Day 15: Submitted MindPetals Article, Conversation with Liz Strauss, and LifeHack.org Article

2 Jul, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

Today is day 15 of my 30 day challenge to bring more *readers* to this blog, and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable business.

By the way, Darren posted the first part of my review on Rss-to-Email providers.

My three tasks for today were:

1. Finished the article on Toastmasters for MindPetals.com

2. I had a great conversation with Liz Strauss of Successful-blog.com. She contacted me based on my Day 13 post and gave a new perspective on blogging. As she put it, some bloggers are marketing people, and some are relationships people. Liz is a big proponent of the relationships type, since this is blogging’s biggest strength. Some things that I got out of it were:

Don’t think about ‘traffic’, think about ‘readers’
Don’t do a report, just talk about your own personal experience
A news article ends by making a point or coming to a conclusion, but blog should generate discussion and be interactive. It’s is not one person’s thoughts, it is many people’s thoughts.
To generate discussion there are a number of things you can do…
Be authentic and let them know there is a real person behind the blog
Don’t always end the post with an answer, leave an open ended question
Encourage readers to contribute their own ideas, the community will generate more insight than one person

Anyway, these were just a few ideas. It was good to meet a more successful blogger and actually speak to them on the phone (so far I’ve only emailed back and forth with a few). I hope to go to some blogging conferences in the future and meet more of them face to face!

3. I wrote and submitted my next LifeHack.org contributing article which was due yesterday!

Contributing articles to other sites has still been my biggest generator of subscribers.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

4 Comments so far »

joel badinas said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 1:32 am

You know what I also want to achieve financial freedom and be my own boss. I think you could help me.

[Reply]
Biswaroop Todi said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 5:21 am

We take pleasure in introducing ourselves as an organization http://www.manuallysubmit.com
It Provide manual directories Submission and articles submission service. Manuallay submit your site to hundreds of seo friendly directories.

[Reply]
vijay said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 10:41 am

Well a great advice!
You pointed one source of traffic as the Contributing articles. Can you plz tell me which option from below should we choose?
1) Write a article and post it on your own blog and then let other people and bloggers inform about the article OR
2) Write the article for other website and don’t put it on your own blog.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 12:31 pm

Joel…great website, lets talk offline I think we have similar goals. I’ll email you.

Vijay,

From what I’ve seen so far, when you’re first starting out it’s probably better to write some great articles for OTHER sites, because you don’t have anyone seeing your site yet. But once you build your readership then I think it’s easier to focus on just your own website. Your readers will spread the word and tell others.

[Reply]