software extensively. In spring 2007 and late 2008, they gave me free copies of V7 and V8, respectively. I disclosed this in two reviews of MindManager published on my personal site, and on select client blog posts where I was reviewing the produt positively. If I simply mention Mindjet or MindManager in passing, I don’t disclose the freebies.

Note: I will be writing an upcoming Performancing post on using mind mapping for writing, but will only disclose the freebies if I’m overly favoring MindManager.

Where and When Should You Disclose

Yes, disclosure can be a PITA, but even if wasn’t an FTC requirement, doing so builds trust with your readers. Now, sometimes it’s pretty obvious when you’re getting freebies. Back in the early to mid-90s, when I was publishing a printed monthly entertainment review magazine in and around Toronto, we were getting as many as 30 music CDs a week and all were freebies. There was no issue about disclosure in those days, and thank goodness because we’d have run out of print space.

If a music reviewer bought a CD, they might say something like, “I love this band so much, I ran out and bought their new CD.” On the other hand, we never received movie passes; that came out of the operating budget, and as result we covered less of them. My film writers were hardcore film fanatics and just reviewed films for me because they wanted the experience, and to share.

Of course, when it comes to blogs, display space isn’t as much of an issue as for print. You’ll have to decide on your own if and when you should disclose some benefit you’ve received. (Or maybe read the FTC guidelines; BuzzMachine has a post on how the FTC is regulating our speech, and has a bit.ly link to the 81-page PDF document.) By the way, the rules also apply to new media, so you’ll want to disclose relevant benefits in podcasts and video blogs. Ultimately, use your common sense and be on the up and up about any benefits you’ve received from a person or company, if it’s relevant to a blog post.

Disclosure: I like long walks on the beach, with the sand squishing beneath my feet. And French’s has never given me free mustard, let alone contacted me about any of my cooking blogs.

Image: Flickr.

5 Tips For Building Expertise Through Blogging

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How much time do you need to put into a niche before you can declare yourself an expert? Well, many bloggers seem to disagree, judging by their self-proclamations after only a few months, but once upon a time you were classified as an expert if you had spent roughly 10,000 hours on a skill, in a focused, structured manner. If we’re referring to a career job, at roughly 40 hours/week, that comes out to about five years. But when it comes to working online and establishing your expertise, the Web doesn’t wait around. Five years is too long, since Web technology is always changing.
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Blogging Workflow and Productivity: Alternate Bookmarking Tip

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If you have a Mac or PC computer, there’s a simple way to locally bookmark Web pages that you’re browsing or researching en masse that keeps you browser-independent: file folder shortcuts. This method keeps you from having to open multiple Web browser tabs or bookmark all the URLS or worse, copy and paste links into some sort of list. It is a simpler former of bookmarking, but avoids some of the other methods’ limitations. Note: I haven’t tried the following tip on a Linux system, but it might work similarily. I tested on a Mac (10.6.x Snow Leopard) and a PC (Win Vista).

First, let’s look at the objectives we’re trying to achieve:

  1. Browse lots of pages daily, to find ideas and references for blogging.
  2. Locally bookmark web pages independent of any browser, to preserve them for that day and beyond, if necessary.
  3. Minimize the number of open browser tabs, to save the amount of RAM memory your computer is using at any given moment. This saves an immense amount of wasted time.
  4. Reserve the ability to group links as necessary, and move links around for regrouping.

Sources that I refer to daily for finding blog post ideas and references include:

  1. Favorite sites you’ve previously bookmarked.
  2. RSS readers (e.g., Google Reader).
  3. Portals and aggregators (Alltop, Techmeme, Megite, WeSmirch, etc.).
  4. Social voting sites (Digg, Mixx, etc.).
  5. Social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Stumbleupon).
  6. Microblogging sites (Twitter).
  7. Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning).

Typically, I’ve used mind mapping software and other tools for bookmarking or recording interesting links for later use. Specifically, I’ve tended to favor Mindjet’s MindManager on a PC for about three years, and particularly love this tool. However, when I switched my main laptop to a MacBook Pro last December, I was hugely disappointed to find that not only is the interface for MindManager different than on a PC, but the workflow is different. That’s also true on the Mac for all the other mind mapping tools that I tend to use regularly, such as XMind.

I still love MindManager and other mind mapping tools, but for now, they don’t work for me on a Mac. After wasting a lot of time going back to opening up multiple browser tabs while researching, I managed to crash my Mac (yes, a Mac!!) too many times. Purely by chance, I accidentally discovered a simple trick: drag Web page links from your browser to Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac) applications to create a link shortcut. I’m honestly surprised that I never knew this before, and actually have Mac OS X’s general interface to thank for the discovery.

What happens is that both apps store link information in the form of a “shortcut,” which you can later either drag into a browser or double-click on to open the content page. It’s really quite simple and I’m actually surprised not to have discovered it in the past. Note that with Macs, clicking on a link stored in a Finder folder opens the Safari browser, and that as far as I know, this cannot be changed. If you prefer a different browser while using a Mac, you can use your mouse to drag shortcut links from Finder folders and drop them into your browser of choice. With PCs, you can configure the default browser, so clicking a saved shortcut will open whatever browser you’ve configured.

Caveats
You can end up still accumulating far too many link shortcuts that you’ll never use, and create multiple daily folders, thus finding yourself just as overwhelmed with information overload as with other blogging research methods. So discipline is independent of blogging workflow, and something you’ll need to discover for yourself.

The fact is, I still open far too many browser windows and tabs. For example, at the time of this writing, I have probably 60 tabs open overall in Firefox, Chrome, Flock and Safari. It may seem like a bad habit, but is often a necessity when working with multiple clients and using multiple Web profiles for social media and other services. Using the “bookmark-within-file-folder” trick simple reduces the number of browser tabs I need to open. As a result, I’ve managed to be more productive again for two key reasons. One is that my browser windows hang less often because of more free memory. The other is that I now focus on one browser tab at at a time. Overall, this means less time spent researching/ browsing and restarting browsers and more time for writing.

How to Improve as a Problogger, Part 2

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Image by svilen001

Last week, I talked about step one for improving as a problogger. I argued that it was a foundational step to believe that you could improve in any skill and natural talent was mostly a myth. If you are poor at a skill right now, you can become competent at it through practice and effort.

Today, let’s look at the next steps for improving as a problogger. These steps provide a blueprint for shoring up your weaknesses and becoming even better at your strengths.

Step 2: Learn.

As you seek to improve, you need a starting point. In this step, look for sources of expertise to guide you in your journey.

For example, let’s pretend you want to grow the search traffic of your blog. You could do several things to start the process of learning about SEO. You could buy an ebook, read blogs, watch a video course, or pick the brain of friend who’s good at SEO.

It’s not enough to learn from the initial information you come across. You need to find trustworthy sources. With all the misinformation on the web, you should do enough research to vet the credibility of your sources.

Avoid the sources who offer empty promises and guarantee quick results since improvement usually takes time. Don’t be like the bloggers who are always looking for the latest shortcut to online riches. While they are being scammed by the latest “guru”, you should be learning on a deep level from the real experts. The most credible sources will be realistic with the speed of improvement. They will place a premium on hard work because they know that becoming competent in the skill takes effort.

Once you’ve found some credible sources, start learning but don’t get stuck on this step. There are too many bloggers that do a lot of reading but barely put any of their knowledge into action. I used to be one of them. I used to spend most of my time reading about problogging instead of actually working on my blog. I learned a lot but I didn’t have time to implement my knowledge since I was spending so much time reading. Therefore, I removed all the problogging blogs from my RSS reader to encourage me to move from learning to doing. I made a list of useful things I learned and set out to apply them to my blog.

Step 3: Take action.

Once you have a solid grasp on a new concept, it’s time to try it out.

Let’s go back to the SEO example. You do some reading and discover that building links on authority sites is very effective. You find some suggestions on how to build these links and try them out.

At this point, it’s important not to expect too much from your efforts since you’re just starting out. You will probably fail a lot in the early stages but with each attempt, you’ll gain valuable experience and knowledge as long as you heed the next step.

Step 4: Evaluate.

In this step, take a look back at your efforts and evaluate them.

You will need some metrics to help you determine if your efforts are succeeding or not. It can also be helpful to set some realistic goals to motivate you.

There are many metrics you can look at depending on the skill you’re trying to improve. Here are some common metrics to consider:

  • traffic
  • links
  • published guest posts
  • comments
  • retweets
  • search engine ranking

During the evaluation process, examine your successes and figure out why you were able to do well. Your aim should be to recreate your successes until the skill becomes second nature. That’s when you know you’ve achieved competency.

Of course, you will also learn from your failures but your successes will be much more informative. Within your successful efforts, you can find a blueprint for further success whereas failures just show you what not to do.

If you want a more accurate evaluation process, I recommended joining a reputable paid forum and getting personal feedback on your efforts from people who have more ability than you. It’s great to have access to experts that can tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Also, they can give you valuable ideas to consider that you may not think of.

You can try free forums if you don’t have money but this method has some risks. Free forums tend to have a much lower signal to noise ratio than paid forums. Also, the quality of information is usually much higher at paid forums.

Performancing offers blog management services.