Expert tips and services for building successful blogs
For all of us FeedBurner users, exciting times are coming: looks like Google indeed buys FeedBurner for $100m!
I think the following things are going to happen rather soon:
According to my blog’s administration dashboard, less that 20 hours ago the long-awaited next version of WordPress engine was released – WordPress 2.2, codenamed Getz.
I’ve just upgraded my main two blogs, and have already tried the two features I’ve been waiting for:
This new release introduces a sandbox approach: all plugins are verified against fatal errors upon their activation, and unless they work safely enough (don’t break your whole blog), they are not activated. You get a nice error message explaining the situation should you come across a nasty plugin like this.
It took me only a few minutes to set up a fatal error scenario, and I must say: this feature is a great time saver on top of being a great plugin installation safeguard.
There’s a many more changes apart from these two, like full Atom 1.0 support – I just don’t use them as much and perhaps need to do a bit of reading/learning myself since too many things have changed in this version.
If you want to learn more, it’s best for you to read the great 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.2 post at Technosailor. As always, Aaron Brazell has provided a great review of the most juicy features to be found in this WordPress release.
That’s all I wanted to tell for the moment. If you haven’t done so yet, wait no more – just go download WordPress 2.2 and upgrade, it’s definitely worth it!
Exciting news! Brian Clark at Copyblogger has just launched a copywriting contest with $10,000 in prizes:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make an irresistible offer. That offer should be in the form of a landing page that catches the reader’s attention, barrels them down a slippery slide to your call to action, and results in that desired action. Hey, that’s what landing pages are all about, right?
With the three great judges: Seth Godin, Darren Rowse and Brian himself, I’m sure it will be challenging enough. And judging by the anticipation shown in previous week’s comments at Copyblogger, the competition is going to be tough.
Good luck to everyone who decides to participate!
Even if you don’t, be sure to stop by cause there will definitely be examples of really good copywriting submitted in the coming days (all entries to be submitted by May 21st, 2007).
Visit Brian’s announcement post for the full contest details.
As you probably know, this week saw another group writing project happening at ProBlogger: Top 5. My week was rather busy and so I only got a chance to participate now, but I welcome this opportunity as a chance to share my thoughts on non-technical aspects of being a successful blogger.
Here they are below, the top five rules for making your blog a success:
1. Bring value
Before rushing yourself into buying a cool domain and then hitting a blogger’s block on the very next morning, take some time to understand what value your blog will bring and how exactly.
Ideally, you will help millions of visitors by posting useful articles and sharing your knowledge. However, a blog can be a selfish enough enterprise too – you could use it as a technical log of all the accomplishments and simply post your discoveries for your own reference, but with the idea that the same notes can help someone
else as well.
2. Set goals
Goals will help you become the kind of blogger you want to be.
You need to agree with yourself on how much traffic you want a month, or how many posts a week you need. Without goals, you will quickly become an irregular author with occasional posts aiming at nothing in particular. I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past, but have started improving in this field.
One important thing about goals is being honest with yourself when setting them. If you set a goal of 5 posts a week, but can’t find time to do this – you probably should lower your standard. Once you master posting 2 posts a week, you can always agree on posting 3 and eventuall 5 posts, but be sure to give yourself enough time and room to actually meet your targets. Without being realistic, your goals will only frustrate you, and that’s the last thing you need.
3. Network
Talk to other bloggers. Leave comments. Particupate in forums discussions. Blogosphere is a great source of information, and it is also a wonderful place to meet new friends. You’re bound to find many incredibly useful and interesting blogs in almost any niche, and you will easily develop and grow yourself by simply talking to people which do something better than you can.
There are some unwritten rules which you should always follow, like replying to all your comments, making sure to thank people for the contributions they make, and linking to all the resources you may have used in preparation of a particular post. Stick to them from the very beginning.
If you get hundreds of comments a day, make a decision not to reply or reply selectively and let your readers know about this. It is very important to always maintain this connection with readers – you don’t want people to feel disappointed after commenting on your blog for months and never getting a single like back from you.
Be sure to highlight other great resources. Many beginner bloggers tend to hide their greater competitors, but that’s very wrong. First of all, because of the whole competition approach. You do not blog to compete! You blog to bring value, make someone else’s life easier, express yourself and meet new people. All of this can easily be done without competing with anyone. If there are websites which serve these purposes better – share links to them with your readers! This will only help you in the long term, because such an open approach will always make you noticed.
4. Educate
Never stop learning! Make it part of your daily routine to learn something new in your niche. Read great blogs in your RSS reader, or finish a relevant book. Asking other bloggers for their advice is always a great way to learn. You’ll be amazed how many great bloggers will be happy to help you even with questions which may seem stupid and simple to yourself. Ask, and you will definitely get an aswer.
It is important to take time for self-growth, too. There is no point in reading hundreds of RSS feeds a day without acting upon them. With the amount of information we get daily, everything is quickly forgotten, unless you take some steps to preserve the information – take notes or try following some technical how-to yourself to remember it better.
Teaching others is another great way of learning something yourself. It is important to make it clear to your readers though, that you may be offering a less than ideal solution. I always enjoy tasks which involve learning something new, and I’m quite comfortable with sharing such information, but I always start such posts with some background information on the subject, stating it clearly that I’m just learning it myself.
5. Enjoy!
One of the most important aspects of being successful is genuinely enjoying doing what you do. If you like blogging about your topics, this will be a daily inspiration for you to provide even better content. If you hate your blog, this will definitely show in your posts too.
I greatly enjoy my online projects, and find it exciting to virtually meet new people almost every day. I like being in a position to share my knowledge and experience, and find it most rewarding when people email me to thank for something they got out of reading my blogs.
Find ways of enjoying your blogging, and it will help you become a success.
Steve Smith has just announced that the FeedBurner plugin he had developed a few years ago and had been supporting ever since is now officially adopted by FeedBuner, and is supported under a FeedBurner FeedSmith name.
Here is a download link: FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.2
Installation instructions for the new plugin can be found on the FeedBurner: WordPress Quick Start page, however there’s a couple of steps they had missed, so I just wanted to post them here for the time being (I’ve also sent emails to FeedBurner about these, so with any luck they’ll be mentioned in the Quick Start guide soon enough):
1) Make sure you disable your old FeedBurner plugin before putting the new one into your WordPress plugins directory
If you don’t do this, there will be a conflict of plugins declarations, and you will have to FTP to your hosting and delete the old plugin file form WordPress directory manually in order to fix this conflict.
2) In FeedSmith, you don’t have to generate FeedBurner-specific feed redirect anymore. Instead, all your feeds will be redirected to FeedBurner by default. This means two things:
– you need to change the Original Feed back to its default in your FeedBurner feed options (log into your FeedBurner account, pick your feed, click Edit Feed Details…)
– you need to clean up your .htaccess file. Just find a line in your .htaccess (it will be in the root directory of your WordPress installation) which looks like this, and delete it:
RewriteRule ^feedburner_879394/?$ /feed/ [R,L]
That’s about it! I’ve just updated the plugin on one of my blogs, and will do it on the rest in the next few hours. If you need help with upgrading it, please feel free to ask!
I’ve just read a post at ProBlogger announcing the new RSS feed for the ProBlogger Job Board, and thought you would probably like to know about it.
I think Darren does a great job with constantly finding new ways of adding value to bloggers, and his Job Board is definitely one of the easiest ways to find yourself a dream job in blogging.
Here’s the new URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProBloggerJobs
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