Yesterday I read a very useful article on problogger that gives you some tips for writing posts that will catch on with your users. I like it because it is simple, straightforward and really helps you realize what your blog is all about. It isn’t relevant to me as I have decided to put all my efforts in WP design work, but I suggest you give it a try:

1. Write something useful - my favourite
   
2. Write something unique
3. Write something newsworthy
4. Write something first
5. Write something that makes those who read it smarter
6. Write something controversial
7. Write something insightful
8. Write something that taps into a fear people have
9. Write something that helps people achieve
10. Write something that produces a response
11. Write something that gives a sense of belonging
12. Write something passionately
13. Write something that interprets or translates news for people
14. Write something inspirational
15. Write something that tells a story
16. Write something that solves a problem
17. Write something that gets a laugh
18. Write something that saves people time or money
19. Write something opinionated
20. Write something that is a resource
21. Write something about something ‘cool‘

It really is worth trying so don’t stop just by reading, take action and try it, I’m sure it will help your blog in many ways. But as always this isn’t just a magic pill for headaches of your blog as Bruce Simmons describes in a comment to Darren’s post:

If you don’t have a foothold in the SEO world, you are spinning your wheels.

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

21 Ways to Write Better Posts for Your Blog

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When I first stepped into the amazing world of blogging I had big expectations, probably like many of you out there. I thought that writing good content comes naturally and so do people that read your stuff – I was so wrong. Nowadays when life is moving faster than ever before, nobody wants to read long novels and listen to frustrations of people out there. Every click has to spur action, buying software online has become a practical joke and making money from blogging is not an easy job anymore….thus I’ll stay as short and descriptive as possible and give you some useful tips on how to stay positive when blogosphere reality hits you in your face:

5 tips to make blogging easier

1. Accept the fact that you probably won’t make any money from blogging, at least not in short-term.
2. Be passionate about the topic you’re blogging about.
3. Write in your native language !
4. Don’t give up and keep it going if you really love what you’re doing.
5. Be a celebrity

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

I’ll Tell You a Secret: Blogging is Tough!

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This is no advertising tip or anything like that, I just hate Cforms plugin. It is a good idea to have this kind of freedom with your own forms but it’s soooo slow. I’ve been using it for ages and it did serve me good, actually I thought it did. After deleting it my blogs speed jumped definitely more than 50%. If you have the same problem try WuFoo forms, I use free edition and it hasn’t let me down. My blogs speed is still the same and functionality got even better. The downturn is as always the price, but if you need just simple contact form for free, it’s in my opinion better than anything else out there.

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

Choose WuFoo Instead of Cforms Plugin

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As you probably know right know, blogging is hard business so don’t take anything for granted. Becoming a successful blogger is not as easy as many think so keeping focus on mainstream problems is very difficult. Thus I’ve done a short study to find out which are top ingredients that make a blog successful:

Content

What you type is still one of the most important things you do when you blog. Actually it is the most important of all four ingredients but still depends heavily on each one of them. The basic purpose of blogging is about its content so try to focus on your words and concentrate on quality.

Design

If you don’t have looks than your content makes no sense. Still, don’t mix great design with beautiful one as it’s not the same thing. Great design is also usable as beautiful may overlap good content.

Performance

Faster is better and with little errors as possible your site becomes a winner in not time. So how slow is still tolerable? If your initial load time for first time visitor doesn’t exceed 5-8 seconds on normal 1mbit connection than you’re OK. Still faster is better and faster you get better you are.

SEO

This ingredient is not at least important (as it’s placed on last place) moreover it is probably just behind great content. Of what use your blog is if nobody can read it? Thus optimizing your blog visibility to search engines is crucial if you want to spread your word to the masses.

Have to say that all ingredients are not worth anything if they don’t complement each other. Invest your time equally in all of them and you should be fine. Otherwise be a celebrity and none of this is important:)

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

4 Ingredients of Successful Blog

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Now that I’m two months in blogging I can say that starting a blog is no longer as easy as ABC. Abandoned blogs are becoming very common nowadays. There are millions of them, actually most of them get abandoned just after they were created.

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

Recent study indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, “representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned”.

Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that:

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.

Source: blog statistics and demographics

If you don’t want to end up being one of those, you should follow the right path to start a blog.

Blog services and platforms allow you to start a blog easily, but don’t let it distract you from doing the preliminary steps first. At the very least, know the ultimate outcome that you want and create a strategy.

Without knowing which destination you want to go exactly, it doesn’t matter which fork you take. In my opinion, a blog without a strategy is a big time waster.

You can read more about detailed steps into blogging from BlogBuildingU,…still I’ll enumerate some strategies that could be crucial if you want to attract as much audience as possible (still make sure you read a BlogBuildingU post – How to start a blog):

*

1. Start from a Social Network

This is the easiest and most effective way to build your online presence. I don’t have personal experiences from it but know from other ones success that it works. You can build your friends community and then easily transfer them to your blogging platform where you can more independently play with words.

2. Buy Another Blog

It’s not the cheapest way but it doesn’t force you to start from scratch. You already have an audience established on which you can build even further. But be carefull when buying a blog. It is like buying a business so overpay it only if it carries a good name with it (in my opinion every site should be valued for unique visits it receives).

3. Start from Blogging Network Service

It is cheap, fast and elegant way to start from. It has a big drawback, you loose your brand and become a subsidiary of your big daddy (wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal etc.). Still, you get the level of SEO you would accomplish after investing hundreds of $ into your own blog.

4. Build Your Own Blog

It is a strategy which most of us have picked. It is quite sadly that search engines  don’t like these kind of startups but you will need to work very hard to get somewhere. It is very difficult so prepare for a possible failure that is underway,…only strongest survive,…but those that survive will become the top bloggers out there.

5. Be a Celebrity:)

Not much to say,…if you’re a celebrity you probably accidently came to this post because blogs come to famous people and not vice versa;)

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

5 Strategies to Start a Blog

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If you watched a movie Batman begins (2005), you probably noticed when Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father tells him:

Thomas Wayne: And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.

It’s quite the same with blogging, if you take bizzartic.com for instance it’s not a fairy tail which I imagined but everytime I get depressed about it I tell to myself that one time it will pay off…I don’t give up that easily.

Here are 25 of lessons that Taylor Davidson has learned from failure:

1. Dither, dither, dither; plan, plan, plan.
Instead: Fail fast. Fire, aim, repeat.

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs.
Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

3. Copy tactics.
Instead: Create strategies.

4. “Fight the good fight.”
Instead: Pick the right battles, at the right time, with the right people. *

5. Solve your problems.
Instead: Solve their problems.

6. Focus on the long-term.
Instead: Focus on the short-term.

7. Build prototypes, mockups and samples.
Instead: Start building in a format and medium as close to the finished product as possible, and iterate, iterate, iterate.

8. Let data make decisions.
Instead: Use data to guide decisions.

9. Give customers everything they want.
Instead: Listen to customers, then throw (almost) all of it away.

10. “New, New, New!”
Instead: F*** new. What’s different? What’s better?

12. Optimise for the best-case scenario.
Instead: Build redundancy and plan for the worst-case scenario.

13. Over-promise, over-sell, under-deliver.
Instead: Over-promise, over-sell, over-deliver.

14. Be stubborn in the face of failure.
Instead: Be determined in the face of disbelief.

15. “We can build a successful business by capturing just X% of the market.”
Instead: Sell to one customer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

16. Depend on outsiders to make key decisions or develop key components.
Instead: Make your own key decisions and build your own core competitive advantages.

17. “I know more than anyone else.”
Instead: If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re the fool.

18. A unanimous decision means we’re all right.
Instead: If everybody agrees, you’re probably all wrong.

19. Hire resumes.
Instead: Hire people: curiosity, passion, interpersonal skills and drive.

20. Create rules to outline decisions.
Instead: Create incentives to guide decisions.

21. Reward activity.
Instead: Reward achievements, both failures and successes.

22. Meet to discuss.
Instead: Meet to decide.

23. Work under “understandings”.
Instead: Create legal agreements as soon as possible.

24. Everything matters.
Instead: Recognize the difference between “penny-wise” and “pound-foolish”.

25. Treat these secrets as absolutes.
Instead: Know all the rules completely so you can break them perfectly.

List source: http://www.unstructuredventures.com/index.html

PDF download: here

And visit authors blog, you might find more useful info for sure.

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

25 Lessons Learned from Failure: Not Mine…Yet;)

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Today I held a presentation to my faculty colleagues about Stephen Denning‘s article Telling Tales. What he says is that managers should use storytelling as a business tool in organizations.

Why the brain likes a good tale

Margaret Parkin says stories can be included in change programs in many ways, such as:

• as part of a brainstorming session;
• to communicate the future of an organization, clearly and enthusiastically;
• to unpick a problem and offer a parallel view;
• to add spice to a presentation on forthcoming changes;
• as an aid to memorable learning;
• to aid discussion and reflection during training sessions; and
• to stimulate curiosity in a “change update” newsletter or e-mail.

Her choice of the word “brainstorming” might take on a more literal meaning as she explains:

Research shows that while listening to stories, biochemical changes take place in the brain; levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) drop and levels of immunoglobulin A rise. So listening to a story can promote relaxation.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?

When Stephen Denning was program director of knowledge management at the World Bank in the mid-1990s, he gave impressive demonstrations and made compelling arguments about the need to gather information that, at the time, was scattered throughout the organization.

Frustrated at the poor response, he told them a story about a health worker in a tiny Zambian town who needed to know something about treatment for malaria, knowledge she was able to get immediately from a web site. The World Bank’s vast array of knowledge on poverty-related issues was not available to her in the same way.

Make’s you think, doesn’t it?

was the sort of response the little story elicited, and it did make them think and change the way they approached the management of their organization’s knowledge.

Ironically, Denning’s account was later criticized by a storytelling “expert” as being somewhat pathetic, lacking in detail and “plot”, few details about the health worker, nothing about her problems and so on. To his credit, Denning rejected this particular expert’s view.He says:

The ‘maximalist’ account would be more engrossing than my relatively dry anecdote. But I had learned enough by then to realize that telling the story in this way to a corporate audience would not galvanize implementation of a strange new idea like knowledge management. I knew that in the modern workplace, people had neither the time nor the patience – remember executives’ general skepticism about storytelling in the first place – to absorb a richly detailed narrative. If I was going to hold the attention of my audience I had to make my point in seconds, not minutes.

Storytelling can be used effectively at a time when an organization is about to undergo huge changes, and when those at the top need managers and other employees to envision what the organization will be like, and their role in it, after the changes. Human nature tends to make us apprehensive, maybe downright scared, of change, with a consequent reluctance to go for it enthusiastically. In the absence of a time machine to let people see that the future organizational change is not such a bad thing after all, the nearest you can get to it is their own imagination, fired by a “story-like” explanation of what is involved.

How Does Storytelling apply to blogging?

Article It is a very useful guide for blogging too. I know much of you already arranged your blog as a one big tale of yours but think again and try to give your audience a useful tale from your experience. Sometimes that’s what they need and that is what they will read with as little  pain as possible.

Here are 30 storytelling blogs you’ll love:

1. Karen Chace – Catch the Story Bug!
   http://karenchace.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
2. Granny Sue’s News and Reviews
   http://www.grannysue.blogspot.com/
3. Ellouise Schoettler
   http://www.storyteller.net/tellers/eschoettler
   http://www.ellouisestory.blogspot.com
4. Storynory
   http://storynory.com/
5. Stephen Hollen
   http://mountainstories.easyjournal.com/
6. Priscilla Howe
   http://www.storytellingnotes.blogspot.com/
7. Going Deep: The Long Traditional Story Festival
   http://www.storytellingnotes.blogspot.com/
8. Gwyn Calvetti – Musings on story and me…
   http://musingsonstoryandlife.blogspot.com/
9. Kevin Burge – Siegfried’s Viking Tales
   http://siegfriedsvikingtales.blogspot.com/
10. Sean Buvala: A Quarter for a Tale
    http://wheresmyquarter.blogspot.com/2008/01/roadblocks-to-your-storytelling-success.html
11. Sally Crandall: Heads or Tales
    http://sallycrandall.typepad.com/heads_or_tales/2008/01/storytelling-re.html
12. Rachel Hedman
    http://www.storytellingadventures.blogspot.com/
13. Limor Shiponi: Limor’s Storytelling Agora
    http://lisb.wordpress.com/
14. Eric Wolf
    http://www.ericwolf.org/
15. Kathy Hansen: A Storied Career
    http://www.astoriedcareer.com/story_seminar_essay.html
16. Mathew Needleman: Creating Lifelong Learners
    http://www.needleworkspictures.com/vic/
17. Austories
    http://austories.blogspot.com/
18. Teresa Clark – Storyteller
    http://teresaclark.blogspot.com/
19. Tim Ereneta: Some Thoughts from Tim and Breaking the Eggs
    http://storytelling.blogspot.com/
    http://blog.myspace.com/storiesbytim
20. Storytelling Guild of Eastern Idaho
    http://snakeriverstories.blogspot.com/
21. Chris King: Curiosity Cubed
    http://www.curiositycubed.blogspot.com/
22. Holly Stephens: The Storyteller and the Listener Online
    http://storyteller-and-listener.blog-city.com/
23. Liz Weir: Liz’s Ireland Journal
    http://irelandjournal.typepad.com/lizs_ireland_journal/
24. How to Tell a Great Story: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling
    http://www.howtotellagreatstory.com/resources/blogs.html
25. TallTales Audio Storytelling Blog: All About Storytelling
    http://www.talltalesaudio.com/blog/index.php
26. The Multicolored Lady
    http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com
27. Hope Baugh: Indy Theatre Habit
    http://www.indytheatrehabit.com
28. Dianne de Las Casas: The Story Connection Blog
    http://storyconnection.net/blog/
29. Laura Lewis-Barr: Jung As I Can Be
    http://www.storiesthatwork.blogspot.com/
30. Stories From Papi
    http://papistories.blogspot.com/

List source: http://www.story-lovers.com/listsstorytellingblogs.html

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

Telling Tales

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Just yesterday I came along a brilliant website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They offer a free tool for optimizing your website and a book with loads of good tips to optimize your pages for better online presence. I will be covering more tips from it, here is one to start from.

High search rankings increase your sales!

A number 1 listing on Google can be totally pointless if it is for the wrong keywords.

If the wrong people or too few people search for that keyword then your SEO efforts will be in vain. The keywords that you choose are the most important factor that decides whether you succeed or not.

If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time, energy and money.

So…think twice before you start

Many webmasters think that they already know the best keyword for their websites. If they haven’t done some research, they are usually wrong. There are several reasons for that:

• You know your business much better than anybody else. You know the special terms that are used in your branch and you know what you should search for when you’re looking for products like yours.
• Your customers don’t know as much as you. They don’t know your terminology and they might use totally different keywords. For example, a recent study found out that many people search for the keyword “nose job”. If you optimize your web page for the keyword “rhinoplasty” then these web surfers won’t find your site.
• Did you consider the intention of the searcher? Just because a keyword is used very often on search engines it doesn’t mean that you’ll get many customers. People who find your website through a special keyword might not be interested in purchasing.

It’s very important that you take some time to find the best keywords for your website. The time and efforts that you invest in finding the right keywords will pay back in no time. 1. Your customers are on the Internet and they have money.

Article source: http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/optimize/seo-ebook.htm

Post from: BizzArtic - Blogging Ideas and Tips

Why Keywords Are The Most Important Part of SEO

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