Successful Blog

Responding to Your Mistakes

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Every blog is a work in progress–a public one. Every legitimate blogger I know is human. Humans make mistakes. I’m better at making mistakes than a lot of humans. Making mistakes in public is never fun, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world either.

What do you do when you make a mistake–a very public one? Big or little, public or private, mistakes have a way of stealing our balance, here are some ways of recovering that balance and moving on.

  • Realize that you aren’t a mistake just because you made one.
  • If it’s fixable, fix it. Otherwise it will nag you. It will always be there.
  • Step back, be dispassionate, and decide if you need to do more. How important is it? Is anyone else affected by your mistake? Learn to recognize what’s a little thing that no one cares about.
  • If it’s something that involves others, acknowledge it. Find the opportunity in the error and get things moving forward again.
  • Know that most people are generous, if you’re upfront with them.

Here’s an object lesson:

Yesterday I posted two articles that had errors in them. I had the wrong glasses on, and my proofreader friend didn’t get the chance to look at them. I am sorry that I let those get to you that way. They are fixed now.

I wrote an apology to Yaro, letting him know his blog has the “r” back in its name. He was most gracious in his reply. I think we’re going to be friends.

I take some comfort in the fact that the nature of this blog made this event something worth posting about.

–ME “Liz” Strauss, who is now cleaning her glasses every hour.

Intra-Linking as Promotion

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Do you know Yaro Starak’s blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey? I follow it because he’s always testing things. I dropped by today looking for something on search engine optimization and found the most-like Yaro tip.

Yaro calls it intra-linking. He places keyword links at the bottom of each page. These key content words link to other pages in his blog. He chooses words that he uses often in his entries.

The idea is that this will get search engines to fully spider his blog.

It’s a short post, and an easy thing to try. The post is called A SEO tip.

He also offers up a link to SEO CHAT which I’ve copied here in case his blog catches fire one day.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Successful-Blog Joins 9rules–Thanks to Our Readers

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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.

Blogger Forums as Promotion

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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

Steve Rubel’s Technorati Hacks

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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

Title Tags and a Poem to Technorati

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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