First is a usability issue. They use an annoying pop-over that blocks your access to the website. They are hard to block and are the most annoying form of advertising since popups. Why have these bloggers decided to put a good user experience behind building their newsletter list? Simple, they have discovered that the annoying pop-overs work and signup rates go up. Daily Blog Tips recently did a poll asking if people would stop visiting a website that has a pop-over. The results showed that 36% of people will stop visiting blogs that have a pop-over. These once interesting blogs have been turned into nothing more than a cheesy sales page. You know the ones where they promise you XYZ in return for entering your name and email address. If you want a cheesy sales page make a cheesy sales page, don’t call it a blog.

Second, lets be honest about why they want you to subscribe to their newsletter list. It has nothing to do with community or building trust, it has to do with one thing, MONEY! I have no problem with making money, but don’t bull*&%$ me and tell me it is about building community or building trust. Permission marketing is all about getting people’s permission to sell them something. Building a newsletter list is all about making money either by selling directly or through affiliate links, driving traffic back to the blog or advertising.

One of the unique things about pop-overs is that they are hard to block. Unlike traditional popups, pop-overs are part of the webpage itself and the only way to stop them from appearing on the page is to disable Javascript. This will disable the pop-over from appearing on the website in the middle of the screen, but it will usually still appear as part of the page. By disabling Javascript globally you also disable other features that you might want to function on a website. If you are using Firefox an option you can try is to install the NoScript addon to have more control over what Javascripts are allowed to run on what websites. I have it running and have successfully blocked the annoying pop-overs from Chrisg.com, Digital Photography School, Shoemoney.com, Remarkablogger, Caroline Middlebrook and John Chow dot Com while still being able to use other Javascript features on the sites.

It is unfortunate that readers need to take such drastic actions to be able to enjoy reading blogs without being annoyed by these pop-overs. We will probably have to continue to take such actions until the bloggers either realize that they are annoying more people than they are gaining, start actually getting hurt in their pocketbooks or until big brother Google comes out with a statement saying that websites should not have pop-overs that deter from user interaction similar to statements that they make on popups.

Photo by oddsock

• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors Revisited
• Reasons Not to Blog
• Blogs on the Go - 7 Ways to Make a Mobile Blog
• Digg - A Bloggers One Night Stand
• Easy Top Post Widget

What is the point of blogging? I was reading about #motrinmoms on Twitter this morning. It seems to me that we all blog to listen to ourselves blow hot air around, but the best of us do it creatively. Even if we are trying to be helpful it all seems like nonsense to me. Therefore, blogging should be creatively talking about nothing. Like one big episode of Seinfeld. Yes/no? Discuss?

Leave a comment/trackback or email me and let me know if you write about it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

• Epiblogger Valentines Giveaway!
• It Takes a Community to Raise a Blog
• Bring the Audience to You
• Our Lives on Twitter: 140 Characters or Less
• Avoid Failure by Capturing Your Audiences Attention

Epiblogger… it’s what’s for breakfast. That was a delicious breakfast. It’s a meal like that that let’s me know I am doing ok. But I can’t say the same for Epiblogger or for the genre.

Is it just me or does everyone notice that the world would be far better off without metablogs? I subscribe to a large portion of metablogs and I can skim through them and think—what is this bullshit?

I have two problems:

• I assume that everyone thinks like me.
• I shouldn’t be passionate about anything because I just get pissed off.

The first problem is probably most peoples problem. For all I know you love metablogs. You can’t get enough of them. You could—if faithful enough—live on metablogs alone. The second problem is probably familiar as well. I don’t watch hockey because I end up spending three hours yelling at my television and it becomes obvious that I am slowly becoming my father. While I love my father, that’s not a bridge I am ready to cross.

The solution

Here is the solution as I see it: stop metablogging. But on the other hand we have a PR3 and why should give that up? Plus I think at least 4 people read this blog on rare occassion. I mean, the reasons to keep going are overwhelming.

This is point where I use an analogy

And a bad analogy at that. I think it has something about how everyone needs breakfast and I have the best breakfast in town so keep coming back to Epiblogger… right?

Lament or rejoice?

I am somewhere between being completely in love with blogging and the community it represents and disgust for the constant white noise that spewn from the general metablog community. However, who is going to benefit from me sitting around bitching about it? So what am I supposed to do? At the very least you can be happy I am using headers.

Keep going

I have ideas. We have changed the theme. I am feeling a fresh breath of air for Epiblogger. I am going to go in slightly different direction and tone with my posting here. I am going to continue to experiment with new ideas. And I suppose you’ll probably be able to find helpful stuff here too. But don’t expect me to play nice. Expect me to play nice-ish, but with a small splash of bitchy.

Long story short

I am back. I want to rejuvenate the genre of metablogging. Also, in case you don’t know, I have to talk things out. Thanks for listening.

• Do You Love Your Blog?
• Navigating the Downs
• Who Are We as Bloggers?
• A Great New Way to Blog for 2008: Conversation
• The Reality of Comments

The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin gives bloggers the ability to show custom messages to readers based upon the referrer that sent them to the blog, as well as showing a default message to users that come from a referrer that is not defined. The plugin combines many of the popular plugins so you only need to run the WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin instead of a plugin for Digg users, StumbleUpon users, Delicious users, etc etc. The plugin also works well with sites that use cache plugins by using JavaScript to output the messages. This prevents the welcome to a Stumbler of Digg user being output into the cache version of the page and being shown to the wrong person, a common problem with some of the other plugins to welcome visitors.

The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin has also made it easy to add additional messages for other referrers by simply adding a new URL and message. This can great if your blog starts to get referral traffic from a specific URL such as another blog or forum, allowing you to offer those readers a custom message.

You can download WP Greet Box from the WordPress plugin repository. It might be the plugin you were needing to be able to disable several other plugins and have a solution to welcome visitors that is compatible with cache plugins.

• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors
• Blogging with Google Maps
• Making Backup Sexy!
• Digg - A Bloggers One Night Stand
• 5 WordPress Security Essentials

Digg can send an enormous amount of traffic to a blog, there is no doubt about it, but the rush is short lived and and then you need to pick up the pieces of your smoking server and carry on. Face it Digg is like a one night stand. Like meeting someone at a night club and being taken up in the moment. Sure it might be fun for the night but the next day after you sober up and you just end up having a headache and hoping you have not caught anything. The biggest long term benefit you can gain from Digg is a chance that others will blog about you and give you some backlinks. Of course that can backfire on you as well depending on who it is that links to you. Face it, Digg is a one night stand, and nothing good ever comes from a one night stand. Look at the types of posts that people write for Digg, nothing but top 25 this and top 50 of that. Drivel! I guess that is what appeals to Digg users.

There are many bloggers that say you should write for social media, and it is tempting to come up with those kinds of list posts. I do write the occasional list post, because they are easy. They take very little thought just some time to compile the list. Great content to enhance your blog and offer something more substantial to your readers does not fit will in a huge list. Relationships take time to nurture and grow. Building relationships with people and offering them content that allows them to grow and think will provide your blog with more long term growth than the flash in the pan Digg can provide. As you write your next post think about how you can offer your readers content that will grow relationships with them and not feed them junk food.

Photo by Night Star Romanus

• Social Proof - The Masses Can’t Be Wrong
• Obscurity to Popularity - Entrecard
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors Revisited
• Reasons Not to Blog
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors

If your blog has been feeling under appreciated lately then you might be interested in joining an idea to help under appreciated blogs become more appreciated. Chuck Westbrook has an idea that might help. The idea is simple in some ways join together and appreciate other blogs and your blog will be appreciated by others. This might be just the thing to give you some new blogs to read and gain some more appreciation for some new blogs as well.

• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - The Starting Point
• Blogging is About Relationships
• Blogging with Character and Leave Botox Blogging Behind
• List Building vs. Valuing Readers
• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Choosing a Topic

AideRSS is more than just a top posts widget. AideRSS is actually a way to sort through a lot of the noise by filtering out posts by different levels based on your interests. For example you might not want to read every single post Boing Boing posts. Using AideRSS you can subscribe in your RSS reader to the best posts that they create, thus eliminating some of the noise that can clog up your RSS reader.

The side benefit of AideRSS is that they create top posts widgets. You can submit your own blogs RSS feed, such as your Blogger.com blog and AideRSS will create a top posts list sorted by what they call postrank. You can choose the time period that you want the top posts to be created from. Either year, month, week or day, and the number of top posts you would like to show. Here is a sample of Epibloggers top posts widget showing the top five posts for the year.

If you are looking for a top posts widget for your blog the AideRSS widget might be just the one you are looking for. Because it is Javascript it will create no extra load on your web hosting if you use a self hosted blogging platform and if you are on a hosted blogging platform, such as Blogger.com, most allow some Javascript widgets to be added. You could even use it to show off your friends blogs top posts if you want. With a little CSS styling you could probably make it blend in perfectly with your blog.

• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Blogging Platform
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors
• Blogging is About Relationships
• Blogging in Reruns
• Blogger Buster - Interview

Now that you have been reading and you have chosen your blogging topic you can look at what blogging platform you will use to power your blog. There are a number of blogging platforms available and each has its advantages and disadvantages. The first decision you need to make is whether you want to have a hosted blog or a self hosted blog. What is the difference? A hosted blog is one where the content of your blog is hosted on the blogging services servers. Examples of a hosted blogging service include Blogger.com, WordPress.com and TypePad. There are many other hosted blogging services and Wikipedia has a good list of available hosted blogging services.

While some people will tell you that you should never use a hosted blogging solution for your blog there are some very good reasons to use a hosted blogging service. If you do not have a very technical background a hosted blogging service can get you up and blogging faster with less headaches. You don’t have to worry about software upgrades, security is less of a concern just make sure you have a good username and password to keep your account secure. Each service has its differences and I would encourage a beginning blogger to test and experiment with each service to decide if they want to use that service. Personally, I find the Blogger.com service very easy for beginning bloggers to use. The number of settings do not seem to be as over whelming to the beginner and they have made a number of enhancements over the last few years including allowing you to have your own domain name and scheduled posts that make the service more attractive.

The biggest disadvantage to using a hosted blogging service is you do not own your content. There are many stories of blogs being closed down for any number of reasons and your content can simply vanish overnight. It is for this reason alone I like to host my own blogs on my own web hosting. Wikipedia again has a nice list of many of the open source self hosted blogging platforms that are available. If you dislike free and open source software you can also look at the proprietary weblog software that you can install and use.

If you have never blogged before and you are just starting installing blogging software on your own web hosting space I would recommend looking at WordPress as your blogging platform (no surprise there eh). There are many good reasons to use WordPress as your self hosted blogging platform. For beginners there will be a learning curve to using any blogging platform, but the self hosted WordPress is perhaps the easiest to learn from the many options that are available. Many web hosts also offer an easy to use install service called Fantastico or another similar system that will install WordPress for you quickly and easily. Dreamhost, the web host Epiblogger is now hosted with, offers a one-click installer. This takes some of the harder work out of installing WordPress. Once you have WordPress installed you can also use the easy installers to upgrade the software when new upgrades are released. While some blogging consultants recommend you don’t use the easy installers for your initial install or upgrading and there are reasons to not use it, for beginners they are useful tools. You should at some point learn how to upgrade your WordPress installation without the easy installers.

The best reason to use WordPress as your self hosted blogging platform is because of the great community of WordPress users. They are a great resource for helping bloggers of all levels from beginners to expert. Many solutions can be found for any problems you might encounter in the WordPress support forums. If there is a problem you can’t find a solution for in the WordPress support forum the widespread use of WordPress makes it easy to find a WordPress guru to pay to help solve your problem.

Your choice of blogging platform can make a large difference in your blogging. You want to make the most of your time and when you are just starting out the learning curve can be kind of steep no matter what blogging platform you chose. In my experience of working on the web and working with many different blogging platforms over the years I do find Blogger.com and WordPress, either hosted or self hosted, to be the platforms that are the easiest to use. It is also possible to move your blog at a later time to another platform if you feel you want to change. Some platforms don’t give you any options to move afterward and you will then either have to abandon your blog and start over, or find another way of moving your data, such as copying and pasting.

Your turn, every blogger has an opinion about what platform people should use. What blogging platform would you recommend to a beginner blogger?

Photo by whiteafrican

• Easy Top Post Widget
• Developing Money Making Niche Sites with WordPress
• RSS - What, Where, Why and How
• 5 WordPress Search Engine Essentials
• Making Backup Sexy!

Looking at the last 10 months of Epiblogger, it occurs to me that I have been entirely too clever. There really isn’t a lot of diversity in what I have said. I have found new ways of saying the same thing over and over again—which continues to tell me that I am bound for a life in radio, but that’s beside the point. I have been beating the idea of Organic Blogging to a green-mash. But everyone needs a bit more fibre. Keeps us regular. So, I am going to do my darnedest to be a bit more practical and try to keep my head out of the clouds.

The reason for this shift in thought? Well because I am changing and two weeks go I was laid off which forced me to completely deconstruct my thinking. Last week, I read one of my favourite bloggers was removing comments and I am disappointed.

After I was laid off and feeling like the world had just failed me (or vice versa), I watched the Band of Brothers mini-series to complete my feeling of utter disappointment and to validate the thought that the world is a bad place. Alright, so I had an ice cream and Julia Roberts day. Except it was nachos and explosions and the utter depravity of humanity captured for my viewing pleasure. One of the great things I understood from watching the series is the nature of leadership. The best leaders, the best teachers, the best bloggers are those that are in shoulder-to-shoulder in the muck.

There’s a problem with that analogy. It’s not completely true. Obviously, if we follow through with the military analogy, the Generals aren’t getting their feet-wet. However, if they are the best leaders, then they will realize where they came from. If I started a blog where I lectured you on topics A, B and C and had no comments from the start, that would be fine. However, if I started a blog, building a community and reputation through comments and communication, then I pulled a Caesar on you—it feels disappointing.

I didn’t start this blog at the top. I started shoulder-to-shoulder with people in similar stations. And if Lee and I ever get to the top, I hope we never consider removing the community’s—who’s been so gracious as to spend their time with us—voice.

I get that some people are assholes. Some have bad advice. Some just like to give you a bunch of useless knowledge interwoven with a new practical spirit *cough*. Some people want attention. And some genuinely want to discuss and converse about the nature of the topic at hand. When it comes to community and comments, you can’t shut out the same people who support you and you have to deal with all types of people.

In retrospect, now that I have my friends and family helping me find employment—even though I lost my faith in humanity momentarily—I have seen the bad side, but I have seen the best side from people that I don’t even know. People who want to help in anyway they can. I promise that as long as I believe in humanity, I will believe in conversations.

Ultimately, there are bad people out there, but I believe that more-or-less most people just want to help. It would be prudent for yourself to accept that help. I know that Lee and I are not going to go anywhere without you.

You take the good and take the bad… and I think we all know where this is heading:

Photo by Sammis Co

• I am part of the problem
• The Cool Bloggers
• Social Proof - The Masses Can’t Be Wrong
• Nationality and Blogging
• Bring the Audience to You

I personally was using the method I described in my previous post on my webmaster blog, and it worked great. The biggest problem was the need to redo it after every upgade. Granted the time spent redoing it is nothing compared to dealing with the hundreds of robots leaving comment spam. After the last upgrade I did not have time to complete my spam fix due to other time pressures and commitments. It did not take long for the comment bots to start taking advantage of the opening. In a few short days I had hundreds of automated comment spam piling and stinking up my blog like the giant a pile of horse shit that it is. Thank goodness for Akismet that kept it off my blog so I did not have to sort through the comments and delete them.

That is when I found WP-SpamFree. WP-SpamFree uses a combination of Javascript and Cookies to prevent automated comment spam from being left. While it works on a different principle than the method I described in my method, it relies on the fact that many automated comment bots cannot handle Javascript and cookies. It is an effective combination. I have been running it on my webmaster blog for just over two weeks and the number of comment spam that I have received has dropped to nearly zero. Looking at the web server log files I can tell that the comment spam I have received has been from actual people visiting the site and leaving it, not from automated comment bots.

Installation is as easy as any other WordPress plugin. Simply download the plugin and unzip it. You will need to upload it to your WordPress blog into the plugins folder. Once it has been uploaded simply activate it in your WordPress administration section by clicking Activate on the plugins page. Once it is activated you will see a WP-SpamFree menu available on the Plugins section. Here you can configure the plugin and set some additional settings to deal with trackback and pingback spam as well as some contact form settings.

If your WordPress blog is swimming in automated comment spam give the WP-SpamFree plugin a try. It might make a world of difference in the amount of comment spam you have to sort through.

• Keep the Comment Bots at Bay
• WordPress Annoyances
• Blog Spring Cleaning
• 5 WordPress Security Essentials
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors Revisited

As I was watching the movers pack up our house into the truck in Rosthern and then later that day spending the night at our new house in Regina it struck me how both these places were just houses. They had no personality, they were just empty shells waiting to be filled with our lives, our memories and our stories.

Since then my children have made new friends who are routinely coming and playing in our house and backyard. The neighbours have welcomed us to the block with some baking, and certificates to eat out while we were getting settled and this new house in Regina has slowly started to feel like our home as more and more of us comes out in how we care for the place, how we decorate the rooms and as our stories start to be told here.

Blogs are likes houses, they are nothing but empty shells waiting to be filled with our stories that will make the blog our online home of our lives. It is not easy to risk and expose ourselves on our blogs. It is like welcoming strangers into your home, but for those that we connect with our lives will become richer with the new relationships we have created on our digital home. Do we welcome people to our blogs like they are coming to our home or are they merely strangers that we want to make leave as quickly as possible?

• The First Official Epiblogger Meetup
• Blogging in Reruns
• Make Your Blog Work for You
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors
• Blogging with Character and Leave Botox Blogging Behind

I read an interesting post yesterday of how to save thousands of hours by not writing as much (”My ‘content is king’ belief was directly responsible for the loss of hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of my time”). The premise of the post makes sense. Write only quality stuff, less frequency and use the rest of the time to market or do jumping-jacks or picking your nose. But what about creating intimacy?

You know what I could have done to save 10, at least 20 dollars and probably 25 minutes of my life?! I could have gone straight home yesterday and had my wife pluck my eyebrows. Rhett, what the hell is wrong with you? Think of those savings! Well, let me tell you about the problem with intimacy—you are too intimate. Brilliant, I know. Please, don’t applaud.

My wife knows me and I am a total wuss. Frankly, I would (and have) whined and cried and scream and yelled if she tried to come at me with tweezers. Leah and I know each other too well and are too comfortable around each other. However, when I go to the scalding-wax lady social etiquette says that I can’t whine/cry/scream/yell at her. I have to be tough. I am not allowed to give into my inner wuss. It’s time to man-up and get my eyebrows groomed.

The problem with intimacy is that you can’t fake it. Maybe a small tear slipped out during the waxing yesterday, but I maintain that was just because she was pulling out hairs near my eyes and so… it… made a tear… come out. It hurts, a lot. Okay? Lay off. But I am beautiful for it.

The problem with creating intimacy on your blog is that people are going to know when you aren’t really engaged or when you are dreaming about other, younger blogs. No one is crying out Problogger anymore. It’s all Oh Ittybiz or Mmm MenWithPens.

Wow, that was a real tangent. Plus, if there ever was an analogy in this post I totally destroyed it. But you don’t need analogies, you aren’t four years old. You don’t need stories about Buzz Lightyear, no matter how dreamy you are. Okay maybe sometimes we need analogies. Lord have mercy, get on topic Rhett.

Maybe Mr. Save-Thousands-of-Hours was right in saying that creating content for the sake of content doesn’t and has never made sense. You will never save time, but you can use the time you have to offer insightful information and connect with the community around you. Create intimacy where it makes sense, like on your blog.

Creating quality content will always be a hit. Creating quality content with a sense of intimacy and sharing will be a knock-out. (Do you ever get a sense when you write closing lines like that one that you are a huge cornball? Me neither.)

Photo by Cia de Foto (You should check out this persons photos, they are fantastic)

• Keywords Does Not a Blog Make
• RSS - What, Where, Why and How
• A Great New Way to Blog for 2008: Conversation
• Blogging with Google Maps
• Firefox, A Blogger’s Best Friend

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:

• Our Lives on Twitter: 140 Characters or Less
• 5 WordPress Security Essentials
• The Cool Bloggers
• Blogging with Character and Leave Botox Blogging Behind
• Blogs on the Go - 7 Ways to Make a Mobile Blog
• Nationality and Blogging
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors
• WordPress Annoyances
• The War of Numbers
• Why Real Estate is Nothing like Blogging

We will continue our regularly scheduled blogging soon!

Photo by dawnzy58

• Easy Top Post Widget
• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - The Starting Point
• Developing Money Making Niche Sites with WordPress
• Blogging with Google Maps
• Blog Spring Cleaning

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

• RSS - What, Where, Why and How
• Obscurity to Popularity - Entrecard
• Digg - A Bloggers One Night Stand
• It Takes a Community to Raise a Blog
• Use WordPress to Welcome Visitors

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?

• Keywords Does Not a Blog Make
• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - The Starting Point
• A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Blogging Platform
• Lather, Rinse, Repeat
• A Great New Way to Blog for 2008: Conversation

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.

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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?

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Once again, I am speaking in generalities and just making observations. About two months ago, I was in Vegas. I was overwhelmed, but Vegas is no place to make general judgments about America. But Idaho feels like a good place. It’s a little more realistic.

You might say that Canadians have a bit of a mania about being compared to Americans. It would likely be fair to say we are often overshadowed by the magnitude of America. But the truth is we are extremely similar to America, in many ways. We hold very similar values, but there are small differences that make us individual.

In my last Nationality and Blogging post, I was concerned about having Authority. And I wonder if this push for authority comes from the congested areas of the world. The west side of Idaho is very similar to Alberta (the province where I live). Trees, hills, mountains, lakes, rivers and ranchers. One major difference is simply the amount of people. Canada has some 30 million people. America has 300 million. Even in Idaho, I could feel the swell of people. It’s a subtle difference, but once you sense it, the feeling doesn’t go away (or it didn’t for me). Therefore, I can’t help but wonder if the necessity to be noticed amongst the crowd only increases.

So how do you Americans stand out in such a big crowd? Perhaps that’s not a question I can answer. But the people along the trip who stood out to me were the honest ones. Like the woman at the gas station who made fun of me for asking the time when there were clocks on every single wall. The border guards, who had a lot of authority, were just another face in the crowd.

But, I open the floor to you American or non-American bloggers once again. Let me hear what you have to say.

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It can be difficult to constantly be creating new and creative posts for your blog. To be creative and a better writer you need to take a break occasionally. Your mind will relax, your body will relax and most importantly you will return in a better state of mind to continue pouring your heart and soul into your blog.

I think we have some great posts coming up in the next little while when Rhett and I return from our holidays. Rhett, I believe, is going to continue his series on “Being Sold (Out)”. I have also started a series of posts specifically for new bloggers. Posts that will help people get started blogging. It will be great to come back full of energy and ideas.

What do you think should bloggers take vacations from blogging?

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