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.

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