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?

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

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

Every day procrastination threatens to steal my dreams and erase any hope of ever achieving my goals.

I know this, but regardless of that knowledge there are still times when I’ll sit down to work on accomplishing goals and then the next thing I know, hours have passed and so many things are still left undone. How do I still manage to let the time slip away?

When I need to write, it seems like everything else is begging for my attention. I don’t know what it is, but everything else seems so much more interesting than using my brain to write a new blog post.

Seems like that’s the only time I actually feel like emptying out my inbox after months of letting both read and unread messages accumulate to an astronomical number.  It’s terrible, I know. It makes no sense.

When mindless activities like checking my email spam folder or compulsive stat checking become more interesting than writing, I know it’s time to do something.

At this point, you’re probably thinking…”therapy” or at least some other psycho analysis to prove that I’m safe to be around children, but I assure you, it’s just the evil procrastination demon trying to steal my success.

Well, I’ve got news for him, I’m not going to surrender that easily. I refuse to let the tempting allure of the internet keep me from the most important thing I must do for my blog.  Yes, it’s time to get off of the internet, exit out of the Reader, Twitter, Facebook and yes…exit out of the internet browser entirely.

When nothing else works to curb meaningless distractions that threaten to kill my blog, I have to totally shut down Firefox, Google Chrome or whatever other browser I might be using at the moment to avoid the temptation to check my email every time I get a notification.

I have to stop myself from rushing to respond to every tweet I see. Sometimes I have to slap my own hand whenever I get the urge to start reading every new blog update that pops into my reader (they always seem urgent until you read them).

It’s strange how the very activities that help me support my blog can become the very activities that threaten its survival. Social networking is wonderful, but if  social networking and promotional activities are allowed to get out of control, they’ll devour your whole day. It’s easy lose track of time and totally forget to write something new to promote. It can become a vicious cycle.

So until I get my writing for the day done, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to shut this thing down-…! (If I could reproduce that old tube television shutdown spark, I would paste that…here!)

So what do you do to force yourself to stay productive? How do you filter out all of the distractions?

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Get Off the Internet and Write!

Every spring, my wife and I survey the junk that has been deposited around our house and we begin to collect it all. Then we sell it at a yard sale for about five percent of what we originally invested in it. The financial loss is a necessary evil that gains us the benefit of restored order and neatness.

Blogs have a tendency to collect junk too. I’m not referring to the content so much as I am all the clutter that often surrounds it. Maybe it’s time to do some spring cleaning around your own blog, just to make sure your content is nicely showcased…

The Big Question to Ask: Why Is This Blog Here Anyway?

Before deleting anything in the design of your blog, re-focus. Answer the question of why you’re blogging. What’s the essence of your content? Whom do you intend to reach? And after answering these questions, conclude with what is essential to keep?

Start Deleting Junk

Begin the process of removing anything that distracts readers, clients, or consumers from the main thrust of your blog. For example…

• Ad spaces that haven’t been purchased after six months. (Take the hint.)
• Widgets that duplicate an effect, like having 3 or 4 blogging network widgets with the same visitor faces in each.
• Share buttons that never get clicked. If nobody ever shares your stuff on Newsvine or Mixx, why do you keep the buttons around?
• Webrings and click exchanges. These have been bad mojo for a decade now.
• Out of place graphics. Be careful not to over-design your blog. Making something look cool can be a distraction.
• While you’re at it, delete drafts you’ll never finish and spam comments too.

If your blog is too far gone, it may be time for a fresh re-design, but hopefully some simple deletions will give your blog a squeaky-clean feel. Give up your compulsion to collect blog junk and focus on producing great content that compels people to discuss and share.

photo credit (and it’s not my garage)

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Is It Time for Some Spring Cleaning Around Your Blog?

Unless you’re blogging purely for fun, there’s likely to be some kind of financial or compensatory motivation behind the writing. And even if you are just writing for fun, you’ll probably have some interest in monitoring readership statistics as the blog grows and changes.

It’s something of a philosophical concern, but it’s worth asking: is my blog a product or a service? If it’s a limited-run sort of a thing, and you don’t intend on supporting any of the content or moderating comments, then you your blog could be considered a product. But if you intend to continue publishing into the foreseeable future, and maintain the content and the community that forms around it, then your blogging enterprise really revolves around a service.

Why does this matter? It matters because if you think of your blog as a product when it’s really a service, you may find yourself ill-equipped to deal with the ongoing costs of serving your user base.

Service-oriented blogging affects frequency

I do my best to be real. And what’s real to me is that many blogs fail because the owner/publisher in charge doesn’t fully account for the cost of maintaining the service. Here’s an illustration of what I mean:

Blogger Alex runs some self-analysis and decides that the best times to write are evenings on three weekdays, and on Sunday mornings. Alex estimates that keeping to a 4 posts-per-week schedule will be enough to keep readers interested, and drive up traffic whilst making the most of downtime when creative energy is high.

However. What Alex doesn’t realise is that although individual posts might be considered products destined for a market of attention, really what’s on offer is a comprehensive service. A service that involves thoughtful research, inspiration management, the discipline of sticking to a reliable formula, ensuring a great technical delivery, and the positive touch of a human presence.

Ultimately Alex’s initial estimate of the time involved falls short of reality because all these other items need to be taken care of. What’s likely to happen is that Alex will feel some obligation to hit the original scheduling target and start working on the blog outside the “optimum hours” originally determined by careful self-inventory of “up” times and surplus attention.

The goal is to survive

When faced with the prospect of not hitting a frequency or coverage goal, it’s important to look at the big picture. The absolute most important thing in pursuing a professional or hobbyist blogging career is persistence. I like to say “existence contains persistence”, and this is particularly true of working to maintain a viable service as writer-publisher.

In the fictitious case of Alex, the best course of action is to take stock of the situation as it is, and not as it could or should be, and realise that a 1 post-per-week goal is a better way to use one of the four overall work sessions. The other three can be shared between additional service elements like research, delivery maintenance, customer contact, and business development.

If all this sounds rather clinical, consider that the best blogs are the ones run by people who handle their responsibilities well. It’s advisable to foster one’s ability to switch modes from romantic to professional, and realise that blogging is a rewarding but also quite rigorous personal discipline.

I wish you all the very best of luck.

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Is Your Blog a Product or a Service?

Interested in integrating Google Buzz into your blog? Google’s new social network does a great job of letting you encourage readers to share your blog’s content. Unfortunately, until it gets more popular Buzz might not be included in many of the social media button sets and plugins that are available for most blogging platforms. Luckily, with the right plugins, modules and extensions, you can help your readers share your posts through Buzz or even send your own Buzz updates right to your blog. Read on for some options to integrate Google Buzz into the blogging software you already use.

1. Adding a Google Buzz Button in Wordpress

One of the first things most people will want to see when using Google Buzz is an option to use buzz to easily share the content of your post. The good news is there are already a wide variety of options available for adding a Google Buzz button to Wordpress blog posts. Installation is just like any Wordpress plugin: all you need to do is upload the downloaded plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder on your server and then activate and customise it from your admin area.

2. Adding a Google Buzz Button in Blogger

If you are interested in adding a Buzz button to your Blogger posts, it will be slightly more complicated than the Wordpress option. Luckily, there’s an easy-to-understand and reasonably generic plugin that looks good available for Blogger hosted blogs. To install the plugin, you’ll need to copy a little bit of code and paste it into a specific place in your Blogger template, which means you can integrate Google Buzz in minutes!

3. Setting Up a Google Buzz Button in Joomla

One of the best things about Joomla is how easy it is to add a wide variety of extensions to customise how your Joomla site looks and functions. There’s no exception when it comes to integrating Google Buzz, with several options for integrated buttons and links that allow your readers to quickly and easily share your content with their followers in an intuitive manner.

4. Setting Up a Google Buzz Button in Drupal

The active development community around the open source Drupal content management system made it likely that a Google Buzz button would show up fast – and as predicted, it did. Drupal has a standard button integrated into the main package already, with plans to include a count feature in the near future.

5. Adding Google Buzz to Your Blog’s Sidebar

Giving your readers a way to use Google Buzz to share your content with friends is great, but it may also be useful to post your own Buzz feed on the sidebar of your blog or website to help build a sense of community and allow your readers to easily interact with you. While some of the content management systems listed in this post don’t offer this feature (at the time of writing), there are a few that are currently available for Joomla and an equivalent Wordpress plugin.

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5 Ways to Integrate Google Buzz With Your Blog

At various points of any worthwhile endeavor I’ve ever undertaken I get this nagging feeling. It’s sneaky and creeps up on me when I least expect it. It’s as if someone is whispering in my ear, probing me, asking questions, and spreading negative thoughts such as “what’s the point?” “you’re not going to make it…” “just quit…” “who really cares anyway…?”

Depending on how overwhelmed I am feeling at the moment, I may even entertain the thought for a few moments and then my stubborn resolve kicks in and talks some sense into me. Reminding me that I’ve come entirely too far to just quit, and the potential rewards are far too great to forfeit.

Have you ever felt this way about your blogging efforts? Do ever feel as if you’re running out of fuel to blog?

My advice is this, no matter what just don’t quit. Take a break and refuel if you must, but don’t give up. You never know when your day is going to come. Everyday puts you one more day closer to your goal. What if you were to quit today, and then you found out that the next day would’ve been your golden day?

What if the very next day after you closed all of your affiliate accounts was the very same day that all those visitors with those 90-day cookies returned to make purchases? What if the day after you shut down and deleted your blog was the day you discovered that several expensive requests for advertising on your site had been swirling around unread in your spam folder?

It’s these questions that give me the fuel I need to keep blogging. I can’t quit because I would always wonder what would have been if I had just kept on blogging. I’m certain that would drive me to insanity. So whenever I’m feeling a bit blogged-down (that’s way beyond being bogged-down) I find ways to refuel and re-engerize so that I can continue blogging.

Whenever you find yourself in this same rut, here’s what you can do:

• Brainstorm and research new issues brewing in your niche. Visit some forums and see what the recurring questions or problems are and consider new ways to solve them.
• Get ahead by writing at a time of day when you feel like writing and then write several posts at a time. It’s okay if they are imperfect, you can always go back and edit and add to them.
• Plan ahead. Decide on a sort of editorial plan for your week. It’s easier to write when you have a framing structure to go by. I try to divide up the various issues surrounding my niche and devote a separate day to each one so that I’m covering a variety of topics throughout the week. On most Mondays my readers can expect a link list post on WeBlogBetter and a post about marriage on Highly Favored. I wouldn’t be able to function if I didn’t know what type of post I needed to write ahead of time.
• Check your reader and review your subscriptions daily. I find that when I’m constantly reading other blogs related to my niche, it fuels my writing by providing me with a cue about what things I need to be writing about and which topics I need to stay away from. If I see too many bloggers writing on the same topics, if I can find an angle that hasn’t already been beaten to death, I avoid those topics altogether.
• Take a break. Take a day off. Take a nap. Take a load off. When I find that I’m stressed out, it really affects my ability to write effectively. I can’t concentrate and I often just end up procrastinating for hours anyway. Don’t force yourself to write, most likely what you’ll produce will be crap anyway. (or maybe that’s just me…)

Do what you need to keep going – you’ll thank yourself for it in the long run.

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5 Ways to Refuel Your Blogging Efforts

Buzz is a buzz word. Especially since Google adopted it. Of course, Yahoo might have adopted it first… awkward. This is not another post about Google Buzz, but the buzz about Google Buzz certainly illustrates what this article about buzz is buzzing all about…

According to Princeton’s online dictionary, “buzz” means…

• make a buzzing sound; “bees were buzzing around the hive”
• fly low; “Planes buzzed the crowds in the square”
• hum: be noisy with activity; “This office is buzzing with activity”
• sound of rapid vibration; “the buzz of a bumble bee”
• call with a buzzer; “he buzzed the servant”
• a confusion of activity and gossip; “the buzz of excitement was so great that a formal denial was issued”

It’s that last definition to which bloggers should pay special attention. Buzz can be “a confusion of activity and gossip.” For the sake of blogging’s delicate reputation, we’re going to assume that “gossip” is intended in the most positive of ways.

I recently stood in an airport check-in line for seven hours (because three inches of snow is apparently a lot in Atlanta) and I learned some things about the power of buzz that bloggers, at least those who have some message to promote, need to understand. There were over 1,000 people in line with me and it didn’t take long for opinions about the airline to spread.

Buzz Is Inevitable Among Human Beings

Our minds race too fast and our lips are far too loose for buzz not to happen. People, because they are people, are going to think. And when people think, people talk. Buzz can’t be stopped. It can rarely even be slowed down. When you write a post, you’re going to have to know in advance that buzz just happens. Complain about it or harness it – your choice.

Buzz Is Spontaneous In Nature

If you’ve ever tried to start a rumor… you should probably talk to someone… but you know how difficult it is to do. Try not to start a rumor and you’ll be far more successful. In other words, buzz can be generated, but there is no foolproof way to get it going because the same people who think and talk do so of their own prerogative.

Buzz Is Better Contained than Controlled

When I was stuck in the airport line, I genuinely felt sorry for the employees of the airline who were working so hard to manage the crowd that day. They couldn’t control what people were thinking or saying, but they did put up ropes to get us into a straight and orderly line. Bloggers have the power to do this, to some degree, with publishing and social media platforms. Do remember though, some people still get out of line and others “cut,” which usually heightens the buzz!

Buzz Can Be Very, Very Good

Yes, buzz can be very, very bad also, but smart people will squeeze all the good they can out of it. Even when buzz is negative, a pro-active response can avert disaster and perhaps win the loyalty of the formerly disgruntled. When positive, buzz is the optimum marketing tool. It was around before blogs, the internet, the television, and even those ancient things we called newspapers.

Why does all of this matter for bloggers? Because we depend on buzz. Therefore, we can instigate it, propogate it, and even capitalize upon it. It’s not easy, especially since the art of generating and guiding buzz is an ever-changing discipline. But we can at least learn from the conversations and interactions that take place around us.

What do you think? Can buzz be powerful in the hands of a skilled content producer?

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What Is Buzz? And Why Should a Blogger Care?

I still very strongly believe that comments and conversation are absolutely best practices for blogging (with good moderation), but it does raise an interesting point about blogging / writing / marketing on the internet… everything is always changing.

A few years ago, Spencer Johnson wrote a great little book simply entitled Who Moved My Cheese?. An excerpt of the description summarizes the story well…

Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice–nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are “littlepeople,” mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It’s not just sustenance to them; it’s their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they’ve found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods–our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in–although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.

It’s a wonderful illustration of all of life, but I think it applies to the world of the internet and blogging. Our industry changes with the wind. New software platforms rise and fall. Blogging services come and go. The rules of search engine optimization are always in flux. And the web culture is an ocean with unpredictable currents beneath the surface, always ready to move us in some new direction.

Here’s the question… are you adaptable? Can your blog handle the future?

Google gets it, like it or not. They may make a mistake someday, but to this point, they’ve had enough of a handle on the web to see that people want to compute in a cloud, so with email, apps, collaboration, calendars and everything in between, they’re fulfilling those demands. Yahoo doesn’t get it, in my estimation. They’re still hoping someone will turn down a dead end street to arrive at Yahoo and stay there.

You’ve heard of “survival of the fittest.” It applies online too and your blog can become a momento rather quickly if you aren’t on guard and aware. This raises some important challenges for how we blog down the road:

• Be aware of web culture – become a student of the direction things are going.
• Decide if you’re going to go with the flow of technology or hold on to yesterday’s techniques in your cold dead hands. It was nice knowing you.
• Critique everything about your blog at all times: the design, the structure and layout, the conversational systems, the community management, and the voice of your writing.
• Adapt. Or go extinct.

The rate of change in our industry is accelerating and we’re either going to keep pace or perish. How do you see things shaping up? What are the trends we need to be aware of for this year and the next? Who are the people, companies, or apps to watch? And how do you adjust on the fly without losing your soul?

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Oh the Interwebs! Adapt or Go Extinct

We have come to define success in terms of avoiding failure, but what if we re-defined success in terms of learning from failure and growing thereby? We’ve talked this week at Fuel Your Blogging about success and failure – here’s a re-cap:

• Success Is Just Beyond Reach… Thankfully
• Have You Designed Your Lifestyle for Success Yet?
• How to Profit From Being One of the Pack
• Ten Reasons Your Blog May Be Destined for Failure

Today I’d like to make the scandalous assertion that maybe your blog needs to fail. I mean that in two ways. Perhaps your blog should fail if it doesn’t fit with your bigger purpose and plan. If your blog is getting in the way of what you feel you really need to be doing, then count the cost and decide if you should continue. Life changes sometimes.

But I would also assert that your blog might need to fail sometimes in order to accomplish two great goals. One is to point you in new directions and force you to experiment and get out of your comfort zone. Though the phrase is tired, sometimes you should be forced to think outside the box.

The other point behind failing, however, is that we learn from our mistakes. In the video in this post, I mention two good books I’ve read about failure. Derailed, by Tim Irwin talks about four well-known corporate leaders who were derailed while seemingly at the top of their game. It’s truly one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read in terms of its warning to us to avoid failure.

Tim talks about the matters of authenticity and self-management, humility, and courage. When leaders derail (or bloggers), it’s because we’ve allowed one or more of these characteristics to be compromised in our lives.

The second book, Failing Forward by John Maxwell talks about turning our mistakes into stepping stones that lead us to success. No great leader in history has ever arisen who couldn’t point back to a pivotal mistake from which they learned the hard lessons.

I want to encourage you to examine your blogging, and your entire life for that matter, and ask the question – is failure the end? Or is it just an opportunity to grow? Get started!

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Maybe Your Blog Needs to Fail

A lot of my spare time is spent reading different blogs, I do this to keep up with all of the relevant news to me, the latest opinions and trends, and sometimes just to be a little nosey. Often I see some really great new blogs appearing and I look forward to seeing what they will become, as they grow with content, readers, and contributors, but before you know it they have become stagnant and uncared for.

I believe this is due to the common misunderstanding that a blog will lead to overnight success and take little time to run, when a person is creating a new blog. So if you are in the thinking stages or even early days of creating your own blog, please read the following reasons why your blog may fail and what you can do to ensure its success.

A Lack of Confidence

Having a lack of confidence in your idea or ability has got to be the biggest killer for anything, not just blogs. Before you get started, you must be prepared to except a certain amount of knock backs and rejection. Not everyone will want to read what you have to say, and not everyone will agree with you, but you need to be ready to accept that we are all lucky enough to have our own individual personalities and opinions. If someone leaves you a bad comment, try to accept it as constructive criticism by learning from it.

A Lack of Patience

Accepting that your blog will take time before it becomes a success is also very important, and assuming it will be an overnight success will also be the downfall of your blog. The greatest blogs are those that never intended to be successful, they were created by authors who have a genuine love for their blog topic.

Not Fully Understanding What a Blog Actually Is

There is a massive difference between a blog and a website, but this is also an unknown fact and a major stumbling block for many people. Blog stands for web log, and if you want to create a place which will act as an online diary for your niche subject and you plan to update it frequently, then a blog is the right tool for you. However, if you are wanting to create something much more static and formal, where people can either learn more about your services as a business, or purchase goods from you, then a website would be much better suited.

Not Enjoying Your Niche

You can really tell when someone has a real passion for what they are talking or writing about, and if you do not, well it will come across in the content of your blog posts. If you do not enjoy what you are writing about, you will find it much harder to overcome point one and two from above.

Cluttering Your Blog

This can be a problem which is much harder for you to detect for yourself and avoid. As we blog about our subject we are creating a wealth of information, but it can also be very easy to keep adding little bits here and there to our sidebar when we have enjoyed a certain blog post more than others, or found some really cool news that you believe everyone must know about. Adding too much information to your sidebar can make your blog look untidy and not very user friendly. Stick to a golden rule which I discovered the hard way, by keeping your blog nice and simple.

Unrealistic Traffic Expectations

As I mentioned above, your blog is going to take time and will not be an overnight success. You will not receive boat loads of traffic as soon as you publish your first post, it will take time, commitment, and perseverance before your blog is receiving loads of traffic. Try not to become too down hearted about this, knowing and accepting that your blog is going to take time before it becomes successful is half of your battle won already.

Failure To Highlight Your Best Content

You should really consider placing a list of your most popular blog articles in your sidebar. It is quite common practice to do this and a lot of people will look for this feature when landing on your blog. Allowing people to see what the current buzz is all about on your blog can work really well by diverting people to active blog posts, where they can join in on discussions.

Failure to Know Your Readers

You should analyse your traffic and really get to know your reader, discover what they like reading and what they do not like reading. This is an important time to also mention a key point about your content and who you are writing for. Always remember that you are writing for a human and not a search engine. By trying to make your content overly search engine friendly, you could make it hard to read, drawn out and basically very boring to the average human.

Failing to Get to the Point

There is a famous saying “quality is much greater than quantity” and this saying is also very true when it comes to blogging. By assuming that your blog posts all need to be a mile long, you’ll be prompted to stuff your post with content which is not really needed. Do not beat around the bush, just get straight to that juicy bit of information which you are blogging about.

Failure to Plan

We plan for almost everything we do in our lives in some way or another. Creating a blog is no different and creating your plan should be your starting point, do not just go with the flow and see how this blogging thing turns out. Ask yourself, why are you creating a blog? , What is its purpose?, How do you see your blog developing in the future? Etc. Try to create a short term plan as well as a long term plan, and do not overly worry if your long term plan changes as plans always do.

I hope the reasons above will help you to achieve your dream of becoming a fantastic blogger. The only other thing which could lead you to blogging failure is if you forget to use this blog post and all of its blogging tips!

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Ten Reasons Your Blog May Be Destined for Failure

That’s all great. You might still be a loner, though.

Bloggers tend to forget about the many ways they can interact with the online community. Sometimes that forgetfulness ends up being the detriment of what the bloggers are trying to accomplish. It’s hard to achieve the popularity and acclaim of big-name bloggers you admire if they don’t even know who you are. It’s even harder to get clients from your blogging if you don’t know much about who they are or your competition.

Being a lone wolf sounds appealing – you want to make it on your own, after all, and show you’re independent. You want to climb the latter and not ride on anyone’s coattails. Or maybe you’re just shy, or feel like you shouldn’t ask anyone for anything.

But that lone wolf mentality may not be so attractive after you consider what being part of the pack can do for you. Check out these possibilities:

Get More Clients by Offering More Services

Let’s say your blog offers consulting services. You’ve been consulting for awhile, and you realize that the vast majority of your clients come to you with certain other needs as well. If you do business consulting, for example, it’s pretty likely that nearly all your clients need an accountant. If you’re into marketing, most of your clients will need some design work at some point.

Now, you probably don’t offer those extra-request services, and you don’t have to. What you might consider doing is looking around for another blogger whose work you enjoy, and who offers the services you need.

You know what your clients’ usual price range may be. You know what they need. And you know they’ll want to work with someone they like. If they like you, they’ll probably like the people you like as well. By combining your services with that of another blogger, both of you increase your potential clients – and probably your sales, too.

Get More Eyes on Your Blog with a Joint Venture

There are lots of bloggers with bigger audiences than yours. They enjoy popularity, they get invited to conferences, and they make more money than you do. They’re still just people.

And because they’re busy people, they don’t have a lot of time on their hands to come up with and develop new projects. If you can suggest a joint venture that fits in perfectly with their objectives, it’s very likely that they’ll take you up on it.

What does that do for you? It means that suddenly their audience is your audience.

Those people that hang on this popular blogger’s every word and offer are going to start paying attention to you and your blog. They’re probably going to assume you’re pretty cool, or else this popular blogger wouldn’t be doing a joint venture with you. And they’ll probably look at what you have, because they might want some of it.

They’ll check out your blog. They’ll check out the stuff you have for sale. They’ll check out the services you offer. And if they like what they see, they’ll take you up on it.

Increase Your Visibility as a Guest Blogger

You’ve probably heard that a good way to get more visitors to your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. That’s absolutely true. The trouble with commenting on blogs is that the people who see you are just other commentators. They scroll down to comment and happen to catch what you have to say and click the link to your blog.

A lot of people don’t comment on blogs, though, especially not the bigger ones. Consider that one well-known blog has over a million readers but that any given blog post has only about a hundred commentators. That’s an awful lot of people who are reading and who aren’t commenting!

Start guest posting. A guest post means that hundreds, thousands or even millions of readers read what you have to say. If they like it, they’ll go over to your blog for more of it. How to you get a guest post gig? Ask around. Even the big blogs need good writers to fill in the gaps. They’ll probably ask to see the post first and won’t promise to use it, but that’s a small risk for a very large return on potential new readers.

So there you have three great reasons to stop being a lone wolf and start making blogging friends online. Pick one that suits what you’re looking to accomplish and get going!

About the Author: For more great wolf-pack tips that work, check out James’ blog at Men with Pens. We don’t bite – promise.

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How to Profit from Being One of the Pack

Scrat’s plight reminds me of the chase for success. Some people are content to simply survive, but in some of us, there is an intense desire for more than survival – we want to be successful and significant. But as John Maxwell says, “Success is a moving target!”

When it comes to the blogging industry, success has a variety of definitions. We measure it in terms of traffic, followers, subscribers and readers, or income and revenue. Personally, I define success in blogging more in terms of reach or influence than dollars and pageviews, but no matter how you define success, it’s always a little bit elusive. It remains just beyond reach, like Scrat’s acorn.

The bittersweet truth about this moving target of success is that we will never quite arrive. We talk about the “pinnacle” of success, but I don’t believe any pinnacle exists. We’re always on a continuous journey. There are always better articles to write, new readers to reach, more connections to be made, and more conversations to be had.

It’s bitter in that it keeps us chasing, often exhausted in our pursuit of a target never quite achievable. But it’s sweet in that this elusiveness is what keeps us chasing, and it’s the chase that defines us.

Over the next few days you’ll see several posts here at Fuel Your Blogging about the subjects of success and failure from some talented guest authors. I simply want to challenge you to keep chasing. Keep reading, studying, connecting, writing, trying, improving, and reaching for the ever-elusive pinnacle of success.

lancehankins

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Success Is Just Beyond Reach… Thankfully