31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge Roundup – Days 4-21

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The main goal of this blog is to help people bridge the gap between their “real” life and their “online” life. Some people have a rich online life that is limited to email and browsing, but think they absolutely cannot have a website of their own, that they don’t know where to start, and so forth.
The beauty of this 31-day challenge promoted by Problogger’s Darren Rowse is that it helps you, step by step, improve your blog (but a lot of the advice is valuable also for other kinds of websites) with specific tasks. The only thing you need to bear in mind is that for this challenge to be truly helpful, you must already have a blog or website. This challenge is for those who are not absolute beginners, but are not yet fully fledged professionals. The in-betweens. I fall into this category, so it is the ideal challenge for me. I have a few followers, I have some subscribers, I have a newsletter that is slowly growing, and I am set up for advertising and affiliate sales. I just have to find new ways of letting people know that I exist and giving them good content they can enjoy and perhaps learn something from.
In this post I am going to give you a rundown of the daily tasks so far in the challenge, with a brief description of each, but I will pay special attention to those tasks that I think are the most useful (though not always the easiest). Here goes:

• Day 4 – Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche – the biggest difficulty here is not the analysis, but finding blogs in your category. The best places to look are: Google Blog Search and Technorati. Both of these services gather the top blogs in many categories and allow you to search the categories. This task is interesting because you have to really think about who you are as a blogger, whom you are talking to, your audience, what you are trying to achieve. For this blog, it would seem easy enough: tech tips for the computer-challenged. Guess what, I can’t find a top blog that really does what I am trying to do here. There are a lot of how-to blogs but not many that are trying to help people who think the web is too hard or has passed them by marry their offline skills with their online potential. Once you find the blogs, you look at various different things they are doing and make note of the ones you think would help you the most. Then you plan on adopting them, and then you start doing it.
• Day 5 – Email a Blog Reader – A great way to build your readership and develop loyal readers and subscribers is to interact directly with them. If you have a few comments already on your blog, email someone who left a comment in person and connect with them by expanding on the topic of the comment. You can also leave comments on their blogs, and respond to their comment in your own comment section. All this will help build community.
• Day 6 – 27 Must Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers – This title is self-explanatory. Head on over to Problogger and give a few of the great articles gathered here a gander. You will learn a lot!
• Day 7 – Write a Link Post – The task for day 7 is exactly what I am doing with this very post. This touches upon a theme that I consider to be of vital importance when doing anything online. The virtual community is different from “real life” communities in many ways, but there are far more similarities between the two than there are differences. The same rules of courtesy, generosity, kindness, reciprocity and just plain common sense apply in both worlds. And some commonplace truths are even more true online than off. Chief among these is: the more you give, the more you get (or any other variation on the “what goes around comes around” theme). I hope that this blog will become a place where people come when they want advice about how to do things online, where they feel they can ask questions and get answers. So why would I point you in the direction of Problogger, a site that does many of the things I want to do so much better, has been around for so much longer, has so much more rich and valuable content than I have, etc? Because Problogger is the best site for those who want to learn about blogging professionally. And that is only one of the things I want to help people do. One of the chief functions of this blog is exactly this, to point people in the right directions. If you look for a blog on blogging on Google, you will find thousands of blogs that say they do what Problogger does. How are you supposed to know which one to choose as your go-to resource? That’s what I am here for. I comb and scour the web and I ferret out the best sites, and then I tell you about them and point you in the right direction. This way, people come to me to get directions, and they get directions to the best resources. Everybody wins. I get readers, Problogger and other top sites get readers, and our readers get the best advices, the best resources there are. So when you are building a site, don’t feel competitive towards other bloggers or website owners. There is room for all of us. The important thing is to feel that you have something unique, something of your own to contribute. If that is the case, there is no need to compete. You will find your audience. But you will find it much faster, more easily, and it will be more fun if you build a community and communicate with other bloggers.
• Day 8 – Interlink Your Old Blog Posts – If you have written posts that are in some way related, it’s a good idea to link them together. People will stay longer on your blog, going from one article to another, and it will have the added benefit of raising your rank in Google. Links coming from other sites to yours are the most useful, but internal links also count. Occasionally I refer to a previous post in one of my articles, and link to it, but the ongoing way I have created internal links is to create Series of articles (in this blog I have a Series page, and this Challenge is the second series I have started, but in my other blog, turtle^haus, I have many article series). I also use the plugin that automatically suggests related posts at the end of each article. If the article is part of a series, it will recommend other articles of the series, but sometimes it will also recommend others.
• Day 9 – Join a Forum and Start Participating – This is a tough one for me, but it could be one of your strongest tools to building a large fan base for your blog. It’s not easy to find forums that are “right up your alley” and even when you do, they are not always easy to navigate and use. In addition, they are very time consuming. The good thing about forums, if you have the stamina to get a handle on using them, is that every time you post a comment, answer someone’s question, etc., you are adding a link to your own blog coming from outside (the best for generating traffic and raising your ranking) and you are also creating a community. If what you say is useful to people, they will click on your links and read your blog, and many of them will become loyal readers. Don’t underestimate the power of forums, because they could be the places where your potential readers are already gathering online.
• Day 10 – Set up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche – This is a topic I have on my editorial calendar to talk about; in particular Google Alerts. The task here is to set up some online alerts that will deliver to your email inbox the links to what other people are saying online about topics you are interested in, need to know about, are relevant to your blog. It’s quick and easy. Two most important benefits: stay on top of breaking news so you can build and maintain your reputation as an expert in your field, and get ideas for posts when you are running dry. Several types of alerts are outlined here, all very useful.
• Day 11 – Come up with 10 Post Ideas – This is a great task for anyone wanting to create online content (or even offline content, for that matter). Take a few posts you have written and brainstorm about how the same topics could be expanded. It doesn’t take long and it’s surprisingly easy. The best part is that this way you develop content that has a direction, rather than a random assemblage of unrelated posts.
• Day 12 – Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog – This is something I’ve done myself, and have also written about. This could be one of your most important tools. You can use a spreadsheet or paper (like I do) but you assign a post per day or per writing day (not everyone posts every day). Use the posts you brainstormed about in the previous task, and as you write new ideas will come to you. This takes a lot of the fear out of blogging, because you already know you have material to write about.
• Day 13 – Take a Trip to the ‘Mall’ and Improve Your Blog – This is an exercise in observation. If you watch people’s behavior in a shopping mall, you will get lots of ideas on how they behave online as well. A few examples of things learned: People often do what other people are doing, bestseller lists work, people like to be acknowledged but not overwhelmed.
• Day 14 – Update a Key Page on Your Blog – This is useful and important to remember. Some key pages to update are the About page and the Contact page on your blog. If you don’t have them, create them now, and periodically go and update them. It will improve your traffic and your relationship with your readers.
• Day 15 – Find a Blog Buddy – Many new bloggers try to forge relationships with top-tier bloggers, knowing that even one link from one of those can lead to a huge surge in traffic. We must remember, however, that it’s better to have a slow and steady growth than a few peaks with very deep valleys in between. Having a blogging buddy means that each can help build the popularity of the other’s blog. My buddy is Mario Kluser of Mario LIVE! and he and I very often link to each other’s posts, comment on each other’s posts, Digg, Stumble and favorite on Technorati each other’s posts. By doing this we help each other gain in popularity and visibility. We also encourage and motivate each other. If you don’t have a buddy, head over to the 31-DBBB forums and you’re bound to find someone!
• Day 16 – Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems – This is the perfect type of task for a blog like this one, whose goal is exactly that, to solve readers’ problems. I have the “Ask Egg Bird” feature in this blog, and when a reader asks me a question I write a post or in some cases a series of posts to show that reader how to solve the problem. The fact is that if one person has that problem, chances are a lot of other people have it too. If you have readers who ask questions, great. If not, there are tools and methods of seeing what kind of searches bring people to your blog.
• Day 17 – Watch a First-Time Reader Use Your Blog – Find a friend or colleague who has never seen your blog, offer them coffee and sit them down in front of your blog. Observe how they navigate, what they look at, where they linger, etc. Then ask them questions about their experience. This is invaluable, and should be done periodically.
• Day 18 – Create a Sneeze Page for Your Blog – A sneeze page is a page that links to posts buried deep in your archives. Over time the many posts in the archives are buried deeper and deeper, and blogs are designed in such a way that a new reader only sees the most recent posts. By creating a page that links back to many good past posts, you will not lose the value of that content, and it’s very good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well. My Series pages are meant to function as sneeze pages. As I go along, every time I create a series I am guaranteeing a longer life for the posts that are part of it. The Series page directs readers to all the articles I’ve ever written as part of a series.
• Day 19 – Write an Opinion Post on Your Blog – If you just stick to reporting things, even if they are relevant to your niche or field, you will inevitably end up blending into the crowd. When you express your opinion about the things you write about you are showing that you care about your topic and you are acting as an arbiter of taste or opinion to your readers. If you have an opinion you will stand out.
• Day 20 – Leave Comments on Other Blogs – The first and most constant piece of advice to new bloggers on how to build traffic to your site: Leave Comments. You will keep up with others in your niche, develop relationships with other bloggers, leaving links to your own site, and making yourself known around the internet. Be thoughtful, contribute, add value.
• Day 21 – Breathe Life Into an Old Post – If you have a post that did not perform well in your statistics, it may have been written in a rush, or perhaps the material is dated. There may be many reasons… update it, edit it, refresh the writing, improve on the title, go into more depth… your blog and your brand will benefit.

This post may turn out to be one of the most important I’ve written. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Those looking for a guide to the 31-Day Challenge will be able to find it here, one-stop shopping, and they will be able to decide for themselves which of the ideas to try to apply to their own sites;
2. The beauty of this challenge is that the 31 days are purely indicative. All of these tips and strategies are to be employed over and over again, over time, as your blog ages and grows. So this resource is as much for me as it is for my readers. I will be able to come back to it at any time and apply whatever strikes my fancy that day.

For all those attempting the challenge, good luck!

Tagged as: Blog, Darren Rowse, Google Blog Search, On the Web, problogger.net, Technorati, Virtual community