Whenever I begin to help a new student or client with blogging, I ask them to answer three really important questions:

1. What is the intent of your blog?
2. Who is your audience for your blog?
3. What is your authority in your blogging topic?

The authority question is almost always the hardest for people to answer. In other words, why would other people want to read what you have to say. I recognize that it can be an intimidating question to answer but it is a crucial one. Let’s get the intimidation part out of the way first.

Authority doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of alphabet behind your name and titles. It does mean getting clear about your strengths  and your goals.  Here are some examples of authority:

• Experience in developing over 20 commercial web sites for a blog on web design
• Retired attorney for blog on estate planning
• Stay at home father of two for daddy blogging
• Breast cancer survivor and nurse for blog on healthy living
• Fantastic sense of humor for a blog on finding the humor in our lives
• Mushroom forager for 5 years and amateur chef for a blog on edible mushrooms
• 15 years of indulging in your love of hand crafts, a keen eye and a creative mind for a blog on crafting
• Passion for the environment, problem solving aptitude and creativity for a blog on recycling goods into crafts

As you can see from the examples above, authority can take many forms. Appropriate and effective authority will vary according to your blog intent and audience.

Once you have outlined your intent, audience and authority, how do evaluate the effectiveness of your authority? That was an interesting question posed by a young 17 year old guest blogger Lianne in her post Does your blog speak authoritatively? for Cats Who Blog. She answers with the following, for traditional blogs and for the micro-blog Twitter:

• Repeat Traffic
• Feed Subscriber count
• Social Media Followers
• Twitter Mention

Traffic and subscriber counts are traditional means of monitoring blog progress and impact but with the increasing importance of social media, those two factors are no longer sufficient to measure  your authority. Translate the word authority into trust.

How much do your readers trust you enough:

• to keep coming back?
• to follow you around so they don’t miss what you have to say?
• trust you enough to share what you say with others?

Cats Who Blog is a relatively new web site, an offshoot of Cats Who Code, one of my favored web development tip and tutorial web sites. I am verifying their authority because I subscribe to their feed, follow on Twitter and used one of their blog posts to anchor my own (called pingback). All of those things validate Jean-Baptiste Jung’s authority in creating those two blogs.

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In the spirit of full disclosure, I am writing this post to enter a contest sponsored by Cats Who Blog. I think contests can be an effective means of blog promotion and I applaud Cats Who Code for showing other bloggers the benefits of running a contest and offering Templatic premium themes as the prizes.

The deadline for the Inspiration Blog Carnival is 2/3/09. Submissions have been trickling in slowly and I am opening that there will be a last minute rush.

Many of my students have told me that they feel overwhelmed by the topic and/or the lack of time in their lives to create a new inspiring post. Creating a post specific for the Blog Carnival is just one way of participating.  I bet that 80% of the students who tell me that they don’t have time or know how to tackle the topic, already have inspirational posts on their blog! One of the cool things about a Blog Carnival is that it can  serve as a directory, a central gathering place for readers find a group of articles on their area of interest.

In the blogging classes, I am always stressing to my students the need to provide content and a service to their readers first and promote your blog second.  A Blog Carnival is an excellent way to provide content to your readers and you provide a service by providing your readers an  easy access to other articles of interest. By doing so, you also end up promoting your blog and carnival participation opens your blog up to a new audience.

The form to submit your blog post is here.

Blogging Basics: Intro to Blogging class  

Learn the blogging basics or step up and discover the benefits of the blogosphere in the new blogging classes at LVS Online. Bean has modified her popular Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune classes into two distinct offerings. The first course Blogging Basics, covers the nuts and bolts of blogging. It is designed as an introductory blogging course and is suited for personal and professional blogs.  We be using the WordPress blogging platform for our examples and demos, but other platforms will be mentioned.

Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune: Promote your blog

The second course, the revised Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class will function as more of a blogging studio and is in response to students requesting a “lifetime membership”.  Although it is really easy to start blogging, once you begin you can see how how multi-faceted it is. You can take your blog in many differnt directions or choose from a wide assortment of goals. You can evolve and refine your blog posts from good to compelling.  You can gain an appeciative audience as you gain authority. You gain authority from participation. Although the core context of the course will remain the same from session, each session the students will have the opportunity to make choices about what type of template modification we will tackle or which social networking site we want to explore in detail. In November session we might devote time and attention to Blog Catalog and changing CSS styles in our templates. In January, we might focus on Weblog and modifying what appears with each post on our home page.

Blogger’s Studio to build content and community for you blog

This Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class is designed for those that really want to promote their Word Press blog for professional gain or personal satisfaction. Students can take it once or sign up repeatedly for their “lifetime membership”. Students will learn from the lessons, instructor examples and more importantly from each other as they support and offer each other feedback and information.

Register for the Blogging Basics course at LVS Online.

Register for the Blogging for Fun, Fame & Fortune course at LVS Online.

Tonight, I reviewed all of the blogs in the Hall of Fame blogroll. With regret, I removed blogs that had no posts for the month of August. It was with regret, because several of those blogs were quite funny, insightful and well written. I am hoping that it was the dog days of summer and as summer draws to a close they will return to entertain and educate us. If I removed your blog from the Hall of Fame and you post this month, add a comment here. I will reinstate your blog.

Spending several hours reviewing the blogs, I noticed several trends amongst these Hall of Fame blogs.

• The more specific the information in the headlines and in the posts, the more search engine traffic generated.
  Last session, I browbeat poor Anita in to changing the headline on a post on a brain tumor to specifically identify the tumor but she started getting hits off that post soon after she changed the headline
• Blog posts with examples get more comments.
  Quirky Artist gives lots of examples of the art that she creates and receives. In general, the more examples she gives the more comments she gets. The great thing about the Learn to Do it Right blog is how she provides clear and detailed examples. We have a lot of art and course blogs in the Hall of Fame that could really benefit from more specific examples for their readers.
• Bloggers often would mention a product or an article but they rarely shared with THEIR readers THEIR personal opinion or experience with that product or article
  It is when the blogger personalizes the experience, that it becomes interesting. Most of us visit blogs because we think the blog has some authority. They are coming to get YOUR opinion and perspective. You may not always agree with the opinions on For the People, By the People but you will always know exactly what her opinion is.

I hope that you will be able to find the time to explore some of the blogs in the Hall of Fame. They are varied in topics, personality and writing style.

The popular and prestigious Bloggers’ Choice Awards are now underway. You can nominate your favorite blogs, vote for the blogs that you like the best and peruse other nominations. Blog awards are given in a large number of categories from best humor blog to best blog design to best travel blog. They even have blog award categories for the Hottest Mommy Blogger and the Blogitizer.  Following the old advantage of there is no such thing as bad publicity, they even have blog categories for the Worst Blog of All Time and the Most Obnoxious Blogger.

So how does it work?

• Go to the Bloggers’ Choice Awards web site to create an account. You need to create an account to nominate and to vote for favorite blogs. The account creation is quick and easy. Reading and figuring out their CAPCHA images is the trickiest part!
• Click the nominate button. This will take you through a brief wizard to fill out details about the blog you want to nominate. You can nominate your own blog or any blog that you think is worthy of recognition. In the nomination process, you can choose up to four blog award categories.
• Once the nomination is complete, it will appear on the home page of the categories it was assigned. Go to those home pages and vote! I am amazed at the thousands of blogs nominated that don’t have a single vote. Voting is easy, just click on the vote button.
• Click on the blog’s link to see its Bloggers’ Choice Award page. It shows who voted for that blog and any comments that they made. This page will list a number of links. If it is your blog, use the claim link to give them a contact email.  There is also a link to add a voting badge. I have two on this blog, for each of the two categories nominated. The badges let people know you are running and makes it easy for them to vote for you.
• Start stumping for votes! Use the Invite Friends link to let your friends now about Bloggers’ Choice Awards. If you are in Blog Catalog, add a voting badge to your profile there. Go to Manage Blogs and there is a section to add in one blog award category badge to your blog profile. Announce it in your social networking groups.  Although you might not end up with an award in a category, you can still get attention and traffic  to your site. Even after the awards are announced, the nominations are kept up and many people use the Bloggers’ Choice Awards site to search for interesting and informative blogs.

If your blog is nominated for an award, let us know about it here. This is another good place to help rally the vote.

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.

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?