Blog Exercises: Building Blogger Relationships

During many of these Blog Exercises I’ve talked about the power of linking across the web, especially with bloggers. This blog exercise is dedicated to helping you make the connection you want and need come true. Do you have a blogging mentor, a blogger you wish to get to know better, feel a connection with, […]

Blog Community Building Starts With Two

10 Things about Making Room for a Community by Liz Strauss of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers is a fabulous step-by-step list for community building, on your blog and otherwise. Liz begins by pointing out that a “community of like-minded thinkers” began with two. This is really important. When we think of a community, we often […]

Blog Building: Who Controls Your Blog? You? Your Host?

Do You Own Your Website? by Healthy Web Design takes a good look at the hidden pain and suffering and control that comes from choosing a cheap web host for your blog compared to making a conscious business decision on how to host your blog. It’s true, companies such as Yahoo!, SiteBuilder, and Homestead offer […]

Building Your Blogging Audience One Reader at a Time

8 Steps to Growing Your Blog Community One Person At a Time by Ben Yoskovitz is a great step-by-step approach to helping you build a relationship with your readers and audience, one reader at a time. In the first three tips, Yoskovitz points out comments as the top of the list way to encourage your […]

Web Zero: Building Relationships With Your Blog

Blogopreneur’s “3 reasons why 30 blog visitors are better than 300 website visitors” takes a good look at why quality matters over quantity. When people think about online marketing – the first things that come up to mind is contextual ad system, affiliate links and selling your products online. Its true, blogs may not be […]

Read Brian Bailey’s Building a Better Blog Now

Wow! Leaving It Behind’s Brian Bailey wrote “Building a Better Blog” and I applaud it. Do not underestimate the power of Google as you raise your site’s traffic. As you’re content grows and your posts are linked to or commented on, search engines will bring more and more visitors. Google in particular seems to highly […]

Blog Exercises: Define Your Community

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to start building a community around your blog. If you have one, it’s time to re-evaluate it to ensure you keep it. We will start with defining your community. Your blog topic should give you a clear indication about demographics of your online community, but it might not […]

Presentation: Blog Your Passion

The following are the presentations notes for my workshop called “Blogging Your Passion” at Making it in Changing Times in 2015. In 2010 I was in Chicago for SOBCon, the Successful Online Business Conference, and I had an amazing encounter with a woman on the crowded downtown streets: …I was storming away from the last […]

Your Blog is Your Business Card

The following are the notes for my popular workshop “Your Blog is Your Business Card”. The premise is that today’s business card can’t hold all the contact information necessary to connect adequately with potential clients, but the blog can. It is the holder of your contact information and online identity. The workshop covers the philosophy […]

Blog Exercises: Why We Dig

In the October issue of The Christian Science Monitor, I found this from John Yemma, Monitor Editor: Why we dig, and what we may find Sometimes a portal opens into the world of legend. A stone is rolled away from an Egyptian tomb revealing a 3,300 year old Pharaoh’s power and wealth. A Roman city […]

Blog Exercises: Where You Came From

Inspired by these blog exercises, Janet Williams of Janet’s Notebook has been taking her readers on a journey back through time and space, exploring her family’s Chinese heritage from her little corner of the south of England. Her “Letters from China” have evolved from a few posts to an entire series, and eventually, I hope, […]

Blog Exercises: When You Assume…

One of the class projects for my WordPress college course involved the students working together on a single broken post to find all the errors in the content. Typically, this is a quick test of their basic coding skills, but this quarter’s students are not typical. They are exceptional. The goal was to identify and […]

Blog Exercises: Current Events for October and November – Interview

Due to the computer crash and trauma lately, October and November Blog Exercises for Current events is combined. In my college courses, one of the student assignments is to interview someone within the WordPress Community. The WordPress Community is a broad field of participants and activists, from users to professionals building their career on the […]

Blog Exercises: Learning From a Mentor Makes You Better

“What One of the World’s Great Novelists Learned About Writing from David Ogilvy” on Copyblogger tells the story of how famous author Salman Rushdie learned copywriting and writing in general from another great copywriter, David Ogilvy. Imagine it’s your job to convey the taste of a chocolate bar in just one word. And by the […]

Blog Exercises: A Link List Post to Dazzle Readers

In blog exercises on making lists and making your lists pretty, we worked on the links, understanding how they work and formatting your styles. In this blog exercise, I want to focus on the content within those links, the real reason people love those link lists. I’d like to cite my friends at Daily Blog […]