TQR — Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging

Blog­gers blog­ging on blogging

Deep Secrets of Suc­cess­ful Blog­ging is the com­pli­ca­tion of 30 posts from April of 2007 when Chi­tika (a blogger’s adver­tis­ing net­work) held a “blog­bash” about pro­fes­sional blog­ging. (I’m a sucker for pdfs, or any­thing that I can print and take away from the com­puter and this one is nicely designed for the type of con­tent it offers.)

So why should I, or you, care about blog­gers blog­ging about blogging?

Look up there at the tag line and you’ll see it. “Tools, tips, and toys…” Blog­ging is a tool for thinking.

So I’ll save you the time to it takes to down­load and read the entire com­pi­la­tion and point you to a cou­ple of posts that will reward you for the time spent read­ing them.

First up Dan Allen’s Find­ing Your Direc­tion with Google Ana­lytics. Unless you’re writ­ing for the cat, you’ll want to know a lit­tle some­thing about who is read­ing your blog and how often. I’ve had occa­sional run-ins with web ana­lyt­ics on var­i­ous projects in the last cou­ple of years. Leaves my head reel­ing. This is a short and sweet intro­duc­tion to just a hand­ful of the most use­ful reports pro­vided by GA. (And the imfor­ma­tion works just fine with the new ver­sion of GA.)

Next Dar­rren Rowse’s Help me, My mom is my blog’s only reader. Dar­ren does the problog­ger thing and I don’t care about 90% of what goes on in that world. This post, how­ever, is not about how to “go pro” but about how to find an on-line com­mu­nity that fits you well, your peo­ple. The one’s who are read­ing and writ­ing and think­ing about the same things that are rat­tling your own brain cage.

Finally, Liz Strauss writes about Stay­ing Con­nected: The secret to keep­ing those loyal read­ers. She under­stands that the dia­logue between the writer and the read­ers is where the value is added in blog­ging. You can dig deeper into her thoughts on how to encour­age (and dis­cour­age) com­ments in her SOB blog. I just wish she’d bun­dle up her replies to her reader’s com­ments. Read­ing her com­ments sec­tion is like watch­ing a ten­nis game — I get whiplash.