It’s been a while, but I am coming back to work on this blog again. I’m trusting that life will be reasonably manageable again.

‘Cause it’s sure been crazy lately.

Since I last posted, I’ve had a baby, moved, and had my Home with the Kids site featured in an article that hit the front page of Yahoo and Bankrate. That was one crazy day, and lead many people to check out this site as well. Rather motivating, really. Picture 65,000 page views before 10 a.m. on a server not ready for that kind of traffic.

It was awesome in a really frustrating kind of way.

Anyhow, I’m still unpacking, still dealing with a rather young baby, but ready to take back on my heavier workload. How else to keep building my business?

Any comments on what you’d like to see blogged about here will be welcome. Otherwise I’ll have to come up with my own ideas.

Yeah, I have lots of those, but I’d still like to know if there are topics you want that I might not have thought of.

I do a lot of article marketing for my sites. I enjoy it and get decent results for my efforts. But it’s sometimes hard to decide whether an article belongs on my blog or being distributed as an article for other sites to use.

Sometimes I do both. A few edits and it’s not the same article on my site as it is on others. But other times I can’t imagine doing that to a good article… err, blog post.

How to Decide Which to Do

Picking which way I go can be a bit of a pain. Sometimes an article that starts out as something I mean for article marketing ends up being something I would far rather have on my blog. There’s a difference that can be hard to explain. I guess you could say blog articles tend to be a bit more personal for me. Not too significantly, but there are some elements I can picture better on my own site than someone else’s.

And sometimes that means I need a new idea for the article site. It might be a twist on the now blog post. It might be an abbreviated version of the post.

Either way, a decision must be made. It’s almost a whim, no hard and fast rule. Just the feeling that the style or how personal I get goes better one way or the other.

Editing for Article Sites

If I choose to just edit it, there are a few ways to go about it. I don’t worry much about duplicate content issues. I don’t particularly want an article site outranking my site with one of my own articles, but it can happen. Even if the article is more thoroughly rewritten it can happen. After all, how many people are going to search for your article by quoting from its text?

I do prefer to keep the most thorough version for my own site. What goes to article sites should still be a good article, but mine should go one better.

Release Schedule

Of course, anything on my own site gets published first, by several days at least. It’s always good to have the content on your own site have first shot at being discovered by the search engines. A couple weeks is better yet in my opinion, but I’m not always writing far enough ahead to manage that.

Are They Really So Different?

Depending on your style, blogging and article marketing don’t have to be all that different. But they can be. I see my blogs as something more personal than what I want to send off to article sites. They need to have more of my personality.

Articles still need some of that personality, but I prefer to count on the information bringing people in through my article links. A hint of personality combined with good information strikes me as a good combination to bring someone to a blog where you continue with the good information and more personality.

A lot of people get into blogging for money because they hear about the fantastic success some people have enjoyed. It’s hard to not envy someone who is earning 5, 6 or even 7 figures a year from their blog.

Trouble is, for many people earning the way someone else does becomes their sole focus. They do their best to copy the successful people they see around them, rather than be themselves.

The biggest problem with imitating the more successful bloggers around you is that it’s easiest to be nothing more than an imitation. You don’t stand out. And if you don’t stand out, you’re not going to get people interested in what you have to say.

It’s one thing to take occasional inspiration from those who are doing better than you are. But if that’s the only thing you do, you’ll have more trouble developing your own voice.

Be aware of what others in your niche are doing, but find ways to stand out. Take a controversial position. Have fun. Worry less about what’s working for others and figure out what works for you.

The thing about blogging is that you can learn quite a bit about what successful bloggers are doing, and still not succeed with your own blog. You’re different people, after all, and the different approaches you take to similar tasks will not get you the same results.

If you really need to compare yourself to someone, take a look at the people who are at your same level of the game. Watch the people who are doing exceptionally well, if you like, but in many ways your most direct competition comes from the people who know about as much as you do.

Even then you don’t want to focus too much on what the other people are doing. You should be focused more on what you can do.

So What Should You Be Doing?

There are some things you absolutely need to get done to succeed as a blogger.

1. Develop your own voice.

You don’t want to sound like everyone else. Be yourself. Have your own style and your own opinions. If you love covering industry news, cover it. If you don’t, leave it alone except when it catches your attention.

2. Write for your blog – a lot!

Many of the most successful blogs are posted to more than once a day. Sure you can get away with less, but you may get less attention.

Don’t overdo! You can annoy readers if you are writing so fast that you forget quality in favor of quantity. Or if you just provide too much information for them to read. There’s a balance to be struck, and it’s up to you to decide what that balance is.

3. Comment on other blogs.

Yes, this takes away from your writing time. But it’s a great way to network with your fellow bloggers and get visitors.

Don’t worry about whether the links to your site are “do follow” or “no follow.” Don’t constantly link to your own posts within the body of your comments. Don’t be self promotional in general.

Be a genuine contributor. Your comments will stick better and bring better attention to your blog.

4. Don’t start too many blogs.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and start up blog after blog. But it’s not going to do you as much good if you can’t maintain quality on all of them. Run just one blog until you really know what you’re doing. Then decide if another one is something you need to start.

Am I perfect with these? Heck no! I post on this particular blog far less than I should, but I have others that are more of a focus for me. I have also dropped blogging on sites that I simply do not have time for right now. As my personal life changes I may pick them back up, but for right now they’re on the back burner.

And of course I sometimes wish I could succeed as wildly as certain other bloggers. But I don’t let that get in the way of working on my blogs in my way.

On the schedules printed for distribution at BlogWorld, one session was missing: Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations & Comments. It was lead by Stowe Boyd, Ted Corman, Louis Grey, Greg Narain and Brian Solis.

For those who were at BlogWorld and missed it due to that, it was a really great session. And not just because I got to tease the guy next to me that the low attendance was actually his fault. You see, he’s brought in a personal size pizza and was eating lunch. I told him obviously the smell of food had made everyone who had attended the previous session decide to go eat rather than stick around.

At start time we had something like 5 people in there. A few more trickled in, then everyone who was on Twitter at the time was asked to start tweeting to get more people in there. I don’t know how many of the others who showed up were due to that, but the numbers were still far, far lower than any of the other sessions I attended.

No, I didn’t tweet it. No laptop computer and let’s just say my cell phone plan is old. I’ve never used it for texting of any sort. However, you can see what people did tweet during the session by searching Twitter for #add. Scroll down because they have been pushed down by other tweets tagged that way. And of course these will get pushed further down as the days go by.

OK, so the crowd was small. What HAPPENED during the session?

I know, I know. The small crowd doesn’t matter so much as the information, which was amazing. I have 3 pages of notes to go through on this one. Things did ramble a bit off to the side of the topic at times, but it was still great.

The basic problem many blogs are facing these days is that their comments are going to other sources, such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Many bloggers say their comments are down by half.

The news isn’t all bad, though. These comments can drive more traffic and increase your overall community of readers. Your work is being exposed to a wider range of people than just those who had already discovered your site, and they’re being introduced by people they trust: friends on these networks.

This is considered by some to be the transition from Blogging 1.0 to Blogging 2.0.

Blogging 2.0 means your users are going to comment where they’re most comfortable. People may see your blog as the conduit, rather than the destination.

One of the considerations they suggested is whether or not it’s a positive to go from considering web pages to web streams. The distribution of comments means there are more ways for people to discover what you’ve written, but it’s harder for you as the blog owner to discover what people are saying and to participate in the conversation.

Should you try to participate in all the conversations?

There are good points to trying to participate in as many of the conversations as you can. It becomes clear that you care, and you can deal with misunderstandings.

On the other hand, finding all these conversations is time consuming, as is keeping up with them. You do have to think about how much time you can afford to spend on this. Think about how you’re going to follow all the conversations that can go on about your site away from it. Do you really need to care about all of them? Think about if quality or quantity of relationships matters the most to you.

Backtype was suggested as one way to find the conversations. It allows you to follow individuals, as identified by their URL. It’s not perfect, but if you want to see what a particular person has been talking about online, it can find them across various blogs.

Summize, the Friendfeed search tool and Yahoo Pipes were also suggested. Summize is now owned by Twitter.

A very good point made was that this is very much an in-crowd phenomenon. So if you’re getting hit hard, congratulations! Your readers are taking up the new technology very quickly.

But if you aren’t seeing this, you should still be paying attention. Just think of how fast things can go from unusual to mainstream in the online world. How long do we have?

It just depends. I was talking to Wendy Piersall after the session, and she said her comments are already way down. Lynn Terry said hers are up.

As for me, well, I rarely get a ton of comments so I really can’t say. Maybe I should blame distributed commenting just for fun.

Seriously, I won’t, because at this point it’s very much worth my while to keep building up my readership and the comments on this site. It does no one any good to pretend there’s no problem if there is one.

My suggestion, if you’re having a drop in comments, would be to check and see if distributed commenting is the problem. Use the tools mentioned. See what you can find out. You need to know if it’s a distributed commenting issue or something else going on. Assumptions are not your friend.

What options do we have?

A change like this wouldn’t be getting interesting without some tools to push things along. One such would be Disqus, a universal commenting system that has been around for close to a year.

The basic idea with Disqus is that they provide a universal way for visitors to comment on sites using their system. It works with Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type and TypePad. You get threaded comments, and your blog joins a community of other blogs that have chosen to use Disqus. It also handles the spam for you.

Each of your post becomes its own forum, and Disqus allows you to sync your comments section to it.

For users, it’s having a single login and a reputation that can be built across several blogs that can be an advantage.

Judging by the comments about Disqus on StumbleUpon, lots of people love this system, a few HATE it. Always good to know what people think about a system before you consider working with it.

This and other systems are still very much in development, and the panel had some good points that you should consider. The big one is “who owns the data?” which should matter tremendously to anyone choosing to use an outside service for their comments.

They also pointed out that these are very early days. When the telephone was new, you had to be on the same system as the person you wanted to call, or you couldn’t reach them. When texting was new, you had to subscribe to the same service as the person you wanted to text. Judging by these examples, the panel expects something similar in time for distributed commenting.

As I said, I learned a lot in this session. This was the topic I knew the least about, so it was generally fascinating. Definitely my favorite session overall.

What can I say but that I had an absolute blast! BlogWorld was utterly exhausting but really educational and I got to make a few new friends. I’ll be posting over the next few days on some of the things I learned.

One of my favorite sessions – and did I ever take notes! – wasn’t listed in the printed schedule available at BlogWorld. It was on the online one that I had printed out at home, so I was one of the few to know about it until people started posting on Twitter about it.

These kinds of things can be really overwhelming, and I sure wish I had a laptop. Would’ve really simplified the note taking, not to mention the chronic urge to blog. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be away from a computer for days when you’re used to spending significant chunks of most days on it?

Well if you’re like me, you probably do.

There were two things that were challenging for me. The first was simply dealing with some hip pain due to my current pregnancy. Not much to be done for that, but it ensured that I went to a lot of sessions. Great excuse to just sit down.

The second was more important. It’s hard to network when you’re no longer used to crowds of people. It’s been AGES for me since I’ve had to deal with more than a small group, and frankly things were overwhelming at times. But the time before and between sessions were nice for just talking to to people in the same room. After all, if you’re in the same session, coming up with something to talk about is pretty easy.

Choosing sessions to go to can be tricky. There can be many great titles available. But don’t bother going to too many on similar topics. There were a ton of them on monetization, and while earning money is nice there’s a lot more information you need in order to succeed.

Besides, the basics of many of the monetization sessions were to first try selling something of your own, preferably your own products, but ad sales as well, then affiliate marketing, with AdSense down on the bottom if you just need a way to earn money.

The exact details varied, of course, but you can experiment with those and see what works best for you. Some did find affiliate sales to work better than selling their own products.

When your schedule and budget allow, go to one of these conferences. I found it to be highly rewarding.

As you work on your blog, it’s good to read up on ways to improve your chances for success. There are so many things you can do to bring up your readership or generally improve your blog.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out. You’ll even find strong opinions on what seem to be little things.

Full vs. Partial Feeds

This one can get quite a bit of debate. Full feeds are great for people who use feed readers and just want to get their blog reading done, but the blog itself may lose out on traffic from those readers.

Partial feeds mean that the first part of your posts must drag people into clicking to read the rest of the post. But some readers will unsubscribe if you require this of them.

There are some strong feelings on both sides of this. Some bloggers worry about their feeds being scraped if they use full feeds. Others want readers to come to their blogs to hopefully improve the number of comments and maybe even ad clicks.

Personally, I go for full feeds simply as the most functional option for readers. Anyone who is moved enough to comment still has to click through to the site. Properly added product recommendations will still make it through to the feed reader, so you can still get affiliate commissions.

Displaying Feed Counts

Having a lot of readers is a wonderful thing for a blog. It’s one of the things that makes blogging worthwhile. Some bloggers display their feed counts, while others don’t.

And of course some fake the numbers so that they look popular. All too easy to do and generally too easily discovered.

I’ve seen general agreement that if you have fewer than 100 subscribers to your feed, you may as well forget about displaying the count. You aren’t getting the social proof that you should want from this. Some will say to wait for even higher numbers, but that’s up to the individual blogger.

Even some sites with a huge number of subscribers will prefer to not show numbers.

Don’t bother faking counts, as being caught out greatly damages your reputation. Instead, think about why it is you want your count to show.

In many cases, it is for that social proof that a lot of people are subscribing to your site. Feed subscriptions don’t tell the whole story, but it’s a number that is easily made public.

Just keep in mind that there are other ways for people to tell how much traffic your blog is getting. The number of comments is a good clue. A high subscriber count displayed with few comments (assuming comments are turned on) can indicate a problem.

Using the Right Social Media Sites

Social media websites have proven to be an amazing way to get the word out about individual blog posts. But if you try to sign up and participate in them all, you’re going to drive yourself crazy and possibly be counted as a spammer if you do nothing more than self-promote.

I’ll be perfectly clear. Social media can make a huge difference to your blog and the traffic you get. But overdoing it is not the answer.

Pick one or two to start with, and participate on them. Promote your own things occasionally, but your main focus should be on being a good member. You’re looking to build a solid reputation and some trust. Network with people doing well on those sites as well as with others just starting out. Get a real feel for what goes over well.

Don’t give yourself too hard a time about learning it all right away. There’s a lot to figure out and taking your time to understand what you’re trying to accomplish will do more than plunging blindly in.

While any of these can make a difference in how your site grows, they really aren’t that likely to make or break you. Even your own use of social sites, which can drive serious traffic at times, can matter far less than if your readers use them. Give yourself time and work the way that is best and most productive for you.

As you go about reading up on ways to build your business, you probably have found there are a lot of theories about how to get a good audience. Many tactics naturally value the search engines, without which you’re hard to find in the first place.

Over time you become more established, and hopefully start to build a good audience. If you’re writing a blog, tracking your audience can be pretty easy with tools such as Feedburner. You can find out just how many people are subscribed to your blog, and even share that information on a chicklet if you like.

The trouble comes in if you start to get too obsessed with search engine traffic, and forget about the audience you’ve been building for. Or you start aiming for the Digg front page or wanting a huge number of Stumbles to your site.

You forget your audience and write for someone or something else instead.

All these sources of traffic can be very nice, but trying too hard for them can alienate the readers you really want. Digg and Stumble traffic may not convert well. Search engine traffic is better, but it only helps if you’re writing for the people reading your site rather than the bots.

Truth be told, success is not to be had strictly in a large number of visitors or subscribers. Both are nice, but what are they doing to help you earn a living? If you’re trying to earn money and they aren’t interested in buying, you aren’t doing yourself any good just going for the numbers.

Show your audience that you value it by providing good value to them. Write interesting, relevant content. Point out solid products and services that they may enjoy using. Build trust. Be responsive.

If you’re open to what your visitors and subscribers have to say, they may well tell you what they’d like to see on your site. You can get some idea of this just by tracking where people go the most on your site (aside from the home page!), or you can ask. Start a poll or write a post asking people what they would like to see more of from you.

Providing good value is not the only step you’ll have to take if you want to succeed online. No matter how good your site is, if no one can find it no one will care about it. But it is a major portion of what it takes to maintain your success.

I’m pretty excited to finally be able to go to such an event. I’ve been trying for ages to get into one industry event or another, but my plans have always fallen through.

I finally got everything to go smoothly for attending BlogWorld.

The one thing slowing me down was waiting to find out if my husband could get the weekend off work. Wouldn’t you know, his 6 weeks training at the new job ends a full week before BlogWorld. For various reasons, we want him to normally work weekends. Yet you obviously don’t want to be making too many scheduling requests on a new job.

Fortunately, his boss thoroughly approves of our taking a trip. Helps that the new job is in the travel industry.

So I have my pass reserved as well as hotel room. Don’t need to rent a car because I’m bringing my husband, and we’re close enough that driving makes more sense than flying, especially with the ticket prices I found online.

I know time’s going to fly, but September 20 seems far away now!