Blogging in Reruns

August 5, 2008 – 2:30 pm

When I was a kid I used to hate watching television in the summer. Looking back that was probably not a bad thing since it got me outside and playing, but the reason I hated watching television during the summer was because all of the shows were reruns. I never understood then that they don’t sit and make televisons shows all year long and that it takes time to create shows. Fast forward to today where I realize it takes time and energy to create content for television, media, and of course blogs. Time is something that has been very precious to me so far this summer. My family and I made it a priority to spend time together during July before making a move to Regina SK. Rhett has recently become a home owner and has been swamped with holidays and work himself.

Recently there have been some highlights for Epiblogger. We made Liz Strauss’ 260 Blogs: 260,000 Thank Yous! Rhett and I would both like to thank Liz for including Epiblogger on her list. There are some great blogs that she showcased. If you want to subscribe to all of the blogs that Liz showcased in a feed reader you can use an OPML file that Barbera Ling put together.

Epiblogger has been open now since January 1st of this year and I thought you might be interested in visiting or revisiting some of the more popular posts that we had over the last 7 months. Of course you are also welcome to browse the archives for some of our other great posts. I am sure this will probably make Rhett grimace, but here are the top ten posts on Epiblogger since we opened our doors to the world:

We will continue our regularly scheduled blogging soon!

Photo by dawnzy58

By Lee Robertson Posted in Blogging Comments (0)

Social Proof - The Masses Can’t Be Wrong

July 23, 2008 – 11:00 pm

Photo by Kevin BriodyWe all want our blogs to be a success, we toil day after day to create unique content, participate in social media to help drive traffic to our sites, and do our best to make the RSS feed subscription button easy to see and click. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that helps people determine if their behaviour is appropriate. It is sometimes also know as the bandwagon effect. Little did you know that social proof might be playing a larger part in the success of your blog than you might realize.

Look at your blog, what forms of social proof do you use to show people that they should continue to visit and subscribe to your blog? One of the most noticeable items of social proof is the feed count. We love to display the number of loyal readers that we have reading our blog. Here at Epiblogger we choose not to display our feed count, but as of this writing our feed count sits at 86 subscribers. It has gone as high as 96. Displaying your feed count is a form of social proof. The theory goes if you have 20,000 subscribers certainly your blog must be worth reading and people are more likely to subscribe to your blog. The reverse is also true, if you only have 10 readers why would people bother to subscribe to your blog. There are many people that will argue that they don’t subscribe to blogs if they don’t like the content, but once you have a decent RSS subscriber count it can be worthwhile to display the number. It can lead to more subscribers on a regular basis.

Another form of social proof on a blog is the comments. Blogs that get more comments appear more lively and are more interesting to other readers. It encourages new readers to take part and creates more of a sense of community. As of writing this post Epiblogger has 97 posts and 382 comments. that is a comment to post ratio of 3.94 comments per post. Find ways to highlight your comments. Those conversations and activity help people to feel they have a place on your blog and can help draw people into your blog. Trackbacks and pingbacks are also an important part of the comments. It shows people what kind of conversations have been going on around the web because of your post.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatelog widgets and others like them are great social proof widgets on blogs. They should you the faces and sometimes the names of the people that have visited your blog. they also provide a way for people to join your blog community on those websites where people can see even more social proof of how popular your blog is. I think it is great that Epiblogger has 30 members at MyBlogLog. If that helps people to find us and keeps people reading then great.

Social media can provide another form of social proof on your blog. If you are active on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg or another social media community let people know on your blog. If you have hundreds of followers and take part in the communities it can help boost your blog profile. Many people don’t subscribe to RSS feeds but will follow you on the social media websites you participate in and come back again and again to read your posts.

What other forms of social proof do you use and see on blogs that help to draw people to be regular readers and visitors to your blog?

Photo by Kevin Briody

By Lee Robertson Posted in Promotion Comments (3)

A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Choosing a Topic

July 16, 2008 – 1:10 pm

Rhett ShavedYou have been doing lots of reading, and you are now at the point where you know you want to start a blog. The next step to start blogging is to decide what you want to blog about. What will your blog focus on?

Personal Blogs

If you want to start a personal blog this step can be very easy. Personal blogs allow you a great deal of flexibility to talk about what ever you wish. You can talk about your family, experiences, your hobbies. While I do not currently have a personal blog, Rhett is currently running a personal blog at Bailing Bucket. I think Rhett’s blog is a great personal blog. It allows people a chance to get to know the “real” Rhett. His blog is a part of who he is. Don’t be fooled into thinking that personal blogs do not have a focus, it is still important for a personal blog to have a focus. For example on Rhett’s blog you will rarely see him talk about work. Rhett’s focus is to talk about who he is, not what he does for a living.

Topic Blogs

If you want to start a topic blog that is more focused than a personal blog you might have more research to do before moving on to the next step. To start a topic blog the first place to look to focus your topic is inside you. Find a topic that you enjoy it will make writing for your blog much easier otherwise you will be nothing more than a botox blogger. You need to find your character and bring you to the blog. Without adding your unique perspective and story to your blog you are not going to add anything new or interesting.

Once you have narrowed down your topic to a few do some research on your topic. Search Google for other blogs that are on your topic. Do some keyword research using the SEOBook.com Keyword Research Tool and Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to determine if there is enough people interested in your topic. You might find there is already a lot of competition on a particular topic, but if you narrow it down you might find it easier to write. Perhaps focusing your topic on a more local level or on a specific area like families. Even if you are interested in a competitive topic don’t give up hope. Find what it is that you have that is unique and you can still be a success.

If you want to make money from your blog (don’t we all want to make a living from our blog) you will want to look at some ways that you can monetize your blog. When a blog is new it can be best to look at using some affiliate networks. Look for products and services that you use on your topic, and consider placing those ads and maybe writing a post or two about the products or services and why you use them and recommend them. Be genuine. For example here on Epiblogger, Rhett and I have placed two ads. Rhett purchases t-shirts on a regular basis from Uneetee.com and I use MozyHome as an online backup solution for my personal computer. We did not choose those ads lightly. We only wanted to recommend products and services that we personally use. Being genuine in your recommendation will help a great deal in your blog monetization. I will talk more about how to monetize your blog later in the series as well.

What are some ways that you focus your blog topic when you start a new blog?

By Lee Robertson Posted in Blogging Comments (3)

Niches are Non-Renewable

July 11, 2008 – 1:22 pm

Oil PumpjackPumpjacks are part of my landscape. I live in Alberta which is a resource rich province. The other day our premiere said that a lot of our resources are just waiting to be developed. Developed is a great word to use. We wouldn’t want to say those resources are just waiting to be ripped, guzzled or burned out of the earth, leaving a wake of devastation and toxicity. No, no, our non-renewable resources are just waiting to be developed. Just dig deeper, go further and we will find the oil. It will always be there, right?

I was talking to my friend Mark Steadman earlier this week about authority. He felt he didn’t have much because his niche is saturated. Which is interesting. Mark is a brilliant .NET Developer who is currently working on his own CMS, as well as a brilliant podcast and working full-time. How can he not have authority? It’s because there’s a bizillion other .NET developers, all blogging and all using up authority in that area. Authority is being shared and can Mark, can I get a piece of that pie?

If you want to be an authority, at anything, you have to develop, dig deeper, go further and you will find an undiscovered niche. A gem waiting for you to exploit. That’s where your authority lies. There will always be another niche, right?

I think you could argue and say that I am just not imaginative enough. If I were truly engaged I would find a niche. Or I did the unthinkable and dive into a heavily developed niche, like metablogging, and try to yank some authority from my, would-be, competitors: Darren, Chris, Liz, and so on. And if I want to get authority I need to link to my competitors so that they will notice me and hopefully take pity on me and spare some change. In real life, I am a normal/weird, happy person and online I am a panhandler for authority.

Even Seth noticed this the other day:

It’s tempting to use a medium to write about the medium. It works for a while, but there’s a limit.

Sooner or later, our niche runs out. The well goes dry. It’s all used up. We have nothing else to say or someone else says it better. So we go back to the drawing board and start again. Develop, dig and go further. This method hasn’t lead us astray yet, has it?

Yes, it has. It has in the real world and it has online. Global warming is real, just as much as our desires to mine the internet for every last dollar. But, at the risk of pushing this analogy to it’s breaking point, there are other ways to develop authority. We don’t have to use coal to make power and we don’t have to exploit niches for authority.

And the answer is the exact same thing I have been saying all along. We have to reassess how we approach the net. We need to start with a renewable resource. Something that continues to grow without running out.

Let me suggest to you that you (or your “people”)—yes, you—are that renewable resource. When you come before the subject, when you bring yourself into the equation, that your niche, your content and your authority grows through your vitality. We when approach the web organically than we have something that will only run out if we let it.

Photo by Amanda

By Rhett Soveran Posted in Blogging, Writing Comments (1)

A Beginners Guide to Blogging - The Starting Point

July 9, 2008 – 2:00 pm

Infinite StaircaseBetween Rhett and I we have been blogging for just over four years. That might not sound like a long time, but consider that the first post you can find on Problogger is September 30, 2004 which is just over four years ago and the amount of experience that Rhett and I have as bloggers combined is not that different from Darren Rowse. I have also been involved in creating websites and other web projects since 1994 so I have been working on the Internet for 14 years. I do not say that to brag, but rather to make the point that it can be hard for me to step back and look at blogging from the eyes of a beginner. Rhett gives me a rough time occasionally that my posts are to “technical”, and that might be true but there is a place for the more technical blogging posts. Sometimes you just want to know how to do something. The problem with being technical is we forget that not everyone is at that level. With that in mind this is the first of a series of posts where I will try and give you a non-technical explanation about how to start blogging.

The Starting Point

I tend to jump in to web projects feet first. Meaning I jump right in and start installing WordPress, start writing and just start going. When Rhett came to be with the idea of Epiblogger the first thing I did was read, and I read a lot. Why should we start another blog about blogging? There are so many out there. I read through a Problogger, I read through Copyblogger, I read DailyBlogTips, I read Lorelle on WordPress, I read, I read and I read. In the end we decided to go ahead with Epiblogger because in all the reading we did we decided we have a unique perspective on blogging to give to people.

The point is if you think you might be interested in starting a blog, the first thing I would suggest you do is read. Read other blogs, take part in those in those communities and start to explore what it is you would like to blog about. While you are exploring other blogs, reading and taking part in the discussions you can explore what it is that you really want to blog about. I have talked about this before, and if you are a regular reader of Epiblogger you might be getting sick of me saying it, but you need to find your passion! Great blogs are not created by keyword research, they are created because the people that write for them are passionate about their topic.

What are some blogs that you spent time reading before you started your blog? What advice would you give a new blogger about where to start blogging?

Photo Infinite staircase by fdecomite

By Lee Robertson Posted in Blogging Comments (6)
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