Successful Blog

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Who’s ME Strauss and What’s She Doing Here?

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Look Closely.

Can you see the difference? Can you tell I’m not Scrivs?

Liz Strauss is ME Strauss

I’m almost as tall as he is. My hair’s way longer than his.
Still he’s Scrivs, and I’m not.

Who am I?

I write as ME Strauss, but call me Liz. The ME was my parents’ idea, and it stuck. It worked in the publishing world. That’s where I started–but you didn’t come to read about me. Well if you want to there’s always my profile. . . . It’s over there in the sidebar on the left.

What am I doing here?

I’m the new face at Successful Blog. I’m doing all kinds of things–researching, writing, editing, talking, interviewing, questioning, learning, analyzing, strategizing, and a whole lot of other “ings”–whatever it takes to get to the bottom of whatever questions we can come up with about what makes a successful blog.

What can you expect?

One way that Scrivs and I look exactly alike is in what we have to say about success and blogs. We agree there are as many definitions for those two words as there are people to give them. I could have written what Scrivs wrote in his post What Makes a Successful Blog?

The generally accepted dictionary definition of success is, an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. Easy enough. Know your purpose and you’ll know how to define success for you. We’ll talk quite a bit about defining your goals and purpose here.

A Blog, or Weblog, is defined in the Wikipedia thusly:
A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is both a web application used for entering, modifying and displaying periodic posts (normally in reverse chronological order) as well as the totality of content constituted by these posts.

The key terms in there, at least for our purposes, are “Web application” and “content.” For me a blog at it’s most basic is an enabler of content, a mechanism through which you publish something. It could be photos, video, artwork, poetry, news, stories — anything. Content, that is what’s key when it comes to blogging.

Here at Successful Blog we’ll talk about content, blogging applications, personal blogging, business blogging, blog design, writing, photo blogging, and . . . tips, techniques and pointers that you can apply to your blogs and your blogging experience.

You can expect we’ll do plenty of that. Conversations like that are what successful bloggers do. You can expect a new post every Monday through Friday and lots of new features. You can also expect that I’m not going to do all of the talking. I’ll constantly be asking what you think about things too.

Here’s what I see.

Successful Blog is the place where all kinds of bloggers meet to share their successes and swap strategies. The content is organized, thorough, and relevant. The conversation is fun, fast, and sometimes irreverent.

This week we’re going to talk about audience and Blog Reviews. You’re my audience. So as they say, enough about me, let’s talk about you.

What do you think I should know about you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Consistency In Writing Frequency

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Too many people worry about how many times they should write in a day on their blogs when the real question to ask how consistent should you be with the frequency of your writing. What I am talking about is if you decide to write at least once a day on your site then you should stick with that schedule because by doing so you are creating expectations for your readers. They will grow accustomed to your posting schedule and once you start deviating from it you might encounter some problems.

Sure it is scary to think of your readers having any power over your writing, but if we don’t write for an audience, who are we writing for? Over at Whitespace I try to write daily and at times I miss a couple of days. It’s a pattern that I think my readers have come to expect and the site continues to be successful from my point of view. However, I never post more than twice in a day because it would go against the patterns I have set for the site and effectively destroy the discussions that make the site popular.

When starting your site should you begin with a posting schedule in mind? I don’t think so because every site has its own flow and it can be hard to determine how frequently you need to write on a topic for the site to be successful. Over time you will begin to see the writing frequency that you are most comfortable with.

Building Traffic: Leaving Comments

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It’s a simple thing to do. Leaving comments on other sites in your niche with an URL pointing back to your site. Should be easy traffic right? Not if it isn’t done correctly. How often do you click on a commentor’s name to see their site when all they left was a comment that didn’t either make you laugh or think?

Sure you can get the author’s attention by asking for links, but what if you want more than the author’s attention? What if you want his audience’s attention? Leave an insightful comment, but don’t just do it once, do it often. Do it on every post for a month if you can. Maybe do it for two months, but do it enough where people begin to recognize who you are.

You are more than likely starting a blog to become an expert in that field, even if it’s just a personal blog. You want to be an expert at something because experts get traffic. Comments can help get you there. I found girlspoke simply because Meme continuously leaves comments on Paul Davidson’s blog and the result was that I invited them into the 9rules Network. What was her expertise? It was humor and it showed through in her comments.

You are not trying to build massive amounts of traffic directly from your comments, but hopefully you can get the attention of some sites that can give you lots of traffic by linking to one of your posts. Indirectly you are looking for that traffic from your comments. This option requires patience though, but building a successful blog never did happen in a day.

Blogging Style

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Joi Ito has posted five good tips that should be used for your blogging style.

  1. You’re probably stupid
  2. You need help thinking
  3. Take a position
  4. Link
  5. Write early, write often

Make sure to read the entry in detail to understand each of these points. I especially like taking a position. Not enough times do we get to see the opinions of the writers as they are just reporting the facts so to speak. Enough blogs do that as it is, people come to read your voice and thoughts so why hold them back?

Building Traffic: Asking For Links

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Many people are still in the dark with regards to how they can first begin to generate traffic to their site. One of the easiest methods that only takes a small amount of time is to ask for links to your site from other sites in your niche. However, you must make sure to do so with care.

For example, you have to figure that most successful blogs get requests for links all the time so what would make your request any different? You have to provide them with content that would compel them to link to your site. Not too many people wish to link to an entry that they feel won’t help their site’s readers out at all.

For I Like Cameras I had no problem finding some of the more popular camera/photography blogs and sending them links to:

Both articles were fortunate enough to get picked up by PhotographyBLOG which provided a healthy dose of traffic and hopefully more subscribed readers.

Now can I do this with every entry? Nope. I only try to do it with entries that I feel I would link to from one of my own sites and ones that I know people will like. Now I know that whenever I send a link over to PhotographyBLOG they will at least take the time to read the entry to see if it’s worth linking to. Send too many junk links and there is a good chance your email will never even get read.

Cardinal Sin #1: Launching With No Content

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Imagine for weeks you heard of a wonderful Grand Opening of this wonderful store getting ready to occur only to find that when the Opening happened, the store was empty. How damaging do you think that would be to your site? On the Web we aren’t given too many second chances to make a lasting impression on a user, so why do so many people waste the first opportunity to do so?

Noobody is expecting you to launch a site with 100 pages of content, but is it so hard to rollout 4-5 entries at launch with the intention of continuously updating afterwards? And no the Welcome entry shouldn’t count as one.