Successful Blog

Here is a good place for a call to action.

  • Home
  • Community
  • About
  • Author Guidelines
  • Liz’s Book
  • Stay Tuned

Successful-Blog Joins 9rules–Thanks to Our Readers

November 9, 2005 by Liz

Once upon a time there was a little blog, who wanted to be Successful. It had all the right ideas. It just needed the care and feeding of great writers and great readers. It even had a cool name. It was called Successful Blog.

Along came two writers who loved the little blog. They met up with some readers who already liked the little blog. Soon more readers caught wind of the change. They came. They looked around and many stayed. The little blog was thriving. It started showing what it could be. It smiled in the company of Fine Fools.

People began to notice the Successful Blog that could. From everwhere, people came to see it. Successful Blog stood taller, worked harder for its readers. Readers took its stories home and said success could happen. All of this took place in but a fortnight and a day or two.

And it came to pass that Scrivian the Blogmaker looked at Successful Blog. And he saw that it was good. He saw community where there had been a little blog. He was touched that they valued their Fine Fool heritage and he realized that they always would.

Lo, that day the Blogmaker proclaimed from his computer that Successful Blog and its readers shall move to the major leagues. And they all lived there bloggily ever after . . . and quite successfully.

I am pleased to announce that Successful-Blog is now part of the 9rules network.

9rules

But then we already knew Successful Blog rules.

Thank you to all of you–you’re the ones who made it happen. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

The virtual champagne is over at the side bar.

Filed Under: Audience, Checklists, Successful Blog Tagged With: 9rules, bc, Scrivs

Blogger Forums as Promotion

November 9, 2005 by Liz

Blogger forums are a great place for networking. It’s amazing what we can learn just by showing up and participating. Enthusiastic learners and generous teachers are attractive human beings. We draw others to us, and every good-natured, authentic interaction is one step to relationship building. Nothing out does the fast-pace give-and-take of a blog forum for teaching-learning, story-swapping, and bloggy brainstorming.

There are some great benefits to becoming a member of a blog forum in my niche.

  • Forums offer a chance to gain visibility, form relationships, and establish a reputation for what I know. Serious blogger forums are like mini-seminars. They’re a great place to ask and answer questions. The very act of participating lets people know that I’m out there and willing to help. People who like what I say might stop by my blog for more, and I’ll have a place I can go to when I run into a bind that is over my head.
  • Talking about my blog is a natural part of the conversation. What would be shameless self-promotion in other venues is using examples in the context of my forum. Pointing a forum friend to an article on my blog that meets their need is something they say thank you for.
  • Leaving a signature link when you enter a thread can be common practice. I realize that I’m joining a group that has it’s own protocols. I look at how others sign their names before I make my signature. If the forum is a good match, I try to have posts in five or six threads. For the first day or two in Forum Land, I do as the forumers do. (In editorial we call that 2.3rds of a pun–p-u).
  • Some forums ask me to introduce myself and my blog. I take those opportunities very seriously and pull together three important points–the purpose of my blog, a little of my strategy, and what I think readers come to see. I chose those three because I want the forum to know me as a multi-faceted thinker who takes blogging seriously.
  • Search engines see forums as a hotbed of content. When the bots come they find plenty of tag-relevant words being used, my link in that mix gets indexed too.

Some forums may be part of an association, directory, a webring, club, or alliance. These groups offer the advantages of a forum and additional opportunities to network with people about your blog. They might even offer opportunities in which you plan blog promotion events together.

Whenever I start out in a new forum, I keep in mind that I’m building new relationships and a new reputation. I take care not to bring out my complete sense of humor too soon or too often, because I want to be taken seriously, and I want the people I meet to know I take them seriously as well.

Don’t join just any forum look around and be choosy. Find one that will be a mutually-beneficial experience for you and its members. Also read Hart’s comment after Blog Promotion Basics [for Everyone]â€? to find out how he learned that the wrong forum is worse than being in none.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Community, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc

Steve Rubel’s Technorati Hacks

November 8, 2005 by Liz

THIS JUST IN:

You may have heard about this already from Darren at Problogger or directly from Steve Rubel himself. Still it’s the hot topic of our day, and it belongs in the Survival Kit.

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion is sharing Ten Technorati Hacks geared for the “digitally inclined” who want to get more mileage out of the Link King. This post is one in Steve’s series of hack postings. It’s complete with visuals and plenty of things that you can’t do in a Blogger template. However, even the newest blogger will find some useful information in a quick read.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Successful Blog, Tech/Stats Tagged With: bc, blog_basics, blogging_hacks, blogging_tools, Steve_Rubel, survival_kit, Technorati

Title Tags and a Poem to Technorati

November 8, 2005 by Liz

I promised you a Tuesday post on tags and this is it. One thing this successful blogger knows is that you don’t tell your readers that you’re going to do something and then not follow through with it. I’m following through with it.

When I started getting my notes together, I knew something about tags. I had put keywords deftly in my template just as Darren Rowse describes in his article, The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization. In fact, I had done things so much like he had, I’d done the same things wrong.

This post explains the importance of title tags in how search engines look at our blogs. Darren added a two-word term to his. Then he graphed what happened. In just three days, his position on that term at Google changed from 65th to 10th. On MSN, his listing went from 40th to 1st. The comments that follow the article also add some new information, including how to respond gracefully when you mess up your host’s template.

Now for something completely different–a poem to Technorati Tags.

Oh Technorati
you fickle one
you really had me going
thinking if I chased enough
I might find solid ground.
But your faint mystery
was finally unraveled
when I found Improbulus
who carefully explained how the
premise is structurally unsound.

In other words, I found a post by a writer named Improbulus, Technorati tags: an introduction that provides everything you’d ever want to know about tags with a capital T and probably more.

I’m a saturation learner, so I found it fascinating to see exactly how the Technorati system might be used. Improbulus provides subheads to guide us through this well-organized analysis of the possibilities. Be sure to read the end where Improbulus gives an opinion of the downside of the system.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats Tagged With: bc, Darren_Rowse, Improbulus, search_engine_optimization, SEO, survival_kit, Technorati, Technorati_poem, title_tags

Blog Promotion Basics [for Everyone]

November 8, 2005 by Liz

If you look up–under the logo for Successful Blog–you’ll see the words content that is organized, thorough, and relevant. That means I plan to capture and present the basics for everything. I also plan to make sure that those posts–like this one–offer information for everyone, not just new bloggers. Oh and, my other plan is that these posts won’t be boring. 🙂

Well, it used to say that. Now, we just live it.

I’ve hidden a posting Easter egg of sorts in this one. Hope most of you don’t have it already.

This post is based on Duncan Riley’s Building blog traffic for newbies. If you already know the basics, read the 31 comments that follow the post.

Duncan lays out six main points he pulled together when he realized that people seemed to know little about promoting blogs. I’ll list them here [with my notes], and you can get the detail from the post.

  • Don’t use blogrolling for your site links. It stuffs up search engines.
  • Pinging is good, but trackbacks and comments are better.
  • Offer to exchange links in your links section [in the sidebar].
  • Link to small sites without exchange through sidebar or a post.
  • Submit your blog to all search engines [and directories].

And what we both agree is the most important one:

  • Post regularly, [consistently], and often.

I’d also like to add two if I might.

  • Join a forum in your niche. It offers natural opportunities to talk about your blog.
  • Find websites in your niche that would like to list your link.

Of course, the best promotion is quality content when the traffic gets there.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

PS. Do we have to use the word “newbies”? Has anyone got a better one?

Related articles:
Turning Reluctant Readers into Loyal Fans
Blog Promotion: Checking Out Curb Appeal
Why Doesn’t Pete Townshend Need to Do Promotion?
GAWKER Design: Curb Appeal as Customer-Centered Promotion

Filed Under: Blog Basics, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, blog_basics, blog_promotion, blog_submissions, Blogrolling, forums, Links, pinging, search_engines, survival_kit, trackbacks

What Is Content that Keeps Readers?

November 7, 2005 by Liz

Everybody talks about content, but nobody actually defines it.

What is content and how can content keep readers?

Content is more than ideas, more than words and pictures on the screen, more than links to articles and data. Content is everything we communicate to our readers. Content is . . .

  • Information Quality content is both fact and analysis. It offers meat and potatoes that anyone can find together with something original–analysis, predictions, interpretation–that comes only from the writer. Everything is relevant. There’s no time waster anywhere. The writer’s decisions are the “value-added”–the secret recipe. If we have the best recipe, readers will keep coming back to us.
  • Presentation Quality content is top-notch presentation. Simple is elegant. The best information is lost, if nobody reads it. Too many long sentences; too many bullets; too many links interrupting the text–these get between the reader and the ideas. If it looks hard to read, it is. Like a great wine in a crystal glass, great presentation makes great content inviting.
  • YOU We saw from our interviews last week, how readers respond to the intangibles Indie brings to his blog. Our presence, our voice, our respect for our readers, they are the nuance, the one-of-a-kind sauce on the expensive meal. Too peppery, too sweet, too salty, too bland, and readers will think this dish isn’t worth having again. On the other hand, get the right balance and they’ll be back every night.

When a blogger provides top-notch content with something extra, readers can see it. They appreciate the writer, and they enjoy the experience. Readers notice that “value-added” difference. They’ll be back to see whether we can do it again.

And that’s when consistency is the operative word. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
SEO–Five Traits of Relevant Content
Turning Reluctant Readers into Loyal Fans
Audience is Your Destination

Filed Under: Audience, Content, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, personal-branding, quality_content, reader_support, typographic_cues, value_added

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 851
  • 852
  • 853
  • 854
  • 855
  • …
  • 858
  • Next Page »

Recently Updated Posts

How to Become a Better Storyteller

SEO and Content Marketing

How to Use Both Content Marketing and SEO to Amplify Your Blog

9 Practical Work-at-Home Ideas For Moms

How to Monetize Your Hobby

How To Get Paid For Sharing Your Travel Stories

7 reasons why visitors leave websites for ever



From Liz Strauss & GeniusShared Press

  • What IS an SOB?!
  • SOB A-Z Directory
  • Letting Liz Be

© 2025 ME Strauss & GeniusShared