Performancing Stream of Consciousness – Thur Apr 24, 2008

These are some of the blogging/ writing/ SEO-related articles posted this week that caught my attention. If you prefer audio, click on the SplashCast player below. In the audio version I expand on some, but not all, of the items listed below. [Time: 9:02]

1. If you sell something on your site, whether a service or a product, making a sale might be dependent on properly informing and educating your visitors. Chris Garrett at ChrisG explains why educating customers is important, and how blogging can help in that regard.
2. Love this title: How to be a Ruthless Blogger, by Darren Rowse at Problogger. Of course, Darren isn’t talking about taking prisoners but rather about becoming focused and productive by being ruthless with yourself and your workflow. To supplement this, Darren has another great post about being a more interactive and accessible blogger.
3. Sonia Simone at Copyblogger has some bang-on advice for copywriting that can be applied to blogging in general. The key bit of takeaway info here is that your readers probably have a lot of information competing for their attention. So your writing has to capture their attention straight away.
4. Darren Rowse did a guest post over at Social Media Mom about what being a dad has taught him about social media. And Maki at Dosh Dosh covers seven characteristics required for building a popular social media profile. As a Digg and Sphinn power user, he tends to know what he’s talking about, so if you haven’t already seen this, check it out. Here’s a summary of the seven characteristics:
   1. Strong profile visibility.
   2. Active participation.
   3. Practice reciprocity (win win outcomes).
   4. Effective communication.
   5. Support the community.
   6. Provide value above all.
   7. Demonstrate integrity.
5. The topic of social media leads to lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is the aggregating of personal info feeds such as Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, in order to either let people know what you’re up to or tofollow your friends’ activities. Maki of Dosh Dosh talks about the benefits of social media aggregators. Ian Kennedy at Everwas feels that lifestream filtering will become an algorithm war.
6. Jeff Quipp at Search Engine Watch suggests a social media strategy for turning sensationalized content traffic into long-term traffic with additional resource content.
7. Hans Viens writes The Secret to Developing a Popular Blog at Search Engine Journal – one of the most indepth articles of its type that I’ve ever seen.
8. Richard V. Burckhardt provides the amusingly named 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love at Search Engine Journal.
9. Patrick Altoft of Blogstorm offers a quick guide to launching a new site. He also links to older articles there that provide some pretty impressive stats for a new site.
10. Patrick Altoft’s guide to .htaccess was written about a year ago, but every blogger comes across a need for this eventually. Have a look. There are some simple cut and paste rules there for redirecting pages, etc., using .htaccess rules, and it’s one of the more comprehensive guides of its type.