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1.5 Indie’s Advice

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Interview with Indie
His Blog: The Synchronicity of Indeterminacy
URL: indeterminacy.blogspot.com
Thing to note when you visit: the interactivity; the connection between Indie and his readers; the quality of the content; the special features and unique ideas

1.5 Indie’s Advice

Indie

We all have bad days we remember, blogging blunders–little or big–mistakes we wished never happened. At the time, they seemed huge and over time they became history. Indie talked about his blogging experiences–his mistakes, what he hopes to do, advice he got, and the advice he would give.

What do you think was the biggest mistake that you made?

The biggest mistake I made was posting a photo which I didn’t think worked well. But I won’t tell which one that was. Maybe someday I’ll go in and quietly replace it.

What change made the greatest improvement? What was the best advice you got?

The greatest improvement I made was based on feedback I received from one of the bloggers who found and supported me in my first months: Robyn Moondancer. She has since stopped blogging and is seldom in the Internet. She was the one who thought it would work if I started the weekend stories in which the visitors write the stories to the photo I post. At first I was skeptical. I thought people wouldn’t want to contribute; they would feel that they were competing with me or I with them. But it went over quite well, and some of my readers say it’s one of the things they like best about the blog.

In general, whenever I want to change something, I write to one of the people who visit my blog regularly. I feel that I am doing the blog in part for them as well as for myself. I value the feedback I receive and usually do what it tells me.

What do you wish you could do for your blog?

I need to spend time organizing my links. Over the last year I’ve come across many blogs and websites that I’ve found were creative and interesting. They deserved to be known about. This resulted over time in a long list of links. In the future I want to organize these in thematic sections so that anyone following a whim of what he/she would like to read next can benefit from what I’ve found.

What advice would you give a beginner?

I started by reading the documentation at Blogspot about how to blog and how to promote one’s blog. At the time I don’t think there was a definitive blog like Successful Blog, devoted to the idea of how to blog successfully. It’s still probably a good idea to read through the documentation at Blogspot, but I would now recommend following successful-blog.com.

I’d also advise beginning bloggers not to be discouraged when they do not receive a lot of visitors right off. It takes a while to build an audience.

Last but not least, be yourself. Don’t try to be something at your blog that you are not. Believe in what you blog about. Do not blog what you think other people want to hear, when it’s not “you.” Blog what you would want to read yourself, if you were the one visiting.

Anything else you think all bloggers should know? [Read more…]

Creating Reader Evangelists

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From Book to Reality

Last year, I read Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell’s book, Creating Customer Evangelists–a business bestseller. The concept, touted as a breakthrough, was really common sense. It seemed like a breakthrough because most businesses weren’t doing what it said–taking advantage of the fact that some customers are plain crazy about them. What Huba and McConnell explained was how to capture that enthusiasm and channel it for the company’s benefit.

We have our blog fans, our daily readers–the folks who think we hung the moon. They are the part of our audience closest to us. They are influencers–people who can change minds and influence others to see our blog the way they do. They’re a natural bridge to get the word out to other readers. How can we tap into the way they feel about us? How can we make it easy for them to share their excitement with others?

At his site, Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel has thoroughly covered this subject for us. He’s taken Huba and McConnell’s thinking and translated it for use in the blogging world. I’ve brought you a taste.

Steve offers six blogging points that echo the six points in the book. Since Rubel writes for a marketing/business audience, I’ve slightly edited his words and added my comments in italics after each.

    1. Use your blog to solicit feedback from your readers and then act on it. It makes total sense. If you want to engage your evangelists you have to be engaged yourself.

    2. Blog your best ideas. The thought here is not to hoard your best ideas. Get them out there. Let your evangelists use them too. They’ll come back to you ten-fold.

    3. Find, listen, engage, and empower your blogging influencers. Everyone wants to feel a part of something bigger than they are. Let your influencers be a part of what you do in every way that you can. Encourage participation. The more they feel they belong, the more they will bring friends along.

    4. Blog with a higher, holy calling. If you have a passion about what you’re doing, other’s will at least pay attention. Many will become passionate too.

    5. Blog away trinkets, credit, and links. Be generous of mind and of spirit. People remember and respect generosity. It’s a statement of character. It also gets their attention.

    6. Show your readers that you’re their greatest fan. Anything I add would be redundant.

Steve also provides links for more articles he recommends. This button will take you to Steve’s article, “Creating Customer Evangelists” from October 20, 2005.

This is one of the best I’ve seen on the web. Read it. Print it. Keep it. But before you go . . . leave me a comment too.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

1.3 Audience Synchroncity

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Interview with Indie
His Blog: The Synchronicity of Indeterminacy
URL: indeterminacy.blogspot.com
His audience: persons from all walks of life who like to read quality fiction–bloggers, high school and college students, people in the creative arts, and people who work with language in their jobs–his blogroll reflects his audience
Thing to note when you visit: the interactivity; the connection between Indie and his readers; the quality of the content; the special features and unique ideas

1.3 Audience Synchronicity

1.3 Audience

Indie has two English-language blogs and a Polish-language blog. Click the screen shot to see his satellite blog–Indeterminacies of Synchronicity. It’s this second blog that provides the venue for the feature that engages his audience in writing their own flash fiction stories each week. Each story posted there is rewarded with a link. The Polish-language blog offers translations of selected stories for a smaller segment of his audience.

Indie’s respect for his readers shows whenever he talks to or about them.

Indie, who is your audience?

I’ve been greatly surprised by the type of people reading my blog. In a nutshell I think of them as the blogging elite. I’ve received feedback from artists, musicians, authors, editors, stand-up comics, company CEO’s, psychotherapists, lawyers, professors and other high level professionals, many of them authors of intelligent blogs themselves. This is, for me, another sign of success. Not too long ago I noticed I had some referrals from an online university class in which the professor asked the students to analyze a flash fiction story of their choosing. He had included my URL as an example of flash fiction, a genre which I incidentally knew nothing about until long into the existence of my blog.

All this attention has been especially gratifying, but also intimidating. I hope I am able to keep up whatever it is that caught their interest.

How do your readers find out about you?

People have found me by accident, through links, random referrals, by word of mouth, using search engines and probably other ways I can’t imagine. I followed all the instructions for promoting one’s blog. I entered myself in all the directories and search engines, I use several traffic exchange programs, I comment at other blogs I find interesting (though these days I have hardly any time left for reading other blogs), I have a description and keywords list included in my blog template, which probably helps improve my search rank for various terms. Lately I’ve been presenting my blog at Blog Explosion’s blog battles. Also, many visitors seem to show up through image searches, which probably goes with the territory of having so many photo posts.

What do they like best about your site?

According to the feedback I receive, people like the idea of what I’m doing (pairing found photos with stories), even if they do not enjoy my writing. Others seem enthusiastic about the pace at which I post stories (five a week at the moment), as well as enjoying the stories. Others enjoy the interactivity or the fact that I try to answer all my comments. On weekends I post a photo without a story and invite my visitors to contribute their own story. I then post my take on the photo the Monday after. Those stories have all been collected at the companion blog indeterminacies.blogspot.com, including links to their respective authors. A few bloggers have been kind enough to write reviews about my project. I’ve linked to them on my front page, and would refer you to these for a feeling about what other people see in my blog.

Indie’s audience is made up of blogger readers from all walks of life. They could be the same people who read our blogs. It’s hard to miss Indie’s connection with his readers. I suspect that even with the great photos, stories, interactivity, and sense of community that the biggest attraction for readers is Indie.

What brings readers to your blog?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

1.2 Indeterminacy of Purpose

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Interview with Indie
His Blog: The Synchronicity of Indeterminacy
URL: indeterminacy.blogspot.com
His initial purpose: to match photos with short fiction in a writer’s photo blog
Thing to note when you visit: the interactivity; the connection between Indie and his readers; the quality of the content; the special features and unique ideas

Indeterminacy of Purpose

1.2 Purpose

Every one of us was a new blogger once. One day we’d never heard of a blog. The next day we had. That was the beginning.

In this part of the conversation, Indie shares how he decided to start a blog and determined what it’s form and purpose would be.

Indie, what made you start the blog? How did you decide on its purpose?

I first found out that blogs existed early in 2004 and had a vague wish to start my own. But I was uncertain as to what it could be. I thought the world could do without another online diary. At the same time I discovered the phenomenon of finding photos via file sharing programs. By summer I had further vague ideas of starting perhaps a photo blog with my own photography, or perhaps a short story, novella, or even a novel built around a series of photographs I had found via p2p. I’d written a few short stories before, but writing had never been a major part of my life. In fact, writing had always been such a painstaking process to me, I could not imagine writing anything longer than a few pages. Despite the verbose answers I am giving here, brevity of expression is one of the concepts I admire most.

My catalyst for beginning the blog was stumbling upon the site 10eastern.com, which had received lots of attention for it’s gallery presentations of found photos, as selected by the site’s proprietor. Until then I was skeptical about the acceptance of a blog which used found photos–photos which were sometimes unintentionally shared.

I greatly admire the stories of John Cage written for his Indeterminacy project, and all of a sudden I realized that the best way for me to do my project was not with a long story wrapped around a series of photographs, but daily one-minute short stories in the form and perhaps style of John Cage’s stories. I believed it would be possible for anyone to have at least one good idea per day. That’s how it all fell into place.

Blogging can keep us so involved day to day, that we forget to stop to see where we are. There was a reason we each started blogging. How has that purpose changed over time? Is our purpose still our guide, or have we lost sight of it?

Knowing the purpose of my blog makes it easier to make decisions about what belongs and what does not. I want to keep enough focus so that when readers return, they’ll know they’re on familiar ground.

My personal blog’s purpose is to offer readers a place to get away from the world, share a few stories, and wonder about things. What’s the purpose of your blog?

Like the bloggers who blog them, every blog needs a purpose in life.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Building Readership: Community Participation

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Guest Writer: Hanni Ross

As recently discussed, community participation is a great way of building traffic to your weblog. Scrivs mentioned commenting on other weblogs as a way of getting your voice out there, and another post offers a great list of starting tips on building traffic. The key message from those two articles is community participation. The more you give to the community the more you can expect to get back. You might wonder where to start, well, that’s where we come in.

Say you’ve just written an article that you’re particularly proud of, how do you get it out there?

  • If you were inspired by another blog post then send a trackback/pingback (for a good explanation of trackback see here). This not only makes the original author aware of your post it also generates a link to your post on their site. Like-minded readers will therefore discover your post and who knows, they might feel the need to write a response or even to link to it from their own weblog.
  • Email the article to a few of your friends and cohorts. They might like it and also feel moved to write a response or to link to it. You have to be very careful on this one though, you can easily lose credit by appearing to “spam” your peers with your work.
  • Participate fully in any discussion that might happen in the
    comment section. Show your readers that you value their input and make your site a nice place to visit.

More generally, how can you gain community-wide recognition?

  • Say, for example, your weblog is primarily about cats. If you happen to frequent any cat forums on the web add your weblog’s URL into the signature. Similarly, if you are a member of any
    relevant mailing lists then it couldn’t hurt to add your URL to your signature.
  • Again participation in any resources on your weblog’s topic can only do you good. Get your name out there as someone who knows what they’re talking about. Think carefully before you write on any discussion boards or mailing lists – anything you write in a moment of madness might come back to haunt you…
  • If you do happen to write a column or just occasional articles for other websites then ensure to include your URL in your author bio. If you have built up a reputation elsewhere then there’s no reason why you can’t use it to show people that you’re channelling your efforts into a weblog too.
  • If you have expertise then share it. If you have a gardening background for example and therefore know more about caring for house plants than most then share your tips. Make yourself an indispensable resource.
  • Hunt around for any relevant directory sites and ensure that you’re included, that way people coming to your site are more likely to be those who will stick around as they are interested in your
    subject matter.

It’s important to communicate your energy, enthusiasm and ideas to others to make yourself known. Good luck!

We’re building up a catalog of tips here at Successful Blog, if you have any you’d like to share then don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments.

10 + 1 Qualities of Bloggers and Our Readers

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First there were bulletin boards. Over time they became forums and then chat rooms. Web sites were born and were gathered into portals. Each of them uses the magic of the Internet in a slightly different way. None of them quite captures the personality and creativity of so many individuals as blogging.

What is it about blogging that makes it so addictive both to bloggers and our readers? What am I talking about? Pete Blackshaw of Intelliseek explains it in his ClickZ article Ten Simple Rules for Dating a Blogger. I’ve used his rules to derive ten blogger descriptions. Do you see yourself in them?

  • Bloggers are always clicking. We see and report everything with amazing clarity.
  • Bloggers are never one. We are part of a social network. We love sharing information.
  • Bloggers are almost chameleons. The world of blogging is flexible and agile. Great bloggers are too. That’s how we’re creeping into all kinds of online publishing.
  • Bloggers love to disrupt the status quo. We live by doing things better, faster, cheaper. We have WAY MORE personality than our webmaster counterparts. It shows up in how we write and in what we like to read.
  • Not all bloggers are on the up and up. In fact spam and advertorial content is what some slimy bloggers are really about. Successful bloggers don’t need them.
  • Bloggers have their addictions and temptations. We are involved with Search Engine Optimization. We can’t quit checking ad program words. We are crazy copy generators. We are constantly checking links and statistics. . . . Excuse me for a minute. (If you don’t know what those things are, that’s why we’re putting together a Blogger’s Survival Kit.)
  • Bloggers live for our bloggy “big breaks.” It might take time, but our position changes. The first notice by a big search engine, the first trend search that shows up on Blog Pulse, the first page ranking at Google–these are our academy awards. We know not to expect our nonblogging friends to understand it.
  • Bloggers don’t tolerate imposters. If someone we trust has steered us wrong, you can bet we’re long gone. . . . and possibly blogging about it.
  • Bloggers think in lists. We list early and often. We know that lists are key to keeping information moving fast and furiously.
  • Bloggers like to have our say or we wouldn’t be blogging.

and I added this one

  • Successful bloggers know what we’re blogging about and who we’re blogging for.

So there they are 10+1 Qualities of Bloggers and Our Readers. Know any others I should add to the list? How do we use this information to make our blogs more enticing to our blogger-readers?

–ME “Liz” Strauss