ProBlogger: How to Eliminate the Echo Chamber and Add New Dimensions to Your Blog

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How to Eliminate the Echo Chamber and Add New Dimensions to Your Blog Posted: 25 Nov 2021 03:19 AM PST The post How to Eliminate the Echo Chamber and Add New Dimensions to Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Jakub Balon on Unsplash One of the better posts I always remember reading is by Chris Pirillo writing about ways to eliminate the ‘echo chamber’. It’s a post that I’m sure many bloggers will find a challenge (I know I did). Here are his main points (in bold) with a few comments of my own (the non bolded stuff) on some of them. I’m not sure I’d be quite as extreme as Chris suggests – but there’s food for thought in the list and I suspect that enacting some of his suggestions from would add new dimensions to a blog (and maybe even help a little with the echo chamber thing too): 1. Don’t live inside your news aggregator I was actually thinking to myself yesterday that my news aggregator and social media feeds have become way too central in my blogging. While I love the way it helps me to keep my finger on the pulse of many aspects of life I do worry from time to time that it has the potential to suck the creativity out of me as a blogger as it’s very easy to use it as a lead generating machine and allow it to determine much of what you post on your blogs. You also need to be aware that the algorithms powering these platforms just dish you up more of the same of what you’ve previously found interesting and interacted with. 2. Say something original at least once a day – One of the results of living in your news aggregator and being a slave to the algorithms is that it’s easy to get lazy and to recycle news and ideas from others – at the expense of exercising your own brain power and developing some original ideas of your own. I’ve got nothing against bouncing off others ideas (I’m doing it now) but starting conversations rather than just responding to others or reporting on the conversations that others start can lead bloggers into a fairly one dimensional type of blogging. 3. If warranted, quote an “unknown” source Chris is spot on with this. It’s easy to only read the A-lister and use them as the source of a story, but the fact is that there are many other talented bloggers who are saying similar things that also deserve attention. This is of course a challenge (as are all other 9 points) as it can be difficult to find the quality ‘unknown source’ partly because no one is linking to them (hence they are unknown). I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes it takes a little work to find them – but it’s worth it when you do. 4. Don’t link to the same site more than once every two weeks I’m not sure I’d put a time limit on it but the principle behind this is a strong one. I hesitate to say this (for looking arrogant and not wanting to offend) but I’ve come across a number of blogs that link to ProBlogger in almost every post. It’s almost like reading ProBlogger itself they refer to it so much. Now – I’m very grateful for the links and am flattered by it (truly I am) but I also feel like saying to these bloggers (and sometimes I have) that perhaps it would be good to not only respond to what I write but to find some other sources for stories also. If their readers just wanted to read ProBlogger stories they’d subscribe to ProBlogger. I know it’s easy to fall into this trap at times (to different extents) as sometimes it’s just easier to always bounce off the one blogger with whom you resonate with – but in doing so you’re also likely to be creating a somewhat empty blog. 5. Wait a week before publishing your thoughts on hot topics It’s always a challenge, with the 24-hour news cycle, to know how to write on a topic that everyone else is writing on. On the one hand unless you’re the one breaking the news your post can on it does have the ‘me to’ feel to it – but on the other hand you feel that if you don’t write something about it some of your readers might miss the story and you’ll end up getting email after email telling you you’ve missed it. Chris suggests that one way to combat this is to wait a week before posting. I think this is one good option as it gives you a chance to not only report a story but add your thoughts (which have had a week to mature) to it and make the post more than just a news report. 6. Create, don’t regurgitate Lots of blogs report on the cool things that others are doing in their niche but sometimes it’s nice to be the one doing the cool thing in your niche. 7. Think twice before using buzzwords Every niche has its jargon and buzzwords but I’m constantly reminded (by emails from readers asking me to explain what I mean when I use them) that quite often the people who read blogs and the people who write them live in different worlds. Every niche has its buzzwords and if you’ve been in that niche long enough you may just take them for granted but you should identify the jargon and think twice about using it, or at least explain it if you do. 8. Make yourself uncomfortable I’ve long been a believer in this. It’s often not until you’re out of your comfort zone that you’re able to grow. It’s a principle of life and one of blogging also – too many of us are way to comfortable in our blogging. Instead, put yourself out there and do something different. 9. Stop whining (or worrying) about what list you’re on (or not on) I wonder who he was thinking of when he wrote this point. I can think of a few bloggers that I might send it to who seem obsessed with their blog’s rankings in different indexes. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with have a well ranked or highly regarded blog, there’s more to life and I suspect the people who are concerned with them could be a lot more highly ranked if they actually stopped focussing on them and started blogging with creativity, originality and passion. 10. Stop saying we need to get out of the echo chamber Hmmm – a nice challenge to end on – although… “The day for blogging about blogging, and podcasting about podcasting, is long gone.” OUCH! :-) Here is one more of my own that came to mind while I read Chris’s list: 11. Look outside the Blogosphere As long as we, as bloggers, continue to look at each other for inspiration, ideas and creativity we will limit ourselves. Read books, see movies, buy the newspaper, take a class or… if you’re really game… talk to a friend. All of these things (and many others) help ensure we ‘get a life’ and will help us to take our blogging to a new fresh level. Chris makes some great points (some of which I went against in writing this very post). While I love blogging and the blogosphere – I do sometimes wonder if we’ve created our own little universe (language, rhythms, rules, culture etc). While it’s wonderful it can also be quite insular and self important. Like Chris acknowledges in his post – it’s not easy to get out of the patterns we (as a blogosphere but also as individuals within it) have gotten into. Hopefully some of what’s above reminds us to step back from it all occasionally and ask some good questions about what we’re becoming.   This post was first published on Aug 30, 2006 and updated Nov 25 2021. The post How to Eliminate the Echo Chamber and Add New Dimensions to Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

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ProBlogger: What My 4-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Successful Blogging

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What My 4-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Successful Blogging Posted: 17 Nov 2021 08:29 PM PST The post What My 4-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Successful Blogging appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash This story goes back to when my eldest (now 15-year-old) son was just a toddler and I delivered a Keynote at BlogWorld Expo, where I told how my son reminded me of a powerful principle of successful blogging. So many people have since told me how much they enjoyed and were impacted by the story that I thought I should share it again here on the blog. I hope you enjoy the wisdom of my four-year-old son. Transcript of “Tell the World Something Important” About three months ago now, I was sitting here at my desk, typing away, blogging, and it was in the afternoon—about three-thirty, four o'clock. Now, in my house around three-thirty, four o'clock, things get a little bit crazy. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old boy and a two-and-half-year-old boy. And in the afternoon, after sleeps and after a long day, they can get a little bit silly. So around this time of the day I would normally hear, you know, a bit of shouting, a bit of screaming. And sometimes I’d hear the footsteps racing down the hall towards my roo,m and I’d see the door burst open and all manner of strife would happen in my offices. Cords get pulled out and my kids demand that I make videos of them, and all kinds of stuff and it’s kind of a fun but also a bit of a crazy time of the afternoon. On this particular day, things happened a little bit differently, though. I did hear some footsteps walking down the hall towards my room but there was no accompanying shouting or shrieking or laughter or giggling. It was just these quiet little footsteps padding down the hallway. And then I heard the door handle creak and the door slowly open. And out of the corner of my eye I saw my four-year-old son Xavier standing at the door. I didn’t look around: I wanted to see what he would do. He very quietly and gently got down onto his knees and then he got down on his tummy and he began to commando-crawl into my room. Now Xavier has this perception that if he can’t see you, you can’t see him. And so he had his head buried down low so that he couldn’t see me and he began to crawl into the room. And he crawled up my right hand side and then he crawled in front of my desk in plain sight for me, but he thought he wouldn’t be seen. Then he crawled down on my either side and then he stood up very quietly and gingerly behind me. Again, I could kind of see him out of the corner of my eye and I could feel his presence there at my left shoulder, and he just stood there for 30 or 40 seconds as I continued to type. I was trying to finish a blog post before whatever happened was going to happen. And as I was sitting there writing, he just watched. And after a moment or two I felt him lean into me, and I felt him begin to breathe on my neck and on my ear. And as he leaned in he just whispered in my ear “Daddy, what are you doing?”, and then he leaned back again. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to describe blogging to a four-year-old. It’s not something that I really know how to do, so I just said “I’m writing a message to the world.” And he seemed to accept that. Again there was silence for a moment or two and again he leaned in close to me and he said “Daddy, make sure you tell the world something important.” And then he leaned back and he got back down on his knees again and he commando-crawled back in front of me and out the door and shut the door behind him. And it was kind of a bizarre little moment. For one, I wasn’t quite sure why he wasn’t in his normal hyper mood, but as I began to think about what he’d actually said to me, it kind of, it was a moment that I found actually quite challenging as I began to think about the type of blogs that I was writing and the information that I was putting out there. Tell the World Something Important I’ve been blogging now for eight years, and I’ve always wanted to tell the world something important. I’ve always had a motivation of trying to help people. But as someone who makes a living from it also, there are these other motivations. You want to make money out of it. You want to build some credibility and you want to build your profile. And so all these other motivations creep into it. And so for me, that little moment where he whispered, “Tell the world something important”—for me it was kind of a challenging moment as I began to think “Yeah, that’s so true”. That was the reason that I got into blogging in the first place but it’s also the secret to any success that I think I … success that I have had. The times where I’ve actually told the world something important rather than something that I think might be profitable, they’re the times where things begin to take off for me. The times where you’re actually are solving people’s problems, when you’re actually doing and saying things that matter. They’re the times that people seem to respond the most, and they’re the times where the profits actually do come down the track—for me, in my experience, at least. And so I guess my message to you as I tell the world a message today is to keep that in the back of your mind. For one, it’s much more satisfying to be a blogger who’s actually saying something important, who’s making a difference. But two, a successful blog is actually built on that. If you’re actually doing something that matters to people, if you’re doing something that’s real and that is actually impacting people’s lives in some way, you’re much more likely to build a blog that people are going to take notice of, and that people will trust, and that people will keep coming back to. So from the mouths of babes, from the mouth of my used-to-be-little-guy-but-now-taller-than-me Xavier, I’d encourage you to keep that in your focus. Tell the world something important.   This post was first published on Jan 14, 2011 and revised Nov 18, 2021 The post What My 4-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Successful Blogging appeared first on ProBlogger.

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ProBlogger: Is Your Blog Ready for the Festive Season?

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Is Your Blog Ready for the Festive Season? Posted: 10 Nov 2021 07:51 PM PST The post Is Your Blog Ready for the Festive Season? appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash There are only 44 days until Christmas! It’s that time of year: the silly season is almost upon us: there’s only 15 days until Black Friday and 18 days until Cyber Monday. If you start preparing your blog for Christmas in December you’re probably too late. The Christmas rush starts late in November and escalates right through until the big day. Bricks-and-mortar stores have had the Christmas trees and fake Santas up for months… but what’s the blogosphere doing to prepare? The answer depends on who you talk to. Every blog and every audience is different, after all. Still, we can learn from each other’s ideas and get inspiration from niches outside our own. Today and over the next few weeks, we’ll look at a few different blogs, and see how their owners are preparing for the festive season: a blogger-consultant-speaker a digital publisher a not-for-profit blog Some of the blogs have been around for years, while others are barely 12 months old. Some of the bloggers work full-time on their blogs, but others are part-timers fitting in blogging around their day jobs. We’ll find out: how they’re planning to optimize festive season sales and promotions how they’re fitting blogging in around all the other stuff that happens in the lead-up to the end of the year how they’re planning to keep in touch with clients, followers, and fans over the New Year break how much they’re expecting to work over this period, how much time they’re hoping to spend with family and friends—and what they’ve done to make that possible what they’re doing to make sure they hit the ground running in the New Year—and what they’ll focus on then. I hope you’ll find this series inspiring. To kick off, let me give you a bit of a behind-the-scenes peek into what I’m doing on dPS, a product blog, for the festive season. The product blog It’s a busy time for dPS in the lead-up to the festive season. As well as maintaining our publishing schedule, we’re starting to prepare for our annual 12 days of Christmas celebration. It’s always a lot of fun … and a lot of work. Festive promotions, content, and visitors For each of the 12 days leading up to Christmas, we usually offer a special price on either one of our own products, or that of a hand-picked partner. So there’s a lot of work getting those deals in place, and getting the pages and promotions ready to go ahead of time. This sale is something that the dPS audience really loves, so we keep trying to improve, and we’re ramping things up again this year. Past experience has shown that the sale should create a lot of additional traffic to the blog, but not just to the sales pages themselves—we’ll start to see increases in the visitors coming to certain tutorials, too. Posts on portraits and family shots are always popular at this time of year, as are more specific topics like photographing fireworks. And while we do promote the 12 days of Christmas deals as great gift ideas, we also encourage our regular readers to buy a special gift for themselves, too. Time off I always like to take some time off at Christmas to spend with family and friends, and preparation is the key. I’m fortunate that I can share some of the preparation with my team, but we also plan and schedule content well in advance so that everyone who works on the blog can enjoy the time off. With all the activity happening in the lead-up to Christmas, I’m pretty busy. In the period between Christmas and New Year, I’ll do check-in from time to time but I do limit that to as little as I can. Looking forward Taking time off means I need to prepare for the time when I get back to work in 2022. That preparation’s been going on for a while now—we already have our first new product ready to launch in January, so that will take some of our focus early in the year. I’ll also start plotting our roadmap for the rest of year in January, with my team, and of course the publishing schedule is an ongoing task. A festive plan Understanding seasonality is an important part of maximising the sales of products for those with a product or affiliate-product blog. The products on dPS are well suited to festive events, so we ensure our campaigns are timed to maximise that potential. But even if your products aren’t really relevant to Christmastime, there will be other times during the year when demand will be at its highest. For those of us who rely on product sales income, it’s important to have a plan in place so you can meet that demand. At the end of the series, I’ll provide you with a five-point checklist to help you prepared your product—or other—blog for the festive season. But for now, I’m interested to hear your stories. What do you have planned on your blog for the coming weeks? Let me know in the comments.   This article was first published on Dec 1, 2012 and republished Nov 11, 2021 The post Is Your Blog Ready for the Festive Season? appeared first on ProBlogger.

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ProBlogger: Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly?

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Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly? Posted: 04 Nov 2021 03:40 AM PDT The post Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly? appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Camille Villanueva on Unsplash Today I want to share one last way to let your blog go to round off our 10 part series. It’s something that has at times almost brought my own blogging to a grinding halt. Problem Taking on too many projects and stretching yourself too thinly. There’s a fine line between: 1. Diversifying your blogging interests so as to have a number of income streams to help ride out the downtimes that most blogs suffer from and 2. Having so many blogs on the go, or too many things going on within your blog, that they begin to suffer as a result of you not being able to dedicate your focus to them. The Argument for Diversification I’ve written on numerous occasions about how it is smart to diversify when it comes to blogging for money (for example here in my 18 Lessons I’ve Learned about Blogging post). Diversification makes sense on a number of levels including: Multiple Blogs (wise because most blogs go through highs and lows in terms of traffic, earnings, search engine ranking etc) Income Streams (not putting all your eggs in the AdSense basket) Non Blogging activities/income streams (looking outside of blogging to find other ways of supplementing your blogging income) Diversifying your interests is a smart move – ask any financial advisor and you’ll find the advice will almost always be to hedge your bets and invest in multiple areas so that when one market goes down you don’t lose everything. The Problem with Diversification While I do believe that it’s smart to diversify – there are some risks with the strategy. The main problem is that you run the risk of spreading yourself too thinly across your blogs. I learned this the hard way in my first couple of years of blogging for money. I saw what I could achieve with having a single blog and decided to multiply my efforts by blogging on up to 20 blogs at once. The result was poor quality content, stress and strain and eventually blogger burn out. The more I gave myself to do the less time I was able to dedicate to any one activity – including the producing of engaging, useful, interesting and unique content. The flow on effect of this is that my earnings in this period didn’t raise anywhere near as much as I’d hoped. What I ended up doing was to hire a blogger to take on one of the projects that I was running, to kill off the majority of the rest of my blogs and to focus upon two blogs (ProBlogger and DPS). In doing so I saw immediate results. The blogs I was able to focus all of my blogging energy upon literally exploded as a result of the improvement in content, the extra time I was able to dedicate to interacting with readers and my extra energy levels which renewed my passion for the topics I was writing about. Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly? There are a number of areas that I see bloggers (including myself) spreading themselves too thinly including: Multiple Blogs – I find two blogs is enough for me – at b5media we have a few bloggers who handle more than that, but there comes a point where their blogs suffer if they add more. Social Media – it seems that every day a new social networking site starts. If you were to accept every invitation and engage fully on every one of them you could easily spend your whole life on these sites. Reader Interaction – you can never do enough interacting with readers right? Well actually you can. There comes a point where even the very worthwhile task of interacting with your readers can distract you from your core task – the producing of good content. Multiple Income Streams – there comes a point where if you add too many different ad networks, affiliate programs and other income streams to your blog where you can be spending too much time administering them. Optimizing ads, tracking results, chasing up payments etc – it all takes time. Sometimes focussing on just a handful of income streams makes more sense than experimenting with too many at once. Now before I go any further let me stress that the above activities are all good – but they CAN be responsible for you spreading yourself too thinly. I do think it’s wise to have more than one blog, engage with social media, interact with readers and experiment with new income streams…. but not at the expense of your core blogging activities – particularly the writing of content. Tips for Overstretched Bloggers If you are like I have been at different times in my blogging ‘career’ I have a few questions to ask and tips for you: What is Important to You? I think it’s crucial to constantly be asking yourself this question. Identify your goals in blogging. What are you trying to achieve? Once you’ve asked this take a look at how you spend your time and identify which things that you’re doing take you closer to your goals and which are not. Where is the Energy? Identify where the energy is within your different activities. What is working and what isn’t? What is producing fruit and what is greedily sucking your time and energy without any benefits? I’m a big believer looking for points of ‘energy’ in my life and putting more focus upon them. For example when I realized how I’d spread myself too thinly with 20+ blogs I picked the two or three that worked and killed the rest. Set Yourself Deadlines When I start new projects I generally have a deadline in mind when I would want to see results by. If i don’t see at least some signs of life in the project at this point I either kill off the project or work out how to approach it differently so that I’ll see the results I need. Streamline your Processes What things do you have to do that you’re inefficient at? I always knew how much time email was sucking out of my day but did nothing about it for years. The extra pressure that my inefficiency in this area of my business cost me was stupid and meant I was stretching myself further than I needed. Reinventing my email processing system gave me extra time. What other processes suck your time? Perhaps it’s email, perhaps its reading RSS feeds, perhaps its social media, perhaps it is an activity like moderating comments? How can you streamline these important but time consuming processes? Outsource There has been a big focus upon outsourcing lately (Tim’s The 4-Hour Workweek might have had something to do with it). I don’t outsource much of my blogging activities but do see the sense in it. I currently have help with comment moderation and have taken on a few writers at DPS which has helped me tremendously. Do keep in mind however that outsourcing means managing others which can take even more time away from you in the short term while you get people set up. Be Ruthless My last tip is to echo the thoughts that I shared in my post on how to be a Ruthless blogger. While it can be hard to let go of blogs that don’t work or to cut out activities that suck our time the fact is that for many bloggers it is these things that stand between success and mediocrity.   This post was first published on June 28, 2008 and updated November 3, 2021 The post Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly? appeared first on ProBlogger.

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