Therefore, I aspire to provide a basic guide to new bloggers. This is not intended to be a list of do’s and don’ts as much as advice from someone who made some mistakes along the way and hopes to help the rest of you avoid a few pitfalls of your own. This also is neither an exclusive nor an all-inclusive list; it is more informational. My goal is simply to provide some insight into the idea of starting your own blog – what you should think about, what you should look for, and how to make some good decisions.

First, do some research.

Answer the questions of what, why, where.

• What type of blog do I want to write? Casual? Professional? Personal? Etc.
• Why do I want to write? To give information? To promote my product/service? To network with others in my field?
• Where do I get my inspiration and information?
• Where do I find the best hosting service?
• Where do I find out which platform is best for my blog (WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.)?

It is essential that you answer these basic questions before you even write your first word. Unfortunately, I didn’t and so it took me a lot longer to find my way through the blogging process than it should have.

Second, read other bloggers’ content.

Find out what others write about, what their style is, and where they garner fresh ideas and information. There are many great bloggers and writers with varying methods, content, and perspectives. Read blogs on various topics and from various points of view to help you determine what approach, design, and platform may work best for you. Again, some advice I wish I had followed. While I did a little bit of reading ahead of time, I still ended up in way over my head.

Third, write some preliminary content of your own.

I’m not talking about publishing here. I’m talking about writing for the sake of writing — getting used to the art, figuring out the rules of grammar and usage, walking away from your work and checking/proofing it later. Have someone else read it, too, just to ensure it conveys what you want it to convey. Let’s face it, as much as you love and enjoy reading your own content, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone else does or that they even understand it the way you wrote it. Just read a few of my first blog posts and you’ll understand what I mean.

Fourth, establish your writing goals and schedule.

This is where you answer the questions of who, how, and when. Who is my audience and how do I reach them with my message/product/service/etc.? This is also where you decide, based on your answers to the previous questions, how often you want to write and when you will put aside time in your schedule to write. Do you aim to publish daily? Two or three times per week? Once per week? Etc. How often you would like to publish will propel your writing habits and schedule. The more often you publish, the more time you must set aside ahead of time to write.

Fifth, publish to your heart’s content.

Once you have answered all the questions (what, why, where, who, how, and when) and settled on a writing schedule, blog your little heart out. Also, I suggest using a free blogging service like WordPress.com, Tumblr, or Posterous to familiarize yourself with writing and blogging. Once you’re comfortable, then the move to self-hosting comes much easier.

Obviously, I am working on a few assumptions here. Namely, that you are genuine and are providing a legitimate good or service. There is no place in the blogging world for scammers or spammers. Plus, your audience will not accept you or your perspective unless you are authentic and sincere.
While I am not a rookie to the blogging scene, I am certainly not a pro blogger either. I guess you could say I am an amateur blogger.

For those of you who are new, let me know how I can help. For those of you who are pros, what other great advice would you pass on to those who are new (basically, what did I miss)?

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Before You Jump Into This Blogging Thing

This isn’t just true of blogging. Think of all the markets now open on the basis of solved problems. Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, Henry Ford’s assembly line manufacturing process, and Richard James’ “slinky” are all vitally important to our current culture and society. And they all solve problems… except for the slinky perhaps.

Here’s the point: If you want to be read, be needed. And to be needed, solve a problem. Fix something that is broken. Address a need in the human heart or head. And if you can’t think of anything useful to say, meet the human need to be entertained. That may seem trivial, but there’s a reason why millions of people laugh out loud at cats.

This isn’t so much a challenge to come up with an idea for a blog that solves a problem as it is a provocation for you to write from a problem-solving mindset. As you pen each post, consider the questions…

• What unmet need am I meeting?
• What unfilled niche am I filling?
• What unsolved problem am I solving?

Then write in such a way that people will crave the answer you are offering.

What blogs do you see solving problems? And what problem does your blog solve?

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Grow Your Blog’s Influence by Solving a Problem

But oh, there’s more.

The truly successful blogs don’t just create great content based around a niche, tweet it out, and wait for the readers to come in. They create blog evangelists – readers that are actively passionate about the brand, spread it by word of mouth, and happily sit by the “buy” button when a new product is released.

Every great blog has these evangelists – of course, though, the question then is – how do I find and/or create these for my blog? It’s not as hard as you think. Blog evangelists require more than just making one great piece of content, though. They require a nurturing, long process, much like taking care of a plant and ensuring it has proper exposure to sunlight and water. Blog readers are no different – they want to be cared for, and when they are, they reward you with great air and beauty (their evangelism).

How to Create Blog Evangelists

1. Make a Great Second Impression

Hopefully you’ve already written a great post. If you’ve done this, then you’ve already converted your reader in some way. They might have tweeted it out, commented, or added you to their RSS feed. Although this is a great thing to see, it doesn’t mean much. For most blogs, so few of these actions will result in follow-up movements like continued retweets, comments, or the like.

Much of this has to do with blog writers doing a poor job of the follow-up. This second impression is arguably the most important one – because it is a strong, powerful step towards both branding your blog and creating future evangelists.

So how do you do this? When people comment, the standard act is just to reply. Believe it or not, this is not enough. Many of these people won’t ever return to look at your follow-up, or subscribe to the comment thread. So, really, all your follow-up comment does – most of the time – is create the illusion of blog activity. What you need to do – and what is so infrequently done – is send an e-mail to every first time commenter on your website.

This creates a real, personal connection with the person who comments. Do a little research on the person, look at their website, and compliment them genuinely on something they do well. Let them know you’ll help them with anything they might need – and don’t lie if you can’t!

2. Create Social Engagement with Readers

If you can’t find an e-mail and the connection point is through a retweet, first, thank the person. Do this individually to increase personalization (rather than the five person mass “Thanks for the RT!” message). Follow them, even if they haven’t followed you. Given their retweet, the odds that they follow back is significantly higher.

Once they’ve retweeted you and/or commented, create a list for them. You can be straightforward and say “readers”, but I suggest you do something a little more obscure, like “people I find interesting” or “people I engage with”. After all, you don’t want to seem too commercial or automated when doing this. Use this list to track their tweet stream and find the best links or commentary they send out.

After that’s done, make a dedicated effort to make a follow-up engagement with this person. Look for something to reply to, or a tweet to funnel back to your followers. This follow-up will go a long way towards evangelism. And it must be within a week or so of their first engagement – as to ensure that you still have a familiar place in their mind.

Once that’s been done, you’ve made some strong steps towards creating brand evangelists. Now, you return back to the first impression – your blog post.

3. Follow up With More Great Content

Once you’ve planted the seed, it’s now your job to follow up on the initial great content that drew their attention. People love great posts, but they aren’t going to go out of their way to fall in love – not unless you nudge them to. By creating social engagement or putting yourself front-facing in their mind, you improve the likelihood they’ll return. Once that happens, you must continue creating things that stick, that they want to spread, and that they want to speak highly of.

The engagement is the easy (but also necessary) part – it’s the great content that’s going to make people run to their mothers to spread the word.

4. Maintain, Maintain, Maintain

Some people, based on personality type, schedules and other things, will take more nudges before turning in to full time readers of your blog. For these people, it will take more than that initial “poke” to start the ball in motion.

And admittedly, some of the smarter people will be very aware of exactly what you’re doing – trying to create evangelists. The more you connect, the more of a “friend” you’ll become – and less of a snake oil salesman. Of course, these kinds of relationships are more rewarding and fun anyways – and it should be your goal to establish this with as many of your readers as possible.

Every Plant Needs Water

The more I think about it, the more I realize blog readers are like plants. They take a long time to grow, but once you get them to their full height, they stay around for a long time, as long as you put them in the sunlight and water on occasion. But they can – and will – die if you don’t pay attention.

Good luck creating your blog evangelists. Do you have any more tips on creating loyal readership? Leave them in the comments!

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How to Create Blog Evangelists

Check out the demo or head on over to download it!

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Typominima: Awesome Wordpress Theme, Awesome Name

Having combed through our curcuit of friends, here are some awesome articles from the past week we think you should check out:

The Top 5 Most Annoying Blogging Cliches

Forming Your Network of Weak Ties for Achievement & Success

Get Smart About Podcasting

Why You Don't Need to Blog Daily

Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better

Is Sincerity the Key to Successful Blogging?

100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition

Blog Your Thumbs Off – How to Blog When There’s no Internet Access

As usual… what did we miss?

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The Hot List of Links for Bloggers

First, let’s agree that your audience is varied and you can’t please everyone – but they all follow your for some reasons (yes, in plural) and trying to understand those reasons is the key.

Your Blog Readership – Layers

One of the great speakers at BlueGlass LA was Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network – I think everyone reading now got it immediately: LOL cats! Now, the most important thing to know about the blogs is they are user-generated – which means the people behind the network managed to build a strong 100%-self-built community – the perfect example of great user engagement and interaction.

So how did they do that?

The answer is simple (no, it’s actually not that simple): understanding how your community is (being) built.

The first law of community you need to know is that it’s not all about “active” users. You need to grow both the commenters and the people who don’t talk. That’s the whole community. Your community is not just the people who generate content: it’s the people who read and use it.

Communities are made of up delicate layers of users: you should listen to ALL of them.

Whilst engaging with these “active” portions of your readership is certainly important, you need to keep in mind that they are (in most cases) the vocal minority. Most of your followers will be people who silently surf through your content, but who will never really feel the need to interact with you as you don’t take the time to actively appeal for them to do so.

Twitter or Facebook isn’t to everyone’s taste (believe it or not) and knee-jerk comments may prove to not be particularly useful, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still engage your audience to find out information that you can be used to better understand what kind of content they want you to produce.

A couple of my favorite ways for getting feedback from my readers are:

Setting Up “Personality Tests”

For some reason people just love taking these kinds of quizzes, which makes the ideal for finding out pretty much anything you want about your readership. You will need to adapt the titles of the quizzes to suite the type of blog you are running. On some blogs “What Kind of Computer Are You?” will go down very well, whilst on others you may need something more along the lines of “Which of the Disciples Do You Most Resemble?”.

Making a fun quiz that appeals to your specific target audience can be difficult, but it is vitally important, if you get it right you’ll be amazed just how many normally silent people you can get to participate.

My favorite tool for making these kinds of tests is ProProfs that has a nifty online testing utility, a really simple to use website which lets you make fully interactive quizzes, graphics and all, with very little effort. So for example using the site I set up a quiz labeled “Which Type of Twitter User You Are”, as an attempt to learn more about my audiences tweeting habits, but I did it in such a way so as to appeal to their inquisitive (and competitive) nature regarding where they ranked compared to my other readers.

Tests like these are really simple to set up, not to mention they can be a lot of fun to create, once you’re done you can embed them straight into your website ready for use. Analyzing the results can yield a real goldmine of information. The Quiz School stats pages give a complete overview of how each individual answered each specific question, as well as charts documenting the overall voting amongst all those who responded.

Below are the result analytics I got from my quiz maker – plenty of data to dig into. Here’s the report itself (notice that you can actually see the user names, details and result):

And here are some visualization tools to allow you to analyze the data better (for example, you can see the answer break-down for each particular question):

Using Survey’s

Survey’s often provide a most useful forms of customer feedback, especially ones which allow for users to leave their own comments regarding specific questions. Unfortunately long survey’s can be a lot more difficult to get people to fill in when compared to short quizzes which appeal to their sense of fun.

If you think you can entice enough of your users to fill in a Survey as to make it worthwhile, there are a couple of options available to you. Firstly you could use a third party website like Survey Monkey to set up and track the results of your survey. Alternatively if you are using Wordpress to run your blog then you could use a simple Wordpress plugin to do the job for you. The second option giving the advantage of maintaining full control of the survey through the back end of your site, as well as complete privacy when it comes to the information compiled.

Do you use any tools to get to know your blog readers better? Please share them in the comments!

Post image by B Rosen

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Do You Listen to Your “Silent” Blog Followers?

In this awkward stage people often become consumed with the tools available and value them over the principles that underly our work. But the underlying principle that makes social media such a vital part of the web is that people naturally long to relate to one another. They long to be deeply known.

Facebook and Twitter provide a means of reaching out and knowing someone. They offer points of access to others – points that didn’t exist before. But how do you explore those contacts more deeply? How do you take the next step beyond a tweet and really mine your established relationships for the kind of data that really connects people?

You can start with tools like these:

Gist

Gist takes the people you’re normally in contact with across the social web and shows you a cross-section of their online activity and an extended profile of them. Get Gist.

Rapportive

Rapportive replaces your Gmail sidebar ads with social web information about the person from whom the email you are reading was sent. It pulls from a variety of sources, shows recent tweets, and gives you a good picture of the person.

Threadsy

Threadsy does several things very well. It pulls together incoming messages from across various networks and puts them into a common inbox. This includes email, mentions, and direct messages. It also provides a networking client alongside the inbox and a sweet email signature to boot.

There are others. In fact, there are more added almost daily. We’re watching a positive trend in that there is a growing focus on building relationships and not just “follower counts.”

What do you use to deepen relationships across the social web?

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3 Tools for Exploring Your Social Networking Relationships

Boasting plugins for three major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), Scribefire is a pretty powerful tool. Check out the screenshot of my editing a post here on Fuel…

What impresses me is that everything I need to do in my normal post editing window is available through Scribefire. We would expect such a plugin to include secondary details such as categories and tags, but Scribefire even includes custom fields.

One of the more useful features is the ability to switch between blogs (assuming you manage multiple blogs) and write and edit instantaneously without logging into different backends. And the only disadvantage? There doesn’t seem to be a way to utilize Wordpress’ media uploading features. You can only add images by url.

My opinion of Scribefire is pretty high. If you’re looking for a very simple, in-browser tool for writing and editing on multiple blogs, it’s an excellent choice. But I’m still a control freak, so to write this review, I still logged in the old-fashioned way. Some habits die hard.

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Scribefire: A Fully Mature External Blog Editor

The Narrative Template

1. Title
2. Opening Thought
3. Multiple Paragraphs of a Single, Flowing Thought

The Well-Structured Template

1. Title
2. Proposition / Thesis
3. Introduction / Hook
4. Transitional Statement
5. Major Points with Elaborations
6. Conclusion and Wrap-up
7. Call to Action

The Seth Godin Template

1. Title
2. Deeply Profound Insight in one to three hundred words.

Seth's Genius

The Money-Making Template

1. Title
2. Advertisement
3. Halfway Relevant but Keyword-Stuffed Opening
4. Advertisement
5. A List With Affiliate Links
6. Pitch a Product
7. Another Advertisement
8. A Plug for Your Email Newsletter
9. Advertisement
10. Another Halfway-Relevant Paragraph
11. Call to Action
12. Call to More Action
13. A pop-up When the Reader Tries to Leave

Oh come on folks, lighten up…

The Copyblogger Template

1. Title
2. Deeply Profound Insight in one to three thousand words.

Simple enough? What’s your template?

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Five Possible Blog Post Templates to Follow

Have you ever met someone who had been married 55 years, was the CEO of one of the world’s largest and nicest hotel chains, and runs a pretty sweet blog? Meet Bill Marriott! And how did I know he’d been married for 55 years? He blogged about it.

As stated on the about page:

The purpose of this blog is to give you a forum to interact with Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International. We believe Marriott is more than just the world’s largest lodging company with more than 3,000 hotels around the world.

We’re proud of our culture, history, service excellence, and especially our 151,000* associates whose Spirit to Serve makes us so successful. Part of what makes us great is our belief in service to the customer and “Success is Never Final.”

This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we’ve nurtured since 1927. We are delighted you have decided to visit us, and we will do our best to make it a valuable experience for you.

The beauty of this blog isn’t in its rather basic design, but in the portal it opens between the average consumer/reader/guest and the CEO of an enormous operation. The company apparently recognizes this corporate blog for what it is, a mechanism to open the communication lines to the very top.

The blog does a great job at being social on the surface, providing links to other profiles and the company itself while allowing comments on posts, but one thread caught my attention on a post about offering points to timeshare owners. It seems there is debate about the points system, but reading between the lines reveals that there’s another debate going on between those who claim their comments aren’t being posted, and others whose negative comments are showing up just fine. Whatever the issue is, the negative factor that stands out is a lack of response, even in intervals.

What I love most about this blog is a very simple point: it’s a CEO, blogging for himself (in his own words, that is) about his company and his life. It’s quite a difficult task to convince C-suite executives of the value of working hard on their own content when they’re so busy with so many other tasks. Bill Marriott seemingly gets it.

What do you think? What does Bill get right or wrong? What can we learn from his blogging efforts?

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Showcase: Marriott on the Move – the Blog of Bill Marriott

1. Refusing to repeat ideas means you have to constantly have new ones, which can be exhausting.
2. The web is more and more a real-time content engine. Yesterday’s great idea is buried under today’s inspiration.
3. People forget what you’re about if you don’t remind them.

One leadership expert often reminds his people that “vision leaks.” You can share it, but you’ll need to share it again in six weeks or everyone will forget it. That can be true of a blog’s audience as well. Our attention spans are shorter than ever, so if you want to be memorable, you have to update your readers’ memory often.

Your best ideas are certainly worth repeating, and if it’s not worth repeating, it’s probably not your best idea. I’ve been a public speaker for thirteen years and have spoken to the exact same crowd, three times per week for half a decade. That means I’ve spoken to one group of people close to 1,000 times. During that time, I learned that originality isn’t always possible. The alternative is the same basic ideas re-packaged and re-published in a new and fresh way.

Here’s the question for you… how do you re-package ideas in a fresh way? How should a blogger utilize repetition and how can she do it without becoming lazy in the process?

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Hey Blogger, Could You Repeat That?

Fuel Your Blogging's List of Awesome Bloggers

We’d like to introduce members of our blogging community to other great bloggers, and we thought one of the best ways to do this would be to highlight, in a Twitter list, some of the people who have caught our attention in the recent past.

They’ve made the list for a variety of reasons. Some have simply established themselves as household names among bloggers. Others have been active within this Fuel Your Blogging community and have caught our attention because of their interactions. Some are outside the social media industry but have proving their wits when it comes to applying principles and practices of great blogging.

We’ll be adding more as time goes on. You’re sure to notice someone who is missing, so we apologize in advance that we can’t be fully comprehensive. We just wanted you to meet some really great bloggers!

So check out and follow the @fuelblogging list of awesome bloggers. Oh, and if you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter too!

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A Twitter List of Awesome Bloggers

A community is a place where people connect with each other in personal relationships. An online community can be thought of, not so much as a tightly defined circle, but rather a loose collection of smaller, overlapping circles. A blogger who wants to manage an online community should be finding ways to connect those circles to each other more effectively.

How do you reach into your online community to strengthen the relationships that exist there? Here are five suggestions…

1. Personally contact individual members. When people leave comments or sign up for your mailing list, they’re giving you permission to contact them. In our ultra-spammy age, this requires a great deal of trust. Never abuse this by sending obviously unsolicited pitches, but I think you can feel free to make an initial “thank you” contact.
2. Highlight great comments in a future post. Occasionally someone leaves a comment that is worthy of being its own post. They’ve taken the time to contribute to the community discussion in a way that might need more attention than being buried in a long, threaded discussion.
3. Turn a question back to the community. There are two big advantages of this: 1.) You get to pass the buck temporarily on a tough question, and 2.) People are generally rather opinionated and love weighing in.
4. Connect community members to each other. This is really the power of the social web. Bob asks a question about building widgets. Sandy mentions that James is an awesome widget-maker. A new connection is formed which only serves to strengthen the community.
5. Highlight the accomplishments of community members. In other words, when you notice someone in your community doing something great off your site, report about it on your site.

What else? How do you reach into your community?

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5 Creative Ways to Reach Into Your Online Community

Tumblr is a pretty cool service. They offer easy set up, loads of funky themes and super-simple reblogging. But blogging on Tumblr is sort of like being in high school. But you know deep-down that you can’t be in high school forever. Eventually, you have to move on…

Face it. You need to leave Tumblr behind and graduate to Posterous.

Bold. Perhaps too bold, in fact, as multiple news outlets not only raising questions but at times outright refuting Posterous’ claims.

Obviously, we’re talking in the realm of startups and apps and not just blogging, but these startup apps are changing the blogging industry, so for me it prompts some deeper thinking about competition in the blogging world.

Here are some questions, you give me answers if you dare…

• Should bloggers see others in their niche as competition?
• If so, are they “friendly” competition?
• How aggressive should bloggers be to claim their turf?
• How do you size up Posterous’ words? Ambitious or slanderous?
• What advice would you give on the subject?

So… shoot!

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Should Bloggers Be Killing the Competition?

Michael Low talks to us about some specific and unique ways to gain the trust of readers, which of course is not only significant when we’re calling them to action in the moment, but as we build a reputation of credibility long-term.

The Top Ten Drop-Dead Ugliest Bloggers of 2010

Nicholas Cardot took it upon himself to point out ten of the ugliest bloggers on the planet and happened to mention this Editor, who is now steaming mad! (Actually, it’s a fun post. Check it out.)

9 Ways to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back

Patsi Krakoff helps us review and re-commit to great writing and blogging in this excellent post.

50 Power Twitter Tips

Chris Brogan published this killer list of tips for Twitter, which has been making headlines all week. If you missed it, tune in now.

My Blog Schedule and Time Management

Kiesha Easley lets us into her world and explains, in detail, how she manages to be such a prolific blogger and keep her sanity (or something close to it). See her post for a good blogging productivity roadmap.

5 Uncreative Ways to Unlock Your Creative Juices

Jared Erickson, a creative guy himself, mentions five basic ways to get out from behind the screen and stoke the creative fires again. We all need a reminder and a revival now and then.

John Saddington guides us through the process of prepping for Wordpress 3.0, just released last week and includes everything a blogger needs to know about backing up and taking the leap.

The Common Characteristics of the Best Entrepreneurs

If you want to be more than a flash in the pan, check out this excellent story by Chris Bennett over at Young Entrepreneur.

Well, what did I miss?

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The Hot List of Links for Bloggers