BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

Being a blogger or a freelance writer or even a social media consultant, you have to know few basic things about social media. There are rules for almost everything in this world. There is a limit for everything in life and social media is not exception. Social media sites can be very good and get your big results, if you use it in the right way. Else, you will see your blog/site banned from it.

When I say social media, digg lovers will think of digg, stumbleupon fans will think about stumbleupon and so on. But whichever is your favorite site, you have to follow certain rules to get the complete value from it.

1. Don’t Promote Your Content Alone

Social media sites are to put the best content in front of people who are interested in the respective niche. You should not promote every single blog post you write in your blog yourself. When someone else submits, it is fine. There is a difference between you praising yourself to others and your friend praising you in front of others. That’s the case here. You can submit one or two at times but not always. Have a ratio. For every 15 submits, you can submit your content. This is the way I use.

2. Give and Receive

Social media is all about giving and receiving. You cannot receive all the time and stay successful without giving anything to the users. If you have a friend from whom you get a ‘thumbs up’ at stumbleupon, you have to help him when he is asking for it. Of course, if the site he or she asks vote for is spammy, you cannot help them with social media. Get new friends and offer help to them. You can also get help from them when you are in need. You cannot succeed in social media without the help from friends.

3. Be Active

The winning secret in social media is being active and participating regularly. I do have to credit my friends for telling me this when I started with social media sites. You got to be active and regularly contributing to the community to succeed. You can get thousands of fans in social media sites only if you are already established and known to a lot of people. Being active isn’t tough. You should spend certain amount of time every day with social media. I try to use social media sites for at least one hour a day. Though I miss it at times, I always try my level best to stick on to it.

These are basic rules and once you follow these and act wisely, you will start to know more about the sites as days go by. You might be the next super user at digg or a power user at mixx. Also don’t forget to read the individual site’s policy or your site might get banned without you knowing it. After all social media is for everyone and you can easily succeed in it with little efforts. Concentrate on one at a time when you are learning and user the ones you have mastered for a little lesser time.

Good luck with social media sites. Hoping to see your post hit the front page of social sites with ease.

Photo credit

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.

Ryan Caldwell of Performancing shared his experience in creating successfull list-oriented linkbaits.

Ah, yes.  Please keep in mind that a linkbait is not only in form of a list, but also in another writing style.

Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere. Linkbait is a strategy when writing a post which was intended to withdraw other readers as well ad bloggers attention and then link it into their own blogs.

In term of posting’s topic or entry, Randfish of SEOMoz pointed out that there are two kinds of linkbait: (1) Linkbait - “Link-Worthy, Linkerati-Targeted Content“; and (2) “Attracting Link Attention with Controversy”

Ryan said that the key to writing bait is not objectivity, but being comfortable with subjectivity and opinion.

Here are he usually does when he writes a listbait:

1. come up with headline (defines the concept)
2. brainstorm list until I’m exhausted
3. remind myself that this is not a mid-term exam
4. write 1 sentence per item in the list (the “justification” for each item)
5. remove any items I can’t write 1 sentence for
6. pray that the sentence writing helped clarify my line of thought and jogs my mind for a few more items
7. remove the chaff
8. flesh out content with pics, videos, links
9. identify a number
10. refine the headline to fit the final content

# 3 is really an interesting point!

Thanks for sharing, Ryan! I will try to write my own soon!

When you have been blogging for several times, finally you would reach the limit of what topics you would like to share with your readers.

I personally experienced this problem. I was freshed out of ideas. I can’t think of anything new that I want to share with my audiences.

One of my own blog’s topics is about brand campaign website and other examples of best practise websites as a business. Usually I commented and criticized about those websites.

Then I got this idea, why not let the website’s owner share his/her ideas of the website he/she built? So, I started to contact some of them (fortunately, a few of them I know quite well), offering them interviews as a post in my blog. They respond happily. This probably would also be a good chance for them to promote their business through different audiences.

I made some questions and send them through email. After receiving the answer, I edited few words and started posting it as a blog post.

So then, you get your post with others writing them out for you. My blog readers were also excited, since they found different perceptions in my blog.

You can also do this by interviewing others that related to your blog topics. Usually, readers would love to read the experience of others in the particular fields.

The readers need to have some inspirations to do the same thing. That’s what they love when they’re reading interviews.

This post written by Pitra Satvika. He is currently active in his own company, Stratego, as client service manager and creative strategy.

When you start blogging seriously, you probably would consider these few tips. These tips were made based on my experience in building and running my own blog for almost three years.

1. Passion

You need to have passion in writing blogs. You should consider writing blogs not because you want to earn money from it, but because you love writing and want to share your life experience to others. Start from the heart, they say. If you’re a passionate person in blogging, you would not give up easily just because nobody commented on your posts.

2. Focus

What do you love the most in life? Do you like reading, watching movies, or travelling? You should have a blog with topics that are not too broad, but not too narrow either. Okay, so nobody would be angry with you if you want to have a blog with various topic discussions. However, then blog readers would be confused in finding your blog’s identity. Just imagine, if suddenly you find a topic about cooking roasted chicken in this blog. Would you find it weird?

3. Dream

Can you imagine what your blog would be like in the future? Where will you lead the blog next year? You should think yourselves as an entrepreneur. They start by dreaming and creating steps to achieve those dreams. Set as higher dream as possible. If you want to have a blog as famous as TechCrunch or Mashable, then start by creating steps to explore the possibilities to achieve it.

4. Identity

If you have found the topics of what you want to blog, then start checking alternatives for your blog name. Your blog name should suit your topic and preferably, you should have a domain that have the same name as your blog. Your blog and domain name will be your identity. So, be careful when you choose the name. The name would stick with you as long as the blog lives.

5. Frequency

Write as many posts as possible. With each post, put certain keywords that resemble what your blog is all about. The more you write, the more articles would be indexed by search engine. Someday, when a person search something related to the information about your blog topic, he would find your blog among the top list.

6. Design

Blog design is part of your identity. Even though you have great contents, nobody would read your blog if it’s not user friendly designed. You should avoid using free templates for your blog. If there are a lot of blogs out there with the same designed as yours, your blog identity would be blurred. In the future, you should consider designing a custom template only for your blog.

7. Start ’selling’ yourselves

Promote your blog in your daily activities. Make a name card with your blog URL on it. Tell your business partners about what your blog is about and how it would help them gain good information in it. You can also join a mailing list or groups discussions with topic related to your blog. Give some introductions and teaser of your posts in those groups.

The more you write good quality posts, the more your audiences would see you as an expertise. Hopefully, these posts would lead in giving you good project opportunities related to your competences.

Just like what I got when certain clients like what I wrote in my blog.

This post written by Pitra Satvika. He is currently active in his own company, Stratego, as client service manager and creative strategy.