Successful Blogging
From Sandro Groganz, Open Source Marketing Consultant
A collection of guidelines and tools helping you to be a successful blogger. All of them are for free available online.
Contents |
Goals
Here you can read about what you can achieve, to get a realistic idea about what it actually means to be a successful blogger.
In the end, it is completely up to you to define what you regard as successful. Do you want to make big money with Google Ads? Are you happy with just writing and sharing ideas? There are different kinds of success.
- Stop playing small: This podcast nicely sums up why raising your voice in your blog lets your personality grow.
- Forrester releases their Blog ROI whitepaper–positive blog ROI exists: This report is not for free, but the link goes to a blog entry with some useful information.
- Guy Kawasaki: A Review of My First Year of Blogging: One of the top bloggers on this planet provides some interesting facts.
- Weblog Awards: Learn from awarded Weblogs how to be successful.
- Blogging Lessons Learned: A review after 3 years of blogging by the Online Marketing Blog.
Getting Started
Various collections of helpful tips.
- Blogging for Beginners
- Blogging Tips at Blog The Internet
- Pieces Of Advice For Bloggers: A list of 25 tips.
- Essential Checklist for Starting a Blog: Make sure your blog has it all.
Etiquette
Blogging is about building relationships with your readers and other bloggers. Just as with any human interaction, your behavior should follow certain rules.
Content
What should you write about? How to deal with comments?
- The "Social Media Press Release" Debuts: A template for PR in times of social media. For example, the template suggest to include del.icio.us and RSS links.
- Blogging to Learn and Learning to Blog: Names three types of entries that are typical in most corporate blogs.
Comments
- A Need to Be Heard: To enable or disable the commenting functionality?
RSS
- 0 to 12,000 RSS Subscribers: Ways to Attract More Subscriptions: Naming the basics to take care of.
Marketing
As a blogger, you are a one-man company and need to market yourself to the blogosphere.
- Cluetrain Manifesto: The basics of communication on the Web.
- The Long Tail: Highly influential marketing paradigm.
- The Long Tail, or Just the Trailing Edge?: An alternative model talking about the center and edge of attention.
- A Marketer's Guide to Web 2.0: Good collection of resources.
- Introducing the A*I*D*A Formula for Blogging: AIDA = Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
- Recent viral marketing campaigns: Good case studies showcasing blogging as viral marketing.
- Pioneering the Participatory Web: This video gives you a "feel" for the topic.
- Business Blog Consulting: This Weblog of several blog marketing consultants offers valuable insights and keeps you up-to-date
- Federated Media: "At FM, our mission is to support independent website authors and audiences, by connecting them to marketers in an ongoing and robust conversation that feeds everyone involved."
Statistics
There are some tools available that help you to measure how successful you are.
- Google Analytics: Very helpful for detailed site statistics.
- Feedburner: Let Feedburner serve your RSS feeds and you will be able to see who subscribed to them.
- Measuring Business Blogging Success: Various other aspects allowing you to measure the success of your blog.
