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How to get more Readers for your blog

By Anita Mathias

Thank you, Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html

How to get traffic for your blog

  1. Use lists.
  2. Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
  3. Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
  4. Break news.
  5. Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
  6. Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
  7. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
  8. Announce news.
  9. Write short, pithy posts.
  10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
  11. Don’t write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
  12. Write long, definitive posts.
  13. Write about your kids.
  14. Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
  15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
  16. Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
  17. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
  18. Coin a term or two.
  19. Do email interviews with the well-known.
  20. Answer your email.
  21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
  22. Be anonymous.
  23. Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit).Do it with every post.
  24. Post your photos on flickr.
  25. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
  26. Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
  27. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
  28. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
  29. Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
  30. Point to useful but little-known resources.
  31. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
  32. Write about Google.
  33. Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
  34. Don’t include comments, people will cross post their responses.
  35. Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
  36. Run no ads.
  37. Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
  38. Write about blogging.
  39. Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
  40. Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
  41. Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
  42. Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don’t bore your readers.
  43. Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
  44. Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
  45. Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
  46. Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
  47. Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention.
  48. Be patient.
  49. Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
  50. Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
  51. Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
  52. Write in English.
  53. Better, write in Chinese.
  54. Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
  55. Don’t be boring.
  56. Write stuff that people want to read and share.

Wikio

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Filed Under: Blogging, books_blog

Thoughts on Blogging

By Anita Mathias



1) It’s writing without gatekeepers. You put your thoughts out there; if they resonate, you find an audience, readers, “followers.”


2) It is more or less a meritocracy, but it can also be tweaked and cheated like the old system. 


3 Nothing is better for breaking a writer’s block


4) Bloggers who are honest and keep in touch with their souls are probably happier for the exercise.
























Wikio


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Blogs as demanding as toddlers, and monetized blogging

By Anita Mathias

A Blog’s Like a Baby and Monetized blogging

Scary words–“It’s not not fun,” says the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, which today attracts almost ten million hits a month. “But it’s more like the blog is a baby, and it has to be tended to at all times. And the baby might grow up a bit, but it’s never going to get past the age of 2 or 3 in terms of how much it demands of you.”
Anna Holmes of jezebel.com
Being in charge of the sharpest, snarkiest, most popular women’s blog around sounds as if it should be a lot of fun. Anna Holmes pauses and chooses her words.
“It’s not not fun,” says the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, which launched in May 2007 and today attracts almost ten million hits a month. “But it’s more like the blog is a baby, and it has to be tended to at all times. And the baby might grow up a bit, but it’s never going to get past the age of 2 or 3 in terms of how much it demands of you.”
From the spare room of her New York apartment, Holmes oversees blogging on a near-industrial scale as she commissions a team of writers who churn out a new post every 10 minutes for almost 12 hours a day, addressing anything from urinary tract infection vaccines, via dating and stupid celebrities, to the evils of glossy women’s magazines’ airbrushed covers. Typically, a working day will stretch to 11 or 12 hours at her computer.
“I don’t want to say it’s ruined my life – I don’t want to put it that way. But it’s reconfigured it in a way that’s probably extremely unhealthy. A social life? Nah, I don’t have one,” she chuckles. “That’s the problem with the internet: it’s always on.”
MAKING A LIVING BY WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
Heather B. Armstrong
dooce.com 
 Dooce.com was created in 2001 for Armstrong to post musings on pop culture and gleefully acerbic accounts of life as a “recovering Mormon”. When she had her first baby, though, “the blog traffic tripled in one day”: people wanted to know what happened next. So she blogged about everything, from her postpartum depression to mischievous takes on the foibles of daily life.
It was in 2005 that her husband suggested they could make a living if she accepted advertising. “I said, ‘No! No! No!’ I was very scared about the idea of supporting my family with a blog.” But she relented, becoming one of the first professional personal bloggers. Since then, she’s been given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Weblog Awards, been cited in Forbes’ Most Influential Women in Media list, written books and, now, met the President.
“And some people still reckon, ‘Who does she think she is?’ Which is fair. I was this housewife, and no one in their right mind would have hired me to write about my life,” she says. “So I just did it myself.”

 http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article7108518.ece
I find this interesting as after turning down the first few offers of sponsored posts, I now do accept sponsorship–mainly from big companies I am comfortable with–Barclays Bank, Paypal, Pizza Hut, Hewlett Packard, and a few advertising campaigns. Basically, I provide advertising space in a blog post, and they pay me–enough for me to keep my blogs running without feeling guilty that I am wasting time on this most pleasurable pursuit. 
I have tried blogging before, but before I monetized my blogs I could not stick it out for more than a week or two. I felt guilty about the time spent on blogging when I could have been doing more lucrative writing. Monetizing my blogs enables me to continue blogging. You were right, Heather Armstrong.

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Filed Under: Blogging, books_blog

Finding Your Own Blogging Voice

By Anita Mathias

Finding Your Own Blogging Voice


I have been writing for a while and have definitely found my own distinctive writing voice. Blogging, on the other hand, was a different ball game–putting up your thoughts on the web, for friend and foe alike, raw, unprocessed, unedited. Wow!


How does one find the voice for that? Not too personal, not too boring, not too pompous or distant. Writing for unseen, anonymous readers.


I have been blogging for almost six months, with some success–top 20 in Wikio UK in both culture and literature, high ranks in technorati, and top blog sites. But I had not found my real voice, me. I was not sharing who I really was, just what I thought.





An accident helped me find my own blogging voice. I wrote a post of great interest to the large Christian community to which I belong. I had 1400 page views within a week, 852 of them unique page views (the rest were repeats because of the 60 or so comments.) 


And as always happens when you have a sudden spike in page views, most dropped off, but not all. My graph of page views was suddenly on another level.




I suddenly had a real audience–people I knew, whom I worshipped with every Sunday, and met mid-week every week. True, I did not know which individuals, but I suddenly felt I had real people reading my blogs, who somewhat knew me, and were interested in what I had to say.


There is nothing like that for finding one’s real writing or blogging voice.




I have now found my own distinctive blogging voice on two of my blogs, theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com and wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com. I still need to find my own voice, who I really am, on my third blog, a literary blog called thegoodbooksblog.blogspot.com.


I think of the pop psychology book popular when I was a teen, “Why am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am.” It goes on to say, “I am afraid to tell you who I am because you may not like who I am, and who I am is all I have.”


So, a truly good blog, a truly interesting one, is written by someone who is not afraid to tell you who she really is. 




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Filed Under: Blogging, books_blog

Second Book Bloggers Meet-Up, Oxford, September 25th, 2010

By Anita Mathias

The Second Book Bloggers Meet-Up

Oxford
 
This is to announce that there will be another Book Bloggers’ Meet-Up on Saturday September 25th in Oxford. Venue and time are tbc, but that should be enough info for now to let you know whether or not you can make it.

We’d love to see as many bloggers as can make it, whether you’ve been blogging for years or weeks! If you’re interested, and haven’t already received emails about it (everyone who emailed about the one in May *should* have been contacted) then let me know on [email protected] – doesn’t commit you to anything, of course.

And do pop all this info up on your own blogs, if you’d like to.

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Blogs and the marginalia of old

By Anita Mathias

“Blogs are the new marginalia, our annotated lives, riffs on our cultural and political patrimony (like this post), asides on the political drama of the day, knowing winks at perpetuity…” from [email protected]



The contribution to civilization of the Irish  “was the preservation of Roman and Greek texts amid the collapse of the Roman empire. The Irish had replaced the Christian tradition of martyrdom with that of “green martyrs,” or monks, whose own recent Celtic roots made them receptive to pagan literature. These monks set about collecting and copying such manuscripts — without censorship — in their remote Irish monasteries, while the barbarians thoroughly brutalized the continent.
These copyists acted as meme-promoters, keeping classical ideas alive until they could once again be let loose on a critical mass of fertile minds in the next renaissance. This is how the memes at the foundation of modern western thought skirted extinction — our knowledge of Plato comes to us through the ages via a thin but sinewy thread that extends through Ireland. Eventually, the Irish monks re-evangelized the continent, and made sure to take the classics with them. By the time the Vikings were raiding monasteries on Ireland, the texts were being kept safe by Irish monks as far afield as Italy.
And while copying was their main task, these monks could not help but populate the margins with annotations, comments, approval or mockery. Cahill writes (in 1995) about what might have motivated them:

[The monks] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual — glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him.

That was, effectively, blogging, circa 700 A.D.
Of course, today, we bloggers have been relieved of the task of manually copying the memes we deem worthy of promotion (and disparagement); the cost of copying information is now negligibleIt is even more efficient merely to refer to the texts in question with a link (although at the risk of the link going bad).. Blogs are the new marginalia, our annotated lives, riffs on our cultural and political patrimony (like this post), asides on the political drama of the day, knowing winks at perpetuity…”

BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM


http://www.stefangeens.com/2003/07/how-the-irish-s.html

Filed Under: Blogging, books_blog

Blogging and slowing down and observing

By Anita Mathias

Blogging, slowing down, observing, and describing what you observe is one way to slow down and return to writing after a period of extroversion

Filed Under: Blogging

A blogging business

By Anita Mathias

I am really enjoying maintaining my three blogs. It is the only writing I’ve done that has provided a regular income, since my writing has always been feast or famine. (The blogs are monetized with ads).

Turning writing, my joy, into a business, has been a joy!!

Filed Under: Blogging

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My Books

Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art

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Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much

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The Story of Dirk Willems

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Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
Runner Up Christian Media Awards 2014 - Tweeter of the year

Recent Posts

  •  On Not Wasting a Desert Experience
  • A Mind of Life and Peace in the Middle of a Global Pandemic
  • On Yoga and Following Jesus
  • Silver and Gold Linings in the Storm Clouds of Coronavirus
  • Trust: A Message of Christmas
  • Life- Changing Journaling: A Gratitude Journal, and Habit-Tracker, with Food and Exercise Logs, Time Sheets, a Bullet Journal, Goal Sheets and a Planner
  • On Loving That Which Love You Back
  • “An Autobiography in Five Chapters” and Avoiding Habitual Holes  
  • Shining Faith in Action: Dirk Willems on the Ice
  • The Story of Dirk Willems: The Man who Died to Save His Enemy

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What I’m Reading

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
Vivian Gornick

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Wanderlust
Rebecca Solnit

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Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life
Kathleen Norris

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Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-96
Seamus Heaney

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