BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

Are you a blogger who feels boredom on writing? Beware! It will kill your passion on writing someday. Find out the problem behind it. Perhaps, the problem is about finding idea. Or, if you are not a blog star, so your blog post has a small amount of comments.

If your problem is the 2nd one, you don’t ever need to be a blog star to get a large amount of comments. Here some tips how to get more comments on your blog post.

1. Write a simple and informative blog post. The power of your blog is in the content itself. People will love to read your blog post if it offered them a good information, useful and understandably. So, write a post with a simple topic, so your visitors will able to understand your idea easily and then interested in sharing their ideas, too.
2. Ask a question to the end of your post. This is a simple trick to make your post more interactive and impressive. Ask a simple question. It will make your visitors interested in sharing their ideas or opinions.
3. Be a commenter of comments. Other way to interact with your visitors is by replying or responding their comments. It would be nice if you can address some of them directly.
4. Be controversial. Being a controversial blogger is not easy, indeed. It will need a big responsibility and last but not least, skill. However this is the fastest way to get comments from readers of your blog post.
5. Blogwalking and leave comments. Blogwalking is one of the easy way to promote your blog. Visit others blogs, read their blog posts, and add comments or your opinion to that posts. Simply write your name and URL of your blog. The owner and visitors of that blog will see your comments. It will be a good chance to get more visitors as well as commenters, for your blog.
6. Create your community. You can start making a small community of bloggers or commenters. This is only a virtual community. The members are the bloggers who periodically write comments to other member’s blog.

Read related post by ProBlogger.

Mustamar, 22 years old. A freelancer, college student, hard thinker, debater, and ordinary person. Living in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Blogger’s block is something which almost every blogger experiences in his blogging career. It is something every blogger hates because if they cannot write posts for their blog, they are going to miss so many new visitors, lose old subscribers and also get a big drip in the income.

This has become a big problem for a blogger that many bloggers have written posts on how to come out of the bloggers block. I have read a lot of posts and have also tried them to overcome bloggers block. In most cases they work but not always. I always feel that:

“Prevention is better than cure”

Why should you fall in bloggers block and then go for a cure. Most people don’t know why they fall in the bloggers block. If you are doing one of the below, you are sure to have bloggers block:

1. Develop Interest In Other Things

If you are developing interest in some other thing, you are going lose interest in what you are doing already. Though few people still manage to continue blogging even though they have developed interest, many cannot do it. They either have to stop blogging for few days and continue with their new interest or dump the new interest and continue blogging. Developing interest in new things is not bad. If you can keep it in control and continue blogging, it will pay off well.

2. Fix Unachievable Goals

Planning and working accordingly is a good habit. People, who plan their work, also set goals. Setting goals will help you achieve almost anything in a less time. But fixing unachievable goals will give bad results.

Say, you can set a goal like this:
I want to earn $1000 per month from blogging by the end of third month.
This is achievable.

But something like the below is not achievable.
I want to earn a five figure income by blogging from first month.

Though few people earn five figure incomes per month, they have worked tremendously hard to achieve this. It didn’t happen for them in single month. There are months of hard work behind it.

So fix goals that are achievable. If you are fixing unachievable goals, you will be frustrated and this might prevent you from blogging. It will create hate towards your blog. Always fix goals that are achievable.

3. Hate Your Blog

Hating your blog is the main reason why you fall into bloggers block. Don’t develop hate towards your blog. This hate towards your blog comes when you are comparing your blog with other people’s blog, or when you are not satisfied with your blog’s performance.

Instead of comparing your blog with others’, compare it with your blog itself. Compare your yesterday’s statistics with today’s. Compare your earnings of last month’s with this month’s. This is the right way of comparing. Always be satisfied with what you get. Don’t have too many expectations from your blog. If your blog is not performing well this month, try working hard to make it perform well in the next month. Don’t feel upset.

If you are falling into the bloggers block, the person to be blamed is you. The reason also lies within you. If you feel encouraged, you will never get trapped in the bloggers block. One of your reasons for blogging can be earning from it. But it should not be the only reason. Blogging is more than that. You can develop trust, brand and friendship. If you are not getting what you expected from your blog, feeling annoyed and getting yourself trapped in the bloggers block won’t help you. Be confident that you can achieve.

Have you ever fallen in the bloggers block? What was the reason behind it? Please share it in the comments.

Ramkarthik is an 18 year old blogger and freelance writer. He writes also has a blog that gives tips on blogging. You can visit his blog, Blogging Tune.

Blog is about opinion. Blog is also about information. And, if we’re talking about blog, we talk about information flow and publishing mechanism. We’re also talking about communication, marketing and business.

I will not talking about how blog can change people’s life. But, I want to propose some reasons for companies which haven’t started blogging. Okey, here are some reasons why you (company) should start blogging:

• You need to publish yourself, right? As a company, you want people know about you — on the Internet. People want to know about what happens to your company. If you have a good news, you want to publish it to the universe. Blog can do this. If we want to publish to other media like newspaper, news portal… they probably do not want to hear your news. Using your own publishing system, you can tell stories your way.
• It’s CHEAP. You do not have to spend millions of dollar only for having online publishing tool. Of course, every company has its own decision on how to spend money, but most of them probably have the same consideration: spend less, get more. We can have a blog set in few minutes.
• It’s easy. Some companies probably wonder: how can a non-geek can publish such stories? How can they have their contents well-organized?
• It has THE technologies. What technologies offered by blog as a publishing system?
  • Search engine optimization. Try to search about your company or products. You will find many blogs in the search results. Do you pay them to publish news about you. Probably. But, what if they published unexpected news?
  • Content management system. You can organize your content in an easy way by categories, date of post, keywords, etc.
  • Social networking. Blog is designed to be a tool for communication. It’s about “delivering contents”.

Those are some reasons to start a blog. If there are companies which think that blog is useless, I am so curious about their reasons.

Thomas Arie Setiawan is currently living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and run a blog called Orangescale.NET. Together with some friends, he runs a small web design service called Orangescale Studio.

The domain name business is a $2 billion one and is expected to reach $4 billion by 2010. The domain number has reached over 150 million, of which over half is .com or .net domains.

This inevitably results in more difficulties to assign a good domain name for a new site. CCTLDs (country-code top-level domains) are then chosen for the alternative.

But soon, the problem recurs for CCTLD. ICANN had to release new TLDs based on continent (.eu, .asia), culture (.cat, .sco), or segment (.travel, .jobs). Then there started a new wave of cross-bordering domain registration.

Some countries started to see it as a good business. Tuvalu, an island with 14,000 inhabitants, sells its .tv domain internationally, for ‘television’ domain; and an ex Soviet-country Moldova offers its .md domain for medical doctor communities.

Domain pun started coloring the Internet culture. Laos offers its .la domain for Los Angeles citizen, while North Ireland businessmen prefers to register .co.ni subdomain from Nicaragua rather than using .uk domain.

The pun flows inevitably. GTLDs with complete name (.info, .name) are licensed for fun and pun, such as Useless.info, Invalid.name, etc. And also CCTLD, like .it of Italy, .to of Tonga, etc. Improve.it, Go.to, Who.is.

Another idea came to use CCTLD as part of the word. Cr.yp.to, Del.icio.us, Blo.gs. Eu.ro, Wristwat.ch, , etc. And also name. Ma.tt for Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress), Jes.us, or my own domain Kun.co.ro. Now they have a name: domain hacking. Steve.jobs? No, I haven’t checked it.

Criticisms have been cried against the practice of domain hacking. It breaks the mapping of Internet sites to political or geographical position. True, but it has been so since the rise of .com.

And how to start a domain hacking? A service like Xona.com could help finding ideas for domain hacks, albeit sometimes inaccurate. But Wikipedia is surely a good point to start. Start on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTLD. A list of CCTLD could be found, with a sign to indicate whether the domain could be registered internationally.

A click on our chosen CCTLD will show the terms & conditions to register a domain under the CCTLD. We can see whether we’re lucky enough to be able to register a domain on second level (directly under the CCTLD).

We must also re-check whether the domain registration requires local presence. The address of each registrar is also linked on Wikipedia. If we’re unlucky, just wait.

Sometimes the policy is revised. It is not necessary to plan annexing a country just to gain a domain name.

Image credit: GettyImages

Kuncoro Wastuwibowo is a worker of telecommunications technology and business, and a lover of science and music. He lives in Bandung, West Java, currently works for Telkom, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications provider.