“Don’t Go It Alone: Relationship-building for Bloggers” plus 1 more |  |
| Don’t Go It Alone: Relationship-building for Bloggers Posted: 10 Feb 2011 11:01 AM PST This guest post is by Jane Sheeba of Find All Answers. Let’s get it straight. Blogging is not a standalone job. You cannot blog in a space that doesn’t exist and to a group of virtual people. You need people—yes, living human beings, not just pairs of eyeballs—to read your You don’t just need people to read what you write; you need people to:
So you need people in the blogosphere. Period. Blogging has evolved so far, so strongly, and in an awesome way because of relationships. Just imagine the number of people who hunt blogs for information these days. A big number is just on and around blogs. So you need to make good use of that number. Let me give you three tips (surely the not-so-trivial kind) to get along with people in the blogging world. 1. CommentCommenting—not spamming, but giving out your genuine thoughts and views about a particular blog post—will help you to develop an excellent relationship with the author of the article. Everyone knows this. So how can you comment to build relationships (apart from links) effectively? Reach out to growing bloggers and to those bloggers who are in the same stage as you in their blogging journey. Every comment you make on your favorite A-lister’s blog will indeed help you make friends, attract new visitors, and sometimes even attract subscribers. This is conventional wisdom. My suggestion is to make a habit of commenting in the not-so-big, yet growing blogs (apart from the A-list blogs that are your favorites and those you comment for link-building purposes). Spend some time to find out a handful of blogs in your niche that are just growing, and comment in them in a consistent and useful way. Your first friend will be the blogger, of course. And he or she will return the favor. You become blogging buddies and comment on each others’ posts regularly. Here’s what you can do after that:
2. Guest postGuest posting is great for link building and for traffic—quite true. But how about guest posting for developing strong relationships? Among various other benefits of guest posting, developing relationships with others is one of the main benefits. How can you achieve that? Again, aim not only for the A-list, but go for the growing blogs. This time you need to filter a bit more. Find out blogs that are doing great with readers and comments, and simply forget about the PR for this moment (I say this because I personally know and follow many blogs that have excellent content, and a great number of loyal readers and fans, but the blog’s page rank is 0). Write a very useful post (you know that!) and close it by opening the topic up for a discussion. Given that the blog has decent number of readers who comment, a call to action should work great. Now it’s your turn to build relationships. Make it a point to respond to every comment in your guest post. But go further. Encourage discussions in the comments. And give out additional tips and secrets in replies to the commenters. Tip: Look for CommentLuv-enabled blogs. They normally have good number of people who comment.
Checking the box will display the recent post. If you have registered your blog at the ComLuv website, you can choose to display any one of the ten most recent posts. That ‘s not all. You also have a search option at ComLuv website. You can search for CommentLuv-enabled blogs in your niche by entering appropriate keywords. Download CommentLuv plugin here, and register your blog at comluv.com. 3. LinkingWrite round-up posts on your blog that link to other posts. Do this periodically: once in a week or two, write a round-up post. This time, you need to aim only for the big players: A-list blogs. Your post can be centered around one post from a particular A-list blog, or a collection of posts from different blogs with either the same or different topics. You can follow any or all of the following strategies:
You have got to try it and see. You will get a lot of exposure, friends—and loyal readers. The bottom line? You cannot blog alone. You need the support of nice people to blog successfully. Don’t just be obsessed with SEO and link building; rather, seek to develop true and long-lasting relationships. Just ask this to yourself: “Why do I blog?” There can be many answers, but this will be surely one of your answers: “to create relationships with others.” Unless you’re writing a blog that’s entirely private, you blog for relationships. You write for people—your friends, your students, your clients, your community, your gender, or people with particular interest or issues. So make the most of those relationships. What methods do you adopt to develop blogging relationships? And what works best for you? Jane writes on Blogging Tips, Relationships and Self Improvement at Find All Answers, a multi-niche blog. You can grab two ebooks titled “Problogging for Newbies” and “Your guide to Better Time Management” freely by subscribing to her blog. Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips Don't Go It Alone: Relationship-building for Bloggers     |
| Monthly Trends + How to Instantly Triple Your Post Ideas Posted: 10 Feb 2011 05:05 AM PST For many bloggers, coming up with ideas for great posts is one of the biggest challenges. The good news is that if you have an idea for one post that will appeal to your readership, odds are, you have at least one more. How so? By covering a story from a different angle. Every time you write a post, you determine the angle you'll take—even if you're not consciously doing so. Just as taking a photograph from a different angle can yield very different results (imagine a photo taken from the base of a large tree, a photo taken from the top of the same tree, and a close-up shot of an individual leaf), covering a story from a different angle can give your readers a brand-new experience, even if you've covered a topic before. As always, Regator has calculated the ten most-blogged-about stories of the last month, and we'll be using posts about those popular stories to demonstrate the power of choosing the right angle. (The blogosphere trends for the month of January 2011, in order, were: Egypt, State of the Union, Golden Globes, Verizon iPhone, Gabrielle Giffords, Super Bowl, Martin Luther King Jr, Sundance Film Festival, Flooding, and Consumer Electronics Show.) Here are some tips on finding the right angle for your next post, along with examples showing how a few bloggers used unexpected angles to put a new spin on these oft-covered topics… and, more importantly, how you can use similar ways of thinking to turn a trickle of post ideas into a flood. 1. Narrow down a broad story by choosing one elementThe top story for the month is, of course, Egypt. While it is valuable for us to hear the general details, it's not valuable for every blogger to provide the same information. To find an angle that would provide unique content to its readers, Threat Level first narrowed the story down to one aspect: the shutting down of Egypt's Internet access. Still, plenty of bloggers were writing about that, so they went even further by focusing on just one aspect of the shutdown: how it was actually achieved by those in power. Because of this very specific angle, the resulting post, Egypt Shut Down Its Series of Tubes With a Series of Phone Calls, is interesting and stands out amidst the crowd. A story doesn't need to be as massive as the Egyptian revolution for this tactic to work. Try taking the subject of your next post and narrowing it down. Then, if you can, take that and narrow it down again. 2. Find the right angle for your nicheA story like President Obama's State of the Union address may seem like a political story—and it is—but it's not limited political bloggers. Smart Politics is a political blog but the angle it chose to cover this story would work just as well for a linguistics or psychology blog. The post, Obama’s SOTU: Uniting the Country…through Pronouns?, is a fascinating examination of the President's use of pronouns as a unifying device. The next time you think, "That's a really interesting story but it doesn't fit into my blog," ask yourself if there's any element to the story or angle you could take that might make it a great fit for readers in your niche. You might be surprised. 3. Look for trendsAnalyzing a story for patterns or trends is another way to find an angle. There was no doubt that celebrity fashion blog, Go Fug Yourself, was going to cover the Golden Globes from a fashion perspective, but by finding a red-carpet trend, its post, Golden Globes Trend Carpet: Best/Worst Green, not only gave readers the gossip on the awards ceremony but also advised its fashion-conscious readership of an upcoming trend. See if you can find a legitimate pattern or trend in a story you're covering. Identifying trends before the rest of the blogosphere will help your blog become the place to go for those who want to be in-the-know. 4. Try a personal or emotional angleIt's no accident that every news organization features "human interest" along with its hard news. Stories involving emotions and struggles of everyday people are almost universally appealing. When writing about the launch of the Verizon iPhone, The Next Web's Verizon Throws Best Customers Under the Bus: Charges Them 3X for iPhone post focuses on the anger of a long-time Verizon customer. Try finding an emotional or personal angle in a post you're working on. 5. Focus on an interesting but seldom-covered aspect of the storyEvery story is made up of thousands of details. Slate: Press Box's Jared Loughner is ready for his photo op post analyzed a rarely talked about aspect of the man accused of shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several others: his mugshot and, more specifically, his baldness and the cultural implications of a shaved head. The uniqueness of this angle made the post a captivating read. Make a list of at least ten different aspects of a story that you're covering, then try to choose an unusual angle to create a distinct post that your readers won't find elsewhere. 6. Turn one story into three (or more) postsThere are countless ways to tell every story. The Business Insider's How To Bet On The Super Bowl – A Click-By-Click Guide chose to focus on betting. Other blogs talked about uniform choice, psychological preparation of the players, Super Bowl party snacks, and many, many other facets of the game. If a story is relevant to your readership, you need not limit yourself to just one post about it. If you can find several angles that each provide something unique and interesting, you can get several quality posts out of just one story. 7. Take an unexpected approachIn general, the more unexpected your angle, the more likely it is to be shared. I saw i09's Martin Luther King In Science Fiction passed around Facebook and Twitter more than any other individual post about Martin Luther King Jr Day. Now that may be because I'm friends with too many nerds, but I think it's actually because the angle was so unexpected. I'm not a big science fiction fan, but even I clicked on the link to see what the connection between King and sci fi was. I think it's important to surprise your readers now and then to keep them engaged. The unexpected makes an impression. 8. Research the historical angle or backstory of an eventThe Daily Beast looked back at the Sundance Film Festival and found that many of this year's Oscar nominees had started at the festival. The combination of finding a trend and researching historical data yielded the post Filmmakers Who Started At Sundance. There are myriad stories hiding in history. A bit of research might reveal an angle you never considered. 9. Remember that there are always more stories than you thinkWhen parts of Queensland, Australia, were affected by severe flooding, Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog combined several of the techniques we've talked about above in the post University of Queensland’s Equine Hospital Keeps Its Head Up Above the Flood. This intriguing post took a broad story and found a way to apply it to the blog's niche; it struck emotional chord with details of horses who'd worn their hooves down by swimming up to 30 hours to stay alive; it narrowed the story down first to horses affected by the flood, then to horses being cared for by a single veterinary hospital; and it took an unexpected and seldom-taken approach to flood coverage. 10. Write a story from someone else's perspectiveThis is one of the easiest ways to find an alternative angle, but it’s also one of the most effective. While most blogs were covering the Consumer Electronics Show from the perspective of attendees or companies presenting new products, Gadget Lab chose to post It Takes a Mountain of Shipping Crates to Make a Trade Show from the perspective of the organizers, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the massive conference. Consider covering a story from another party's perspective to provide a whole new story. Do you consider different angles when writing posts? Please share your thoughts in the comments! Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator, as well as an award-winning print journalist. Find her on Twitter @kimber_regator and visit Regator's widget site to get free widgets for your blog. Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips Monthly Trends + How to Instantly Triple Your Post Ideas     |
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