The top reasons people want to blog are all self-centered:

• I want to write a diary
• I want to make money from ads
• I want to sell products and services
• I want people to listen to me
• … and so on

That’s all fine, and I encourage anyone to persue their goals. Fact is though, if you do want to achieve goals, you need to think differently … read more

Right as I throttle down my guest posting to the lowest in my blogging career it seems guest posting is gaining steam.

This is because it’s not just traditional bloggers who are realizing the value of guest posting, but marketers, SEOs and other webmasters. Rather than looking for profile and personal brand building, these folks are using the tactic for growing their traffic and links. read more

Since Google slammed bought links, more and more webmasters have been scrambling around for a solution. Maybe not to replace their paid links, but to make their linking more natural in appearance, and definitely more scalable and sustainable. As an online marketing consultant I get paid well when called on to help out with this, but I am going to give you one solution for free. read more

If you are a member of a social networking service, it’s natural that you want to put the HTML code in your sidebar that shows off the faces or avatars of your buddies. After all, that’s what these social networking sites are all about. Your face on their blog and their face on your blog.

Is it? What good it is? How does it help your blog?

As part of this going series on WTF Blog Design Clutter, let’s look at the visual social clutter that clogs our blogs.

If your blog is a social blog, and the pictures of the folks participating on your blog might be helpful. People like seeing their faces or avatars on other blogs. Besides, it should be good link juice, right?

Maybe. read more

Remember the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression? You personally may get a second chance to sway that first impress, but your blog doesn’t. If you don’t grab them within the first micro-seconds of a visit, they won’t subscribe and they won’t be back.

Digging through a lot of blogs recently to research an upcoming article, I found myself thinking “WTF” as I looked at the designs. I was constantly distracted from the content I was eager to read through and quote towards things that blinked, flashed, or listed irrelevant stuff. My eyes had to work overtime to stay focused on the information I was there to glean.
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Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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It looks as if Adobe has given sight to blind search engines. Previously if web designers of blogs, web sites, etc. coded their site in flash, they would have to give up the ability to have their site indexed by the Google giant, and their whipping boy Yahoo!

Now bloggers, web developers and social networks will be able to remake their sites into “one big eye candy,” without fear on missing out from search engine traffic (aka “Google juice”).
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In Blog Challenge: What Are Your Most Favorite Blog Post Failures, one of the regular blog challenges I issue to “kick your blogging butt,” Atul Sabnis of Gaizabonts accepted the challenge to describe one of your favorite blog posts to write, one you were sure would get a lot of attention, but didn’t.

The challenge was to figure out why the blog post didn’t work. Sabnis wrote in Failed in Abstraction that the blog post titled A Discrete Process of Abstraction didn’t work for some very good reason, reasons we could all learn from:

This post deserved more attention than it got because it summarised well, my thought process of all that goes into most of my blogs; especially this blog…Why do I think this post failed? It was very dogmatic, to begin with. Its statement left no crack even, to pry open a possibility for a conversation. Then, it used artistic metaphors for something that isn’t often considered artistic. Finally it got tangled in its own wordsmithery. It still makes meaning to me, even if I shed the context I have, but I can imagine why, somewhere towards the end of the third paragraph, the reader may get lost. Anthropomorphism abounds.

Why do our blog posts fail? Not every blog can be at the top of the charts, but learning why they fail may help you understand what works and doesn’t work, on your blog with your readers.

Here are some of the reasons some blog posts fail:
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I recently published How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs, and a friend asked me how would she know if her blog is banned by a country, government, Internet Provider, company, school, or otherwise. Good question.

On Monday, I’ll be publishing a feature article on how to find out if your blog is banned and offer some options to get your blog off a ban or blocked list, but what about you?

Has your blog been blocked or banned by a government, educational institute, corporation, or web filtering service or program? How did you find out? Did you find out why your blog was blocked? Were you unable to get your blog unblocked?

Share your story with us.

I’m not bragging. It’s a fact. My blogs get a lot of attention. They win awards. I have a lot of incoming links, and a lot of steady traffic. The PageRank of my blog - well, actually, I don’t know. I have no idea and haven’t paid attention for several years. It doesn’t matter.

Most of the stuff that other bloggers worry and fuss over doesn’t matter to me. I don’t look at my blog stats unless I have a good reason. I don’t write to beg for traffic nor attention. Honestly, I just do what I do and people like it. Any search engine page ranking success I’ve had is due to experience and common sense. No games. I hate the games.

I tried to explain this to someone just entering the blog market recently, and they just couldn’t get it. “But you’re THE Lorelle! You’re famous!”

Nope. I’m just me. I’m just you. I’m just like everyone else, I’ve just been doing this longer. So pardon my arrogance for just a moment, but I’ve been there, done that, and now I think I’m paying attention to what’s more important than some numbers and scores.

What matters most to me is helping people.
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