Lost Art Of Blogging: Blogging Tips, Blogging Resources and Social Media with a touch of Zen

The Comment Etiquette: The Guide to Proper Blog Commenting

May 11, 2008 in Blogging Tips with 2 Comments

Commenting on the web is one of the most important factors that lead to the Internet social revolution, from the last few years. In the not so distant past, commenting and public social interactions on the web was more or less exclusive on forums and was limited by a series of complications. When blogs first became popular in the early 2000s, they were hailed and highly praised, not for their particular concept, but rather for their social innovation; a never before seen connectivity between the readers and the article authors. Readers could now freely and easily interact with the authors, publicly share and discuss the post’s ideas and form a bond with the blogger. In short comments from behalf of the readers made blogs what they are today.

Since then, a lot of things have changed on the web and in the blogoshere particularly. Commenting has also more or less changed, thanks to the ever expanding issue of spam, that’s lead to steadily decline of quality in blog comments.

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22 Essential Habits Towards Blogging Success

Apr 27, 2008 in Blogging Tips, Productivity with 23 Comments

Blogging Habits
Photo by erinen31

Last week I wrote about the habit of blogging. There I discussed about habits in general and how they fit into blogging, why gaining the habit of blogging is very important and finally how to eventually grow it. I’d like to think of the respective post as more of a initiation piece, for today’s article, in which I plan to lay down quite a few habits that make a blogger more effective, efficient, intelligent, interesting and well, let’s just say they kinda mark the difference between regular bloggers and, what’s commonly known as, “probloggers.”

I won’t limit the list to only habits, though. In it you’ll also find characteristics and traits, that highly prolific bloggers posses and which we all should strive to adopt. Continue Reading »

10 Easy Ways to Get in The Habit of Blogging

Apr 16, 2008 in Blogging Tips, Writing with 10 Comments

Forming the habit of blogging
Photo by Mrs. Maze

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

~Aristotle

Blogging demands seriousness, commitment, passion and of course consistency. These are the four essential ingredients, not only towards a successful blogging career, but a healthy and balanced life as well. However keeping up with the fast paced environment, that bloggers are ever so often subjected to, can be a bit of a impediment, especially for blogging beginners and amateurs. Apparently the biggest problem for most bloggers is consistency.

People tend to burn out really fast, after subsequently they passionately burned the midnight oil, during their first weeks, some just days, of blogging. Enthusiasm can be really swell, but the trouble with it is that it dies off pretty fast, so to keep on blogging consistently you have to asimilate it completely. It has to become a part of what you are and do completely, it has to flow throw your veins so to speak, and the easiest way to do that is to form the habit of blogging.

It’s just a matter of simple psychology. Every time your learn something new, your brain tries to connect dots, to form a pathway for neurological activity. If you repetitively perform an action, your brain will soon make behavior patterns and in term will improve your neurological pathway. This is the efficient way your brain handles routine. This is a habit.

Twitter: Why It’s So Great And How To Effectively Use It

Apr 7, 2008 in Blogging Tips, Social Bookmarking with 58 Comments

Photo by iJustine

Apparently micro-blogging is getting more and more popular by the day and consequently its biggest platform on the web, Twitter, is rapidly growing as well. This means there’s a whole new emerging market of tech savvy, blogging experienced users that’s just waiting to be grasped. A great opportunity indeed!

But first, for those a bit unfamiliar with micro blogging and more importantly twitter, let me explain a bit how it works. Twitter is basically a service that allows you to update your status with short messages, of up to 140 characters, just like a SMS text message. What makes it so special is that it also has social elements, allowing users to befriend each other; in twitter this is called “following.” Whenever you’re following somebody on twitter you’ll be able to instantly receive their updates and keep up to date with someone’s status. Furthermore because mobility and fastness are of the utmost importance in micro blogging, twitter allows you to update your status via the web page, IM, mobile phone, blackberry or various other third party applications.

WordPress 2.5: A Thorough Analysis

Mar 30, 2008 in The Net with 13 Comments

We Love Wordpress
WordPress is undoubtedly the leading blogging platform in the world, hands down. I’ve experimented with a lot of blogging CMS, from blogger, to drupal, to typepad and none came close (although I hold a particular fondness for typepad) to the versatility, reliability and support that WordPress offers.

Yesterday night, the fine people from WP released the latest and much awaited stable version, the WordPress 2.5 at the Dallas WordCamp conference and as always an update is in order. Apparently to celebrate the release, the WordPress official portal has also suffered a drastic re-design to go hand-in-hand with the new version.

My first thought though was “why 2.5? where did 2.4 go?.” I did some digging around and found that 2.4 was simply skipped, because the regular 120-day release cycle was extended. So basically this latest version is a two in one. WP 2.5 took almost 6 months (185 days) to develop, being the end result of countless hours of tinkering, tweaking, design and programming from behalf of over 110 contributors. Let me tell you though, the wait was worth it. The new version is radically different (364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions were changed) and brings in a lot of new features, both visible and invisible (nested deep in the CMS’ core).

I had the pleasure of playing around with some earlier versions of the 2.5 a few weeks ago (wasn’t particularly impressed at the time), including the RC2 release from a few days ago, but decided I’d post a review when the final cut came in. I upgraded right after it was announced last night (a friend ecstatically quickly e-mailed me), as always with no difficulties, clean and fast; played a bit with it and decided to sleep it over, so I better digest these new changes. Before going further with the review, if you haven’t update yet to the latest 2.5 version, please read Lorelle’s guide to safely upgrading WordPress.

Understanding The Visitor’s Psychology: Becoming One With The Reader

Mar 23, 2008 in Blog Design, Blogging Tips, Social Bookmarking with 18 Comments

The Reader
Photo by scaamanho

I’ve been blogging for a pretty long time now (give or take, 2 years) and in that time I’ve managed to see, experience and experiment a lot of things in the social media field, particularly in blogging. Because social media is such a volatile industry, in which new promising services pop out at a regular basis and disappear almost just as suddenly as they appeared, it’s very hard to predict what the next big thing will be, that will help you get your blog exposed or significantly increase your readership. However, I’ve found that one thing almost always stays the same and that’s the readers, the visitors. They’re the constant in almost any successful blog equation.

They’re the ones that can make your blog very popular and successful, by regularly reading your posts, posting comments, clicking ads etc. Basically we, as bloggers, wouldn’t manage to achieve anything without them. What I’m gonna try to do, in this post, is to dwell a bit in the average blog reader’s psychology. What I want to do is to make a write up of what makes them ‘tick,’ how, when and where they read your blog, thus by understanding what goes around their heads when surfing your blog, you can take the necessary steps to improve it.

I’ve done some research in the past few weeks and found that although people surfing blogs on the internet come from different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds, they almost all behave the same way when reading blogs.

Sunday Quickies: 16 March

Mar 16, 2008 in Link Love with 5 Comments

Get Your Blog Moving: Break The Plateau!

Mar 14, 2008 in Blogging Tips with 8 Comments

Desert Plateau
Photo by More Altitude

Sometimes I like to think of blogs like people, because, due to their high social profile, they resemble in so many ways their human authors. Actually blogs are you want them to be, you dictate what gets posted and by doing so your blog takes on the meaning you give it, just like life. It’s just like your eyes are the windows to your soul, so is a blog a mirror to your personality. And just like life a blog will pass through several stages of existence from birth, to its moment of climax, to its inevitable death. During its lifetime, if it’s long enough of course, a blog will fluctuate numerous times on up-down scales and ever so often you’ll find that for a limited time it doesn’t go up, nor does it go down, but just stagnates. This is called a plateau.

Plateaus are pretty easy to recognize, you start off pretty well with a decent month to month growth, from all points of view, be it traffic, subscribers or money earned, but then you suddenly hit a dead lock, when everything comes to a halt. Blogs aren’t the only ones that experience it either, they’re just as well present in any form of activity, from guitar playing, to weight loss to writing to just about anything. What you have to understand about plateaus is that they’re part of the process of growth, it’s more of a psychological factor actually, if you link the opening part of the article with what I’ve said, then you’ll understand. Basically the blog needs to reach a point in which it can at least cope with the current level of exigences, before it can pass on to the next level, otherwise it will stray off in shallow ground. Such is the case with high traffic spikes. So you see plateaus actually are good… sometimes.

Sunday Quickies: 9 March

Mar 9, 2008 in Link Love with 1 Comment

Al from SMM, just landed a great article on his blog, detailing ~~ten~~ almost ten ways to expand your blog on the net. Out of the points listed in the article I think a forum and job board would work best.
Two similar minded articles caught my attention this week, one from Maki who asks why are you giving away content for free and the other from Yaro who asks why do so few bloggers sell their own product s. Both articles address the financial side of blogging, but a bit different; at one side there’s Maki who explains why giving away free content builds a readership, which turns to traffic, which in term turns to money, while on the other stands Yaro, who’s a bit frustrated (sorry if i’m wrong) that so few bloggers don’t make some kind of premium content, like ebooks, to increase their earning potential.
Down at ProBlogger I had the pleasure of reading quite a fun and interesting post, that linked teaching (in a classroom) and blogging together in a eclectic mix.
I’ve always said that uniqueness, be it in design, writing or attitude is a must for success, for any kind of business, be it off or online. And PabloPabla hit the spot with his guest post for Super Blogging, where he laid down five ways to be a more unique blogger.
Why we blog? For some it’s money, building relationships, the need to write about something that bugs them or just for the pleasure and calmness it brings; personally my reasons are a bit of all. Read this great article from NORTHxEAST and ask yourself that question, I’m sure it will stir some interesting thoughts.

Fighting Blog Hacks: Preventing And Eliminating Intruders

Mar 6, 2008 in Blogging Tips, The Net with 25 Comments

Hackers
Photo by Mike_3D

A few weeks ago I had the unpleasant surprise of finding out that my blog got automatically hacked by spam bots, due to a Wordpress exploit, and in course also got infected with malware. Google, vigilant as always, was quick on scanning LOAB for any malicious software, found some corrupted code and immediately flagged the blog. What happened next was very predictable: who ever tried to search to for something on Google and found LOAB among the search results wasn’t able to access the blog, as it was “quarantined.” I lost hundreds of visitors daily during the course of two weeks, my rankings were shattered and of course the blog’s reputation was stained; as a side note I’d like to thank all the loyal readers that confidently continued to read my blog during that tough period.

So what basically happened was me, a innocent blogger, got hacked and unjustly suffered a great deal for nothing. And I’m not alone either, my horror story was shared by thousand of other bloggers all over the world, reporting almost the same “symptoms” as me. But was I entirely fault-less? Of course not, much of the blame of getting flagged by Google belonged to me, I’m as much responsible for it, as the devious persons behind the attack, just for letting something like this happen in the first place. Only after It was too late I realized I was never really ready for any similar situation, that could’ve happen to anyone at any time. I never took the necessary precautions and I got burned. Fortunately I got unbanned and all is well now, but it all could’ve been much worse. If there’s anything this nightmare’s taught is to be always prepared; so to spare some bloggers of sleepless nights and burnt neurons, I’ve decided to do a write up about protecting your blog against hacks. Note: this article is mainly aimed at Wordpress blogs.

The Comment Etiquette: The Guide to Proper Blog Commenting

22 Essential Habits Towards Blogging Success

10 Easy Ways to Get in The Habit of Blogging

Twitter: Why It’s So Great And How To Effectively Use It

WordPress 2.5: A Thorough Analysis

Understanding The Visitor’s Psychology: Becoming One With The Reader

Sunday Quickies: 16 March

Get Your Blog Moving: Break The Plateau!

Sunday Quickies: 9 March

Fighting Blog Hacks: Preventing And Eliminating Intruders

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