Successful Blog

What New Friends Have You Met and How Have You Made Life Easy for Them?

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Done these three things lately?

New links connect blogs. New relationships connect people.

New people can add dimension and depth to your thinking and your ideas.

What new friends have you met lately? How have you made getting to know your blog easy for them? Here are three things you might do to get the ball rolling.

  1. Find a new blog in your niche to follow. New blogs are new people with new points of view. Join their discussion by leaving meaningful comments and trackbacks. Every discussion offers an opportunity to learn something new from.
  2. Check your sidebar. Make sure your sidebar is friendly to new arrivals who want to take a tour. Showing your readers where to find things is advertising.
  3. Organize your archives as your readers would want them, and make a Popular Posts page. Ask your readers how they use your archives. Try to use them yourself to see how they actually work. Take the time to put your most popular articles in one place where new readers can find them as soon as they arrive at your blog.

New friends who feel at home usually come back to visit again.

UPDATE: I am updating this post as part of my response to comments 11-13. Carma this is a post reference that I am linking back to your blog through a trackback. This should show up in your comments for the post called Make New Friends with Trackback.

This is the URl for that page http://karmasword.blogspot.com/2007/03/make-new-friends-with-trackback.html I got there by clicking the time 9:22A.M. (when you posted that post) under your blog. I copied the URL from my browser’s address bar to use it to make the link in my post here.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
For more on how to think like your readers see Customer Think on the Successful Series page.
Watch What You’re Doing.

Branding, Self-Promotion, Selling: Are You OverDoing?

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It’s Easier to Write About Someone Else

Personal Branding logo

Whether we work in a traditional enterprise, work in a boutique shop with a handful of people, work alone or work at a hobby, such as blogging, we need a goal to channel our investment, to direct it toward gains, to have the energy and time required to stretch and free ourselves.

Yet even when we choose productivity, to work totally alone without employee or employer, we’re still interacting with people who have myriad needs. We meet with others who have myriad needs of their own and we actively listen to take them on as our own.

If we do it well, we will gain credibility, if we miss the mark, we actually harm some part of the relationship. Relationships may be more difficult than editing this page. just forming. We know those times well, when we try too hard to convince others of our brand, apologize for our writing, ask links instead of earning them, or quote text when we should analyze.

Each day this week we’ll discuss one way we touch those we meet in business and in our personal lives. We’ll look at how branding, personal branding, self-promotion, and selling form the big picture of our image.

We’ll look at case studies and use each of our own core competencies to discuss how we might improve our interactions in each case.

We’ll begin tomorrow with the thought that all relationships are imagined and constructed within us and as such we can have an impact on how they work.

But you might start listening around the blogopshere for examples you see of branding, self-promotion, and sales today.

–ME “Liz” Strauss”