Today I’m simply going to recommend a blog that is very much worth reading. Chris Guillebeau has a very successful blog. He offers incredible value, and writes engaging content. On top of that, he offers two well written thought provoking ebooks free of charge. Truly, he is remarkable.
"No one will give you links without you earning them. To earn them, you’ll need to do something remarkable. When you receive inbound links, it’s like getting paid." – Chris Gillebeau
Enjoy his blog.
Ben
Not blogging at all. Or blogging infrequently. I rarely advise website owners I don’t know well to start a blog. A good blog is a rare thing, but a blog doesn’t always have to be good (as in well written) to be effective. At the very least it lets people know you and your business is active.
Until you stop.
And then blog becomes damaging, because even if no-one notices your blog after 4 hard months of writing, believe me they will notice if you’ve stopped for any length of time. They’ll ask questions if your latest post is months out of date. Questions they’ll guess the answer to, and you can bet they won’t be favourable.
Blogging is good when it is done. If you give up part way through, better not to have started.
Ben
Some good advice I had today was never to blog more than two or three times a week. Why? When your blog becomes popular, it can take a few days for the posts to filter down through the various content-sharing sites (such as technorati, digg or slashdot). If you keep posting new content every day, the people coming to your site front page looking for content from 3 days ago will have a much harder time getting to where they want to be.
However, until you reach that stage, write as frequently as possible and build up a resource. Writing every day will pay off in the long run (when your site reaches true popularity, then feel free to consider writing less).
Ben
SEO people will tell you that writing comments in blogs and getting link backs is an excellent strategy. What you should do, is go along, write something semi-relevant, and plug your website. Guaranteed traffic, links back, and page-rank-increases will follow! Even without understanding what that means, it sounds authoritive, and it sounds convincing.
But it’s all complete nonsense.
Write something interesting. If you enjoyed reading something, let the author know – it’s a nice thing to do. If you disagree, that’s fine too (though please at least say why, there’s nothing worse than absolutions such as "that sucked!", without any indication as to why that may be the case). Don’t plug your product, service, website, own blog or anything else. Blatent "plugging" will never get past any real blog-owner, and you are wasting your time.
But the worst thing you can do (and a client of mine once had this), was pay for a company to write comments on blogs, and then discover that they are using people in third world countries to write things like "I really like what you do, let’s discuss opportunities to work together".Can you imagine the embarrasment when one of the blog owners called up to try and book a meeting!
Writing comments on blogs is a great opportunity to connect with people, by giving good feedback or adding thoughtful insight on the topic of conversation. Anything less is a missed opportunity.
Here are some basic pointers for survival:
Having written a few blogs over the years, I’m no stranger to spam comments – but the oddest I have ever recieved arrived here this morning:
Hi, brother, please, need your help. My sickly old dad didnt read the label on the energy drink can before opening it and giving it to my 3 year? Thenk you. I am vaiting for answer!!!
Doctor Ben to the rescue? I think not. All I hope, is that someone had the sense to dial 999 before writing a comment on my web strategy for businesses blog…
Ben
