Who ever said blogging was easy?
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It wasn’t me!
Do you ever stare at an empty post page wondering what to write?
Do you sometimes struggle with your blogging? I know I sometimes do and this is one of those times. I’ve got so much planned that I want to do for this blog and want to say, that I don’t know where to start! Or how to say it…a kind of writers block or lack of focus maybe.
It’s a little unnerving because normally I am quite good at planning what I want to do. You never know writing about it may help!
And this is all amplified by the fact I have had a hard time recently keeping up the pace I would like to with the blog, and that’s not only nagging at the back of my mind it’s also frustrating me.
What’s the solution?
But the thing to do is not panic or give up, everybody has ups and downs with blogging, the difference is how I deal with them.
I think the first thing to do is a bit of a brain dump and get all my ideas onto paper then I can start sorting them out. And the second is to stop ripping myself up about posting, I would rather write a good post a couple of times a week than churn out a load of bad posts everyday. If I don’t get the good post written then there’s no post that day, and that goes for both my blogs until I get back on track.
Anyway I thought I would write about it, and where I am at because at the end of the day this is about my journey with blogging so I may as well show all sides of it. I want it to be a truthful account to help others, and I’m not going to be helping anybody if I only focus on the good sides of blogging.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:blogging journeyLooking at a Well Branded Blog
This post is more of my thought process about branding for blogs and what a powerful tool it can be, to help a blog be read by as many people as possible.
After writing the post the other day about branding your blog to raise it’s profile I started to wonder if I could find an example of what I was talking about. I could.
I’m talking about an easily recognizable blog due to it’s name/domain, logo etc… I decided I could pick almost any of the top blogs in their niches and you would find that they all had strong branding and identity. And obviously they were all popular blogs.
You could say what came first the branding or the popularity?
You have to remember a blog has to establish a readership by building it up with good content that people will find interesting, and want to come back for more. So it’s the popularity that has to come first, the branding grows and changes as the blog grows, adding to it.
I also think the earlier you start to set some branding up for your blog, the more it can help draw people in as the blogs readership and popularity grows.
So where’s my example?
The one blog for me that comes to mind when I think about branding is Problogger by Darren Rowse. You only have to see it’s logo, a ‘P‘ and you know what it refers to. He even has Problogger t-shirts!
I have followed this blog for a couple of years now and I’ve found it an extremely interesting place to find bogging help and inforamtion, and that’s the impression that hits me first. So it’s the blogs name that was the greatest branding and has made it instantly recognised. Which brings home the importance of a good domain name. It’s only fairly recently that the blog and logo etc has been redesigned, and has worked with the name to make it even easier to notice.
It would be interesting to see how many people would know about it outside the blogging about blogging niche. You would find that similar niches like make money on the internet and perhaps internet marketing would have heard of Problogger, but obviously branding is niche specific.
But that is the holy grail for most probloggers, to be one of the top blogs and instantly known within their niche!
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Darren Rowse, ProBloggerBranding for your blog
Do you have to use branding on your blog
No, but it can be useful.
At the moment I am working on building the case study blog, I would like it to build a presence in the digital photography niche, although I do know it’s a competitive one. And to get my blog’s face known out there, even if I concentrate on a sub niche within digital photography.
I also want visitors to feel it is a blog to follow, that it will be around for a good while and it has an attractive design that is easy to read and follow. A professional feel in a relaxed atmosphere, if you know what I mean!
To help me do this I have been working on some branding for The Photographer Blog (TPB) to help people remember it easier (hopefully) and to help get it’s name out there. I am still in the process of working on it but so far I have added a logo which I created in Adobe Photoshop Elements
You may also notice I have added some advertising, like many other bloggers do, it would be nice to be able to make enough money to cover the costs of the site and be able to make more improvements to it, like a professional blog design!
These changes may only seem slight and I will do some more, but I feel they will all add up to building the presence and the impression that TPB (The Photographer Blog) will leave on people.
More to come on this…
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:adobe photoshop 3, case study, the photographer blogHave you heard about the new blogging book?
Yes a proper book with pages!
Yesterday I heard about a new book about blogging, the Problogger book - secrets of blogging your way to a six figure income, now that is quite a claim.
But you couldn’t have two better authors showing you the way, the book has been written by Darren Rowse of Problogger and Chris Garrett of Chrisg.com so they definitely have the right credentials.
It’s not released yet but Darren and Chris have put together a web page with an email list where once you have subscribed you can download a sample chapter of the book and also receive weekly blogging tips for a year. And that sounds like a good deal, so I have signed up to have a look.
If you would like to pre-order the Problogger book then you can click on the amazon box (which gives the best deal).
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:chris garrett, Darren Rowse, problogger bookGetting the most out of blog carnivals
Have you heard of blog carnivals?
I know I kept reading about them and how they could help your blog to gain traffic but I never knew anything more about them. So I did some digging around and found some information on them. And I have now be using them for some time.
Basically they are a collection of blog posts all to do with the same topic and posted to a blog on a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly basis. Some carnivals have a different host each week so other blogs can take a turn.
Most carnivals have set rules for who can submit an article, mainly your article has to do with the topic of the carnival.
Do you use blog carnivals?
So that’s my next question, do you use blog carnivals? I first used a carnival through a recommendation, it was the All Women blogging carnival and as the name suggests it’s for any women who blogs no matter what it’s about. And I think referrals are the best way to find a good carnival.
The other place to find a blog carnival would have to be the Blog Carnival website which is the directory for blog carnivals. And that’s where I have found a lot of the carnivals I have used. Although it hasn’t had a spring clean for a while and there are a lot of old carnivals left on there that haven’t ran for a long time, but new ones are added all the time.
Are they useful?
I think they are, if you just want to get loads of traffic and aren’t interested in anything else then they are not for you. But if you are interested in finding new networking opportunities, making new blogging friends or finding new blogs in your niche then they are great. I was asked for my first interview because of submitting to a blog carnival. And don’t forget that they have loads of great articles to read as well.
They also have another useful purpose, every time you get an article accepted and published on a carnival then you are putting yourself in front of a new audience, with the added benefit of a link back to your blog which will help with the rankings and they will build up over time. So they might not deliver tons of traffic but they still have their advantages.
Photography carnivals?
I’ve not seen any current photography carnivals at the moment, I don’t know if anybody knows of any? But I still wanted to use this method of marketing for my case study blog.
So I am participating in slightly different carnivals but ones I still have something in common with. Whenever I can I am submitting to the All Women blogging carnival and also a new one I have found called the Mom’s blogging carnival.
I haven’t been submitting the case study blog articles for long but there are lots of quality posts on both of these carnivals, and I hope to get to know the bloggers behind them a little better over time.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:All Women Blogging Carnival, blog carnival, moms blog carnivalHow to Submit to the Search Engines
What was the first thing I did to promote my case study blog?
There are hundreds if not thousands of search engines although you wouldn’t really know it because most people are only concerned with 3, Google, MSN and Yahoo.
So the very first thing on my list once I had got a few articles on the blog was to submit it to the search engines, and in particular Google. At the end of the day everybody wants search engine traffic.
The reason for this being the first on the list is the Google sandbox effect, or in simple terms it can take a while for your posts to start appearing in the search results. So the sooner you submit your blog the sooner the process can start.
What is the best way to submit to Google?
Personally I think the best way to get Google to visit your blog, and quickly, is to use the Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. This XML sitemap generator has also been adopted my MSN and Yahoo, and all 3 of these search engines regularly send their ‘bots’ to check my sites after using this plugin on both of my blogs. I know not everybody has a Wordpress blog but don’t worry I’ll get to that later.
To install it you just need to download the plugin and install it onto your wordpress installation, if you need any help doing this take a look at this article I wrote about installing themes and plugins. You can then track the progress of your sitemap by using Google Webmaster Tools.
Submitting RSS feeds to homepages
Another way to submit to search engines or to get them to send a ‘bot’ to your blog is adding your rss feed to the search engine personal homepage. If you set yourself up with a homepage on either Google, MSN or Yahoo then you will have the option to ‘add content’ to that page, that is where you can add the rss feed of your blog, once added the search engine bots will go check it out.
Use a submission service
There are a lot of these around some are free and some are paid for. I have only used this type of service once, a long time ago for this blog and I used a free service (although you could make a donation) called Self Promotion. I could choose which search engines I wanted to submit to and they did the rest.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Google, msn, self promotion, xml sitemap, yahoo
