This isn’t just true of blogging. Think of all the markets now open on the basis of solved problems. Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, Henry Ford’s assembly line manufacturing process, and Richard James’ “slinky” are all vitally important to our current culture and society. And they all solve problems… except for the slinky perhaps.

Here’s the point: If you want to be read, be needed. And to be needed, solve a problem. Fix something that is broken. Address a need in the human heart or head. And if you can’t think of anything useful to say, meet the human need to be entertained. That may seem trivial, but there’s a reason why millions of people laugh out loud at cats.

This isn’t so much a challenge to come up with an idea for a blog that solves a problem as it is a provocation for you to write from a problem-solving mindset. As you pen each post, consider the questions…

• What unmet need am I meeting?
• What unfilled niche am I filling?
• What unsolved problem am I solving?

Then write in such a way that people will crave the answer you are offering.

What blogs do you see solving problems? And what problem does your blog solve?

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Grow Your Blog’s Influence by Solving a Problem

Having combed through our curcuit of friends, here are some awesome articles from the past week we think you should check out:

The Top 5 Most Annoying Blogging Cliches

Forming Your Network of Weak Ties for Achievement & Success

Get Smart About Podcasting

Why You Don't Need to Blog Daily

Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better

Is Sincerity the Key to Successful Blogging?

100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition

Blog Your Thumbs Off – How to Blog When There’s no Internet Access

As usual… what did we miss?

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The Hot List of Links for Bloggers

In this awkward stage people often become consumed with the tools available and value them over the principles that underly our work. But the underlying principle that makes social media such a vital part of the web is that people naturally long to relate to one another. They long to be deeply known.

Facebook and Twitter provide a means of reaching out and knowing someone. They offer points of access to others – points that didn’t exist before. But how do you explore those contacts more deeply? How do you take the next step beyond a tweet and really mine your established relationships for the kind of data that really connects people?

You can start with tools like these:

Gist

Gist takes the people you’re normally in contact with across the social web and shows you a cross-section of their online activity and an extended profile of them. Get Gist.

Rapportive

Rapportive replaces your Gmail sidebar ads with social web information about the person from whom the email you are reading was sent. It pulls from a variety of sources, shows recent tweets, and gives you a good picture of the person.

Threadsy

Threadsy does several things very well. It pulls together incoming messages from across various networks and puts them into a common inbox. This includes email, mentions, and direct messages. It also provides a networking client alongside the inbox and a sweet email signature to boot.

There are others. In fact, there are more added almost daily. We’re watching a positive trend in that there is a growing focus on building relationships and not just “follower counts.”

What do you use to deepen relationships across the social web?

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3 Tools for Exploring Your Social Networking Relationships

Have you ever met someone who had been married 55 years, was the CEO of one of the world’s largest and nicest hotel chains, and runs a pretty sweet blog? Meet Bill Marriott! And how did I know he’d been married for 55 years? He blogged about it.

As stated on the about page:

The purpose of this blog is to give you a forum to interact with Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International. We believe Marriott is more than just the world’s largest lodging company with more than 3,000 hotels around the world.

We’re proud of our culture, history, service excellence, and especially our 151,000* associates whose Spirit to Serve makes us so successful. Part of what makes us great is our belief in service to the customer and “Success is Never Final.”

This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we’ve nurtured since 1927. We are delighted you have decided to visit us, and we will do our best to make it a valuable experience for you.

The beauty of this blog isn’t in its rather basic design, but in the portal it opens between the average consumer/reader/guest and the CEO of an enormous operation. The company apparently recognizes this corporate blog for what it is, a mechanism to open the communication lines to the very top.

The blog does a great job at being social on the surface, providing links to other profiles and the company itself while allowing comments on posts, but one thread caught my attention on a post about offering points to timeshare owners. It seems there is debate about the points system, but reading between the lines reveals that there’s another debate going on between those who claim their comments aren’t being posted, and others whose negative comments are showing up just fine. Whatever the issue is, the negative factor that stands out is a lack of response, even in intervals.

What I love most about this blog is a very simple point: it’s a CEO, blogging for himself (in his own words, that is) about his company and his life. It’s quite a difficult task to convince C-suite executives of the value of working hard on their own content when they’re so busy with so many other tasks. Bill Marriott seemingly gets it.

What do you think? What does Bill get right or wrong? What can we learn from his blogging efforts?

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Showcase: Marriott on the Move – the Blog of Bill Marriott

1. Refusing to repeat ideas means you have to constantly have new ones, which can be exhausting.
2. The web is more and more a real-time content engine. Yesterday’s great idea is buried under today’s inspiration.
3. People forget what you’re about if you don’t remind them.

One leadership expert often reminds his people that “vision leaks.” You can share it, but you’ll need to share it again in six weeks or everyone will forget it. That can be true of a blog’s audience as well. Our attention spans are shorter than ever, so if you want to be memorable, you have to update your readers’ memory often.

Your best ideas are certainly worth repeating, and if it’s not worth repeating, it’s probably not your best idea. I’ve been a public speaker for thirteen years and have spoken to the exact same crowd, three times per week for half a decade. That means I’ve spoken to one group of people close to 1,000 times. During that time, I learned that originality isn’t always possible. The alternative is the same basic ideas re-packaged and re-published in a new and fresh way.

Here’s the question for you… how do you re-package ideas in a fresh way? How should a blogger utilize repetition and how can she do it without becoming lazy in the process?

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Hey Blogger, Could You Repeat That?

Fuel Your Blogging's List of Awesome Bloggers

We’d like to introduce members of our blogging community to other great bloggers, and we thought one of the best ways to do this would be to highlight, in a Twitter list, some of the people who have caught our attention in the recent past.

They’ve made the list for a variety of reasons. Some have simply established themselves as household names among bloggers. Others have been active within this Fuel Your Blogging community and have caught our attention because of their interactions. Some are outside the social media industry but have proving their wits when it comes to applying principles and practices of great blogging.

We’ll be adding more as time goes on. You’re sure to notice someone who is missing, so we apologize in advance that we can’t be fully comprehensive. We just wanted you to meet some really great bloggers!

So check out and follow the @fuelblogging list of awesome bloggers. Oh, and if you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter too!

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A Twitter List of Awesome Bloggers

A community is a place where people connect with each other in personal relationships. An online community can be thought of, not so much as a tightly defined circle, but rather a loose collection of smaller, overlapping circles. A blogger who wants to manage an online community should be finding ways to connect those circles to each other more effectively.

How do you reach into your online community to strengthen the relationships that exist there? Here are five suggestions…

1. Personally contact individual members. When people leave comments or sign up for your mailing list, they’re giving you permission to contact them. In our ultra-spammy age, this requires a great deal of trust. Never abuse this by sending obviously unsolicited pitches, but I think you can feel free to make an initial “thank you” contact.
2. Highlight great comments in a future post. Occasionally someone leaves a comment that is worthy of being its own post. They’ve taken the time to contribute to the community discussion in a way that might need more attention than being buried in a long, threaded discussion.
3. Turn a question back to the community. There are two big advantages of this: 1.) You get to pass the buck temporarily on a tough question, and 2.) People are generally rather opinionated and love weighing in.
4. Connect community members to each other. This is really the power of the social web. Bob asks a question about building widgets. Sandy mentions that James is an awesome widget-maker. A new connection is formed which only serves to strengthen the community.
5. Highlight the accomplishments of community members. In other words, when you notice someone in your community doing something great off your site, report about it on your site.

What else? How do you reach into your community?

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5 Creative Ways to Reach Into Your Online Community

Tumblr is a pretty cool service. They offer easy set up, loads of funky themes and super-simple reblogging. But blogging on Tumblr is sort of like being in high school. But you know deep-down that you can’t be in high school forever. Eventually, you have to move on…

Face it. You need to leave Tumblr behind and graduate to Posterous.

Bold. Perhaps too bold, in fact, as multiple news outlets not only raising questions but at times outright refuting Posterous’ claims.

Obviously, we’re talking in the realm of startups and apps and not just blogging, but these startup apps are changing the blogging industry, so for me it prompts some deeper thinking about competition in the blogging world.

Here are some questions, you give me answers if you dare…

• Should bloggers see others in their niche as competition?
• If so, are they “friendly” competition?
• How aggressive should bloggers be to claim their turf?
• How do you size up Posterous’ words? Ambitious or slanderous?
• What advice would you give on the subject?

So… shoot!

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Should Bloggers Be Killing the Competition?

Michael Low talks to us about some specific and unique ways to gain the trust of readers, which of course is not only significant when we’re calling them to action in the moment, but as we build a reputation of credibility long-term.

The Top Ten Drop-Dead Ugliest Bloggers of 2010

Nicholas Cardot took it upon himself to point out ten of the ugliest bloggers on the planet and happened to mention this Editor, who is now steaming mad! (Actually, it’s a fun post. Check it out.)

9 Ways to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back

Patsi Krakoff helps us review and re-commit to great writing and blogging in this excellent post.

50 Power Twitter Tips

Chris Brogan published this killer list of tips for Twitter, which has been making headlines all week. If you missed it, tune in now.

My Blog Schedule and Time Management

Kiesha Easley lets us into her world and explains, in detail, how she manages to be such a prolific blogger and keep her sanity (or something close to it). See her post for a good blogging productivity roadmap.

5 Uncreative Ways to Unlock Your Creative Juices

Jared Erickson, a creative guy himself, mentions five basic ways to get out from behind the screen and stoke the creative fires again. We all need a reminder and a revival now and then.

John Saddington guides us through the process of prepping for Wordpress 3.0, just released last week and includes everything a blogger needs to know about backing up and taking the leap.

The Common Characteristics of the Best Entrepreneurs

If you want to be more than a flash in the pan, check out this excellent story by Chris Bennett over at Young Entrepreneur.

Well, what did I miss?

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The Hot List of Links for Bloggers

“Community” is admittedly a buzz word, but it’s one we can’t avoid using in connection with building great blogs. It’s one of the essential elements of a total web presence for any person or organization.

The word community has to do with “sharing in common.” It’s a principle much older than the internet and dates back to the dawn of human civilization. Our work as bloggers and community managers isn’t to invent the concept of community, but to understand the social principles of community and apply them to our online villages.

Community isn’t as easy to understand as we might think. Human relationships are complex and often fragile, and building a successful online community requires more effort that many bloggers are willing to invest.

Here are seven myths about building online communities, and some correct alternative conclusions…

If You Build It, They Will Come

At one time, we operated under the assumption that an online community was built out of a good domain, hosting, and a sweet design. But there are plenty of well designed websites collecting dust because no one knows they exist. For a community to grow, it needs publicity, which comes in various forms. Our community can be found in organic search results. We can advertise and promote it. We can paste the url on billboards across the land, but as far as community is concerned, we need to realize the power of the invitation.

Inviting someone into a community is powerful. Facebook knows this and it’s why they want you to share everything you like with your friends. People long to belong and have an insatiable need for acceptance. Churches know this. So do gangs. And the sooner bloggers figure it out, the better. Invite people.

Great Content Is All You Need

I’ve said before that content is the currency of social media, and I stand by that truth. Content is the core of a great blog. It can be wrapped in a slick design and marketed via multiple channels, but if the content stinks, all incentive is lost for potential community members.

However, great content does not create community. Word on a page, no matter how eloquent, do not foster interpersonal connections between people. People do. Beyond content, a community demands and thrives on interaction. While interaction can be fostered by multiple mediums, it must be nurtured by a community manager. If you’re a blogger, that’s you. You’re not just a writer if you’re a blogger – you’re a people connector.

Offer Every Possible Feature

I grew up in a small community. We had a store, a fire station with a ballpark attached, and some churches. We didn’t have a mall or large supermarket. People who needed clothes and other essentials for life “went to town” to find them, but community happened there. That fire station became the location of an annual fair and everyone showed up. People stopped at the store to chat on their way home from work. It was a community without the bells and whistles.

Your blog or online community doesn’t need every possible feature. It may be that you add a discussion forum only to realize that your community would rather just comment on your posts. You might create a full-fledged social network only to realize your members would rather discuss your content on Twitter.

Just because features are possible doesn’t mean they are essential. Watch out for “feature creep.” Keep it simple. Think “relationships” instead of tools.

Comments Equal Community

Blogger Dave Lucas brought out an excellent point in his comment on the previous post about community:

Your post is dated June 8th… I’ve seen it displayed on other blogs and seen tweets about it… but you have two Lame comments (make that 3 with mine ;))… exactly what i come up against when I write “hit” posts!

Your “Community Theory” in real life on the net:

Yet I’ll see total BS crappily written posts get hundreds of comments! I won’t name any names, but after reading one of these I asked myself “what are these people smoking?” There were comments, links, kudos, tweets about a post written about getting blog traffic, a post so poorly-written that it bordered on idiocy! Yet it was tweeted and re-tweeted and blogged about by people who should know better! SOMETHING is wrong with this picture!

Your post here is well thought out and constructed. But it’s not attracting comments. I don’t understand why.

Dave highlights what I think is a growing trend of separation between comments and conversation. Blogs often reward commenters with backlinks, link love, and sometimes even “do follow” link juice. What inevitably happens is that people game the system for personal benefit. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These features can be nice and it can create some reciprocal benefits. The side effect, however, is that real conversation gives way to quick bursts like “nice post.” That isn’t really community.

Should you drop commenting from your blog? Absolutely not. Comments allow a platform for conversation whether it genuinely happens or not. Comments extend the content and offer a chance for critical thinking and response. But don’t assume that the number of comments received equals the real size of a community.

Community Only Happens On Your Site

Our understanding of this concept is rapidly changing as social networking continues to explode in popularity. Essentially, a blogger needs to understand that the conversation surrounding a piece of content takes place all over the web. Backtype, along with other similar tools, will take a url and trace its impact around the web, even showing top influencers who spread the content to begin with.

This principle has enormous advantages. Your community is now a band of evangelists helping to spread your brand around on the web.

You’re In Control At All Times

We are, by nature, control addicts, but control and community are not such good friends. Communities have a tendency to take on lives of their own. As a blogger, you have the advantage of framing discussions with your content and facilitating connections as an administrator, but your readers will still determine your success or failure in reaction to what you say and do. You can’t control people, and when you try, you destroy community.

Everyone Will Be As Devoted As You

The inevitable result of assuming every member of your community will be as devoted as you is frustration. I’ve witnessed plenty of melt downs and rants by bloggers who attempt to guilt their community members into being more faithful adherents and promoters. It never works.

Your blog is your baby, and you should have an attitude of gratefulness for every contribution to it. I’d rather have someone’s casual readership than to not have them at all, even if they never speak up. There are exceptions. There are communities that need greater accountability, but specific to blogging is the principle that the blogger is chief brand evangelist, communicator, facilitator, and community manager.

Your passion will drive the success of your online community. Your face will be the strand that connects others in relationship with each other. Your words will set the tone for discussion. It’s your community, make the very best of it.

The bottom line is that community never happens on accident. You need to define the nature of the community you want to build and then implement strategies to see its success.

Comments, Fuel community?

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7 Myths About Building a Successful Online Community

If feed readers and email lists aren’t your thing, perhaps these ten sites will be worthy of your bookmark for browsing. What I like about them is that I can glance at them and there is no “mark as read” button necessary. When I click away, I’m done.

TweetTabs.com

TweetTabs.com offers a sweet multi-column real-time tracker for trending topics and customized searches on Twitter.

Sency Real Time Search

Sency is a real-time search engine that offers much more, including the hottest trending topics in major cities, tying together the power of real-time search and geo-location.

Collecta

Collecta is another real-time search engine with a nice home page design offering the latest story on five popular topics along with some discussion surrounding that story.

Regator

Regator is kind of an aggregator for what’s being blogged about across a variety of topics, but you can create an account to personalize your results.

Guzzle.It

Want to roll your own Alltop or Popurls type interface? Guzzle.It lets you do just that with your own account.

RSSmeme

RSSmeme is an aggregator of what’s hot among rss feeds across the web. I like the quick ability to switch between “now,” “today,” and “this week.”

These are six, among so many! What’s your favorite way to consume news (other than email and a feed reader)?

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Six Cool Sites for Keeping Up With the Blogosphere

You can add widgets, bells, and whistles, but the absolute best addition to any blog is people who return for the value of the content and connections you provide. A community is made up of people who stay in tune with your content, with you as the blogger, and even with each other in one way or another.

What A Blog’s Community Looks Like

Even before the advent of the internet, a community was more than a mere geographical area within a set of prescribed boundaries. The word “community” has far more to do with the relationships between people inside it and how they interact with one another.

A blog’s community is enthusiastically tied to that blog’s brand and content. Members discuss content with one another, discover new connections within the circle, and contribute to the value of your blog. A community actually begins to shape the nature and personality of a blog over time and therefore, a community can be grown, but rarely controlled.

Why a Community is So Vital

If your blog is going to thrive, you need people to make contributions in the form of internal content (especially comments and discussion) but also to share your content with connections outside your community. One fact that Facebook understands well is that human relationships are far more important than directory listings and organic search results. Showing up in search results represents the infancy of the web while showing up in resources shared by people in relationships with one another is the future.

Without a community, your blog’s success is always on its last leg. Its survival is dependent upon a returning, faithful audience who grow to trust that you’ll continue to contribute value to their lives even when you miss a beat here and there.

How to Start Building Your Blog’s Community

I’m going to be writing about this issue more in depth in a multi-part series on building your blog’s community, but for now know this one dominating principle – be social. Connect with people. Speak their language, respond to their needs, and forge bridges of ongoing communication. Being social is far more important than joining social networks or using social tools.

Before I proceed with my series, what are your thoughts about online communities? How important are they? How do you start building them?

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The Best Addition to Your Blog Is a Great Community

Robb Sutton's 30 Most Influential Bloggers of 2010

You may or may not be into lists. I still like them myself, and Robb’s list caught my attention. He lists 30 of the most influential bloggers and website owners, but what I noticed is that Robb didn’t just list the well-known “money makers” but those who have truly worked hard a expanding their influence.

Quite a few members of his list have written for Fuel, including Robb himself. Perhaps there’s some connection between writing for Fuel and winding up on a list of successful bloggers?

My bigger question in light of Robb’s list is, who has influenced you personally?

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Robb Sutton Lists 30 of the Most Influential Bloggers of 2010

Your blogging success isn’t about your next post. It’s about all of your posts. It isn’t about a great headline, a huge list, or sweet graphics. It’s about the total package. Whether your blog is personal, corporate, or one of those that’s supposed to make you a millionaire tomorrow, your blog is really all about you.

Managing a blog requires keeping up with posting schedules, comment replies, topic assortment, and external sources. It’s the management of ideas, words, and peak traffic hours. Managing the blogger (yourself) is so much more vital. This is what I mean…

• Managing your body (diet, rest, exercise) prepares you for longevity.
• Managing your time and prioritizing correctly preserves your sanity.
• Managing your mind (reading, learning) empowers your words with greater impact.
• Managing your vision keeps you determined to grow your blog and your brand.
• Managing relationships is the essence of great community-building.

Anybody can manage a blog for a season. But are you managing yourself? It’s highly important! It’s vital.

What are you doing to prepare for the long haul?

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Managing a Blog Is Great. Managing the Blogger is Even Better.

Quantifying successful blogging is challenging. Some blogs that are highly successful in terms of influence can’t boast of large direct revenue while others that make a killing off of pay-per-click ads offer little real value to the world. And traffic alone isn’t always a great qualifier of successful blogging either. Analyzing traffic is tricky because the real story sometimes gets hidden beneath the numbers.

The real goal is readership. One devoted reader can be a more powerful ally than 100 random visitors. So the goal isn’t just to grab attention, but to stimulate real devotion. Great blogs rely on a great community of devoted, supportive fans.

How does a blogger build a community of truly devoted readers? The answer is simple, the execution is challenging – reach the heart. The reason you are loyal to certain brands has a lot more to do with your emotions than your mind. Daily, we make the choice to spend extra money on the things we value rather than going cheap because we’re emotionally devoted. So if you want to build a loyal, devoted readership, aim for the heart.

How do you engage the emotions to win the hearts of devoted readers?

1. Make people think… about themselves. Facts can be interesting, but facts that hit home are compelling. Human beings, by nature, are uncomfortable with change, but change we will when our emotions are involved. People don’t buckle up because they see a road sign – they do so because they’re in a fender bender that jolts them or they see a horrific accident.
2. Be a face and a name, not just a blog. What do Chris Brogan, Michael Hyatt, and Brian Solis all have in common? In addition to being successful bloggers who impact their respective industries, they each have an online persona that can be known in a unique way.
3. Push buttons. I heard a Christian minister say once that his role was to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” In many cases, our role as bloggers is to push buttons – to make people mad… or sad… or uncomfortable in some way.
4. Tell stories. Or at least make sure a story is told about you, your blog, or your brand. In fact, branding is often misunderstood as symbols, designs, and logos. But a brand is really the story associated with a person, product, or organization. It represents the emotional connection people associate with a name.
5. Do it all again. Making people laugh, or cry, or think just once is great, but we’re aiming for devoted readers, which can only be done when we communicate with the heart consistently and repetitively.

This is a partial list. I’ve gotten you started. Now help me out. How else do you gather a devoted community?

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How to Aim for Devoted Readers