In the first week of Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune, we spend a lot of time looking at different blogs. We look at little blogs, big blogs, indie blogs, corporate blogs and everything in between. Part of the reason is to get a scope of blog diversity. Another reason is to initiate students into blogging communities. The third reason that I have students look at so many blogs is to help them get a sense of what works and what doesn’t work for them with blogs. This can encompass topic, style, perspective and more.

For part of this week’s assignment, I am asking that students comment on this post. The comment should state your personal favorite blog that you reviewed this week and a couple of sentences of why it was your favorite. The comments on this blog are moderated. The first time you post on this blog, I must approve the comment before it will appear.  So don’t fear if you don’t see your comment go live right away.

Feeling stuck with your blog? Want to start a blog but not sure where to start? Journal blogs can be really helpful, even cathartic at times. People have benefitted from journal writing for years and now online journals give you another medium to do so. But having another means of doing it doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to start sometimes!
Mary, a former blog student and a LVS Online Instructor, posted some good ideas on different types of journals on her blog. In her post she also provides some additional links to help you with journalling. If you are wanting a journal style of blog, you might also be interested in taking one of her memoir classes. She is offering a $3 off coupon on her blog to sweeten the deal. Here are more details about the Writing Your Memoirs class.

Thank you for all of you that took the time to give your suggestions to the blogging course. LVS Online has found an instructor that will create a beginning hobby blogging class but it is still in the works. This course will provide instruction, opportunities and support for those of you that want to blog to change the world and/or your wallet. The more time that you devote to the lessons and assignments, the more opportunities to increase your fame and fortune. This class is for people that want to:

• Learn about the business of blogging
• Learn how to set up a WordPress blog
• Write posts that will attract attention in search engines and blog directories
• Build a social network to support your blog, your cause, your business
• Have fun!

This session, I have revised the lessons for WordPress version 2.6 and changed some of the sequencing. I have also added an assistant, Anita, to help me. Registration is now open at LVS Online. Sign up here and I am looking forward to ’seeing’ you all when classes start on August 30!

Controversy

Taking on a controversal topic in your blog requires a clear opinion or a keen awareness of your own ambivalence and indecision. Some of us shy away from controversy while others may crave the energy and attention that stirring up a hornet’s nest brings. Some bloggers will try to create controversal headlines to attract readers but fail to follow through in providing information or insight to the conversation.

Is it Art or Porn?

Recently, one of the LVS students successfully presented a controversial subject and offered both information and insight to the controversy while encouraging her readers to examine their own stand. Art is a very personal topic and has certainly been controversial for ages. Add in the religious, societal, personal and political values that we hold in regards to nudity and you are upping in the ante. Bring in the subject of children and without care you have such an explosive topic that emotions and outrage cloud all opportunities for meaningful discussion. In her blog post on the Bill Henson Controversy and nudity in art, she does a masterful job of bringing the current controversy to frame her own questions and musings about nudity in art.

Light and Shadow

From the artist’s perspective, the human form is a interesting collection of angles and curves, light and shadow. Like the choices they make in regards to paints and medium, an artist uses angles and curves to convey their message and to garner an emotional response. Sometimes the choice of nudity is a conscious one, banking on the emotional response of the audience to the nude. Sometimes it less conscious as the artist focuses on the subject not as a nude but light and shadow.  When an artist focuses on the latter, it can be a surprise to them when the audience reacts to the nudity instead of the shadows they lovingly created or captured. The same can be true of the blogger. 

Bringing it Full Circle

When dealing with a controversial subject, you might be posting with a particular focus and expecting feedback on that focus. It can be a bit startling to start getting emotional reactions to what you construed to be the minor facts of your blog post. Blogging can be an enlightening education on the views and ethics of many communities. Quirky Artist explores the diverse reactions to nudity in art, acknowledges her own journey to her current stand. This includes discussing her grey areas and her convictions are clear.  She brings her posting to a close by stating her own personal stand in the Bill Henson controversy. Her headline was not just to entice the reader, she used it to frame the entire post in a very successful way.

I encourage you to visit her post and join in the discussion. Look at how she handled controversy and how you might envision discussing controversal topics in your own blog.

Do not put anything online that you wouldn’t put on a grocery store bulletin board

That is basically the advice of the Women’s Dish Blog about how much information to disclose online when searching for a new job. When it comes to social networking sites, you might want to consider even less. You might put your phone number on that supermarket bulletin board when you have a litter of kittens that need homes, but I wouldn’t advocate posting your phone number on social networking sites. There are exceptions to that, especially for freelancers that have a business phone that can be screened. A business blog with a brick and mortar presence will want to have their address available as well as their email and phone. If you are blogging about your joys of baby rearing, you will want to keep all that information private. What about if your blogging about your garden? It might make sense to list your geographic region if not state. Gardening issues definitely vary if you live in New Zealand versus New England versus Arizona.

 Remember that if you register on a social networking site to promote your blog, you are now associating your blog with the information that you share there. This is true if you are sharing your Instant Message contact,  the country you live in, the other social networking sites you participate in or the blog posts that you bookmark. So, how do you determine that balance of disclosure that allows your customers to contact you or your readers to match interests with your need for privacy and security?

For this week’s discussion add your comments here or by pinging back from your own blog.

Why in the world would I want to talk about someone else’s blog on MY blog?
Pingbacks or trackbacks are vital aspects of blogging because:

• It provides additional context to your own opinions and ideas
• Other blogs are a source of inspiration when confronted with “writer’s block”
• A means to share ideas, causes and products that you have discovered with your audience
• A very focused means of directing readers with similar interests to your own blog. Talk about your niche marketing!
• Jumpstarts communications with other bloggers. Where many bloggers won’t have the time to check out the links on all of their commentators, most bloggers will want to follow a pingback to see what others are saying about them. This is true for even the really famous ones out there. Check out my post on giveaways where I pingbacked Lorelle of WordPress fame.
• If you talk about other bloggers, and have something worth talking about on your own blog, they are more likely to be talking about you!

On this blog, you will often find that I refer to other blogs in my blog posts. I do this for two reasons. The first is that I want to bring certain ideas to your attention to certain blogging topics. Second, I am hoping that my post will inspire you to visit the other blog for additional information and to expand your reference resources.  Therein, lies the power of blogging.

So, if I wanted to show my readers an example of good writing and how to engage with your readers on a personal level I might write a post about Barb’s post on Scrapbook or Art Journal: Its a Personal Journey. To make it an educational post, I would identify key themes and techniques in the writing of that post that make it so successful. I would compare and contrast it with another great example of student writing with Shoshanna’s post Hiding out from the Third Millenium.

If I was stuck and frustrated with writer’s block, I could tap into Val’s post on Literary Finds and the post Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Those posts might inspire me to think and write about classic books, the books that I grew up with or a lament on current literature. I could go a variety of directions from those posts from a critical literary review to a discussion on how popular books impact the culture of their day to…

We have a lot of instructors in this class. Maybe they have been too busy to check out all of their classmates’ blogs and have missed out on the great instructor references that Karen provides us with her post Use Free Online Resources to Teach Your Online Courses.   Because we know that no matter how busy they are, they will make time to read the all the posts in the class blog! ;-P

If you take a look at the posts that I have mentioned in this post, you will see that there is a pingback to here in the comment section of the post. Well there will be, if the blog owners decide to approve the ping back.

Blog naked? I am not talking about you wear or don’t wear while in front of your computer, but how much do you choose to expose of yourself to the world as you blog. On the class message board, several students have been expressing concern about how much of themselves that they want to share with the Internet world and that is important consideration that each blogger needs to weigh. This isn’t just a concern for beginning bloggers but experienced bloggers  as they weigh the pros and cons of sharing themselves online. Sonia Simone at CopyBlogger was inspired by last week’s Biz School for Bloggers to write a great post on this topic, titled Feel Great Naked.  She does a great job of offering hints about protecting yourself and the ones you love while providing a convincing argument about how it is the personal aspects of blogging that engage your reader. She also touches on the use of aliases and gives examples of professionals who have opted to work under a pseudonym.

We have been talking about using an alias on the class message board and I cover it this week’s lesson. You can develop an online persona for a number of reasons. The primary reason is to protect your identity. There are two factors to consider. The first that is if the only thing that you change is your name, what you write about will often give your readers clues about you like the region/city that you live, the composition of your family, your lifestyle, your socioeconomic background etc.  I use one of my aliases “Frumpz” on a review blog. Generally readers won’t know that Bean Fairbanks is Frumpz but after reading the fourth post on Washington wine, Seattle restaurants and/or Seattle events, they probably can figure out that I am in the Seattle area. I am quite comfortable with that level of exposure. The review blog would be meaningless if I chose to hide the locations of the reviews.

The second factor to consider is what will I do if I develop this online persona and I want to do more with it. This something regular authors struggle with when they are known for one style of writing but want to try something very different under a different name.  They may choose this due to a fear of failure or a fear of alienating their current fans. What do you do when that new writing style takes off  and your publisher wants you on tour and your face on the book jacket? Related to this is that blogging is more than just writing posts, it is about gaining authority to attract readership. How will this online persona promote the blog? Will you use this persona to comment on other blogs and build a reputation? I often use another persona online when I am promoting women’s health issues and relationships.  Gender, health, sexuality and relationships can be “hot button” topics. That persona could talk about my experiences as working as a patient model for the medical school. I probably don’t really want potential customers or students to base their decision to hire me on the fact that I use my (naked) body to teach physical exams, I want them to base their hiring decision on my technical and business skills. The persona that I use to develop authority in health promotion is different than the one I use to teach computer and business skills.

Oops! I just put information on an official business blog about something that I said I might not want students to know. In actuality, I thought about the disclosure and I felt OK about it. I made a purposeful choice to disclose that personal information because I decided that served the blog post in two ways. First, it was a real life example of using alternate personas for different aspects of who I am. Notice I did not give you the name of that persona. Truthfully if you REALLY searched for it you might find it but not without some serious work on your part. Secondly, that disclosure demonstrated a conscious choice on my part to share information that gives you more information as a teacher. I don’t just teach online computer classes, I also have taught for years at the medical school and the naturopath university. Maybe, just maybe, that gave me more authority in your eyes and built my reputation in your eyes. I gambled. It might have backfired. You might think that is too weird that your instructor sometimes teaches naked (well I am wearing a hospital gown so I might as well be naked!) or someone that teaches in a medical school is going to be too technical of a teacher for this course or… Your comments to this post will let me know if my gamble paid off.

As Sonia points out, it is the personal information that hooks us. It allows us to connect with the author in a different way and we often care more about what they say. The trick is to do it as a well informed decision versus a slip of the keyboard mid rant. I really stress planning your blog in the first week of class so you can make some of these choices. Sonia stresses the need for planning as well.

Don’t wing it. Sit down and work out, in writing, exactly what you will and won’t talk about. Maybe you’ll talk about old boyfriends but not your current husband, or you’ll say anything about your parents but nothing about your kids. Decide exactly where you draw the line, and live by that.

If you write a post that goes over your particular line, you can edit it and save the personal stuff for your private journal, or sleep on it (at least two nights, ideally) and post it anyway. Either way, you’ll have made a conscious decision.

Sonia says use your personal journal but you can also password protect the post as another option. The other thing that she stresses and with which I agree is that you share only what is yours, and not some one’s elses story.

As covered in the lesson, there is a huge spectrum of private to public online. In the lesson I mentioned some people have lost their jobs due to their blogs. The most famous is Heather (Hamilton) Armstrong whose blogging about being fired made her famous Heather not only blogs “naked”, she runs down the street naked waving a banner saying LOOK AT ME!. She says whatever is on her mind and is not shy about sharing her thoughts and prejudices in colorful language and humor. Her blog Dooce is not for the thin skinned or faint of heart. Sometimes I think it aometimes goes towards Too Much Information (TMI) but it also so popular that she was just on the Today show and her blog supports her entire family so the parents can stay at home with the kids.

Not all successful blogs have a personal element, but many do. This includes business as well as personal blogs. Businesses that can bare their mistakes and show the actions that they have taken to remedy the situation gain trust and customer loyalty.  It will be up to you decide how personal in nature your blog will be overall and on a post by post basis.

It happens to every writer. There are those days when your creative fountain of ideas has run dry and you are confronted with an empty screen.  Journal or diary bloggers could just detail their errands and comings and going, but that tends to bore the writer not to mention the reader!

On Problogger today, Darren Rowse wrote a post titled “5 Ideas to Come Up with Blog Content from Your Daily Life“.  Although I could see how his five ideas could help generate content, I was more intrigued by his diagram that showed Daily Life – Capture – Repurpose. Instead of just telling your readers that you ate your favorite Indian dal for dinner, share the recipe with them and/or tempt them with a photo of your feast.  Darren is correct in stating that sharing your “latest meal” is probably not going to be appropriate for most topic bloggers like those that blog on collector cars or wilderness photography. It is totally appropriate for the journal blogger or the blogger that focuses on food or delectable delights. Capture how you do things and what they look like. Web surfers are used to a multimedia experience and if you incorporate images and video, you will cater to their surfing expectations. You could type out an anecdote that you want to share with your readers, but think of how much more engaging that story might be with your vocal inflections and facial expressions in a video. There is a reason that You-Tube is as popular as it is. Humans like to watch!

Recapture can be viewed as recycling your blog content in a fresh and innovative way. Using a guest blogger to respond more in depth or to give their point of view on a prior post can encourage additional dialog. Your guest doesn’t even need to be actually written by another human. If you have been blogging about your toddler on your parenting blog and feeling overwhelmed, try writing a blog post from the perspective  of your two year old. It will probably be amusing and maybe even enlightening. When I worked on a blog for an organic farm, and we were too busy farming to actually blog, I would often ask customers if I could share their emails on the blog. I could post their rapture over the fresh luscious organic raspberrries that they got from us last week and attach a brief note about berry status this week. It allowed me to consolidate my time, provide another point of view on the berries, and answer questions about berry availability, all at once. Another way to recapture content is to provide updates. In another blog, I frequently post about bills in the local legislature. If they passed or failed, got vetoed or signed, I can provide update to my readers and allow me to voice again my concerns or congratulations on how the government is handling an issues.

Prizes are a time honored gimmick to promote events and businesses, but do they work? The short answer is sometimes. Recently Rachelle Chase did an online promotion by giving away three copies of Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle VanFossen  To be eligible for the prize, her readers were asked to add a comment about what they like or dislike to read. She had about thirty people post their comments.

There are three groups of cost and benefit here: blog readers, Rachelle and Lorelle. Let’s look at the blog readers first. Obviously, three of them won a new book. About half of them had links to their blogs with their comments. This gave their blogs additional exposure.  Rachelle looked at their blogs and some of her readers looked at their blogs. The cost to the readers was minimal. Basically, the cost was the time involved in writing their comments.

Rachelle’s cost is basically the shipping on the three books. Her benefits? Other bloggers posted about her contest. I heard about the contest on another blog and it directed other readers to her blog. She had about 30 people that posted. The other third of the comments were from Rachelle and Lorelle, and part of their “cost”.

Lorelle’s cost was her three books and, as mentioned above, the time to respond to the readers. Her main benefit is the increased exposure to her book and to her blog. It was at least the 30 readers that commented but we don’t know how many read the post, learned about her book and/or visited her blog.

Rachelle provided additional benefit to all three groups by her topic selection. Her prize was a book for bloggers. So, she picked a topic of interest of bloggers. Her reader-bloggers, Lorelle and herself all gained the benefit of information about blog turn ons and turn offs. Although a couple of comments contradicted each other, definite themes emerged.

Was it worth it? Take a look at the comments on Rachelle’s post and let me know what you think. Did all three parties gain more than they spent?

Professional bloggers work around the clock to stay on top of their competition. Often the first person to post the scoop is the one that wins. That is the post that makes the top of the list and garners thousands,  sometimes even hundreds of thousands of hits.  This insistent pressure to be the first is taking its toll, particularly on professional bloggers that are paid by the piece. Two professional bloggers have died of heart attacks in the past year, and their fellow bloggers are taking notice. Working from home doesn’t mean low stress. Advertising dollars is often a cut throat business and that is true for blogging for advertising dollars.  According to an article in today’s New York Times, bloggers that work as contractors or employees for media outlets are feeling the crunch as their pay may be based not only the post but on the number of hits that their post generates. Independent bloggers who have created their own media outlets are not immune.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

Other professional bloggers complain of sleep deprivation, relationship issues, poor health and weight gain.  Hmm sounds like many a workaholic to me. The key is balance. Like others driven to succeed and to be the best, sacrifices are made. Only the individual can decide when the sacrifices are too great.  For me, with my limited energy and disability, I am delighted when my revenue pays my web hosting bill. If there is enough that month to sample and review another couple of bottles of wine, that is all good too!