When the stream becomes a river….

Providing your readers with Value for time (VfT) is as important as blogging itself.
Just like investing - if people don’t get a good return (learn something/discover something/confirm something/are inspired) then they won’t ‘invest’ (return) again.
But many bloggers link thier VfT rating to thier comments.
That’s not always a good way to judge whether you’re offering your readers good value - in fact, just because someone has invested that little extra time, doesn’t mean they’ll return and continue the conversation.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll explain VfT - and how to increase it.

Though, if it only takes one article, and you can adapt this project into your own pattern, why stop at one?

What you’ll need:

An article writing system - whether you use (and REWRITE PLR), or write your own article from scratch.
A list of places that accept your articles, press releases, blog posts, and ten (no more, no less) absolute favorite bookmarking sites (I recommend Digg, Deli.cio.us, StumbledUpon and seven others ;)).  As an optional extra, research some ezines in your niche, and get contact information for THEM, and grab a copy of Audiacity - for podcasting.  If you choose to do this last step, you’ll need to build a little bit more than an article ;).

I know, its fairly harsh, but I’m in a bad mood this evening.
There’s a rash of internet marketers making me itchy at the moment - they’re running out of date WordPress installs, and worst of all, they’re not even doing the ‘basics’ of making sure thier blog has a good reach ability.

I’ve written about ‘reachability’ before, but the basics of it is that you’ve got tools that you can use to make sure your blog is plastering itself wherever you’ve got a spare piece of wall.  Why not use them?

Image by FotoosVanRobin via Flickr

Recently, over at Mamaneedsabookcontract, we talked about niches (we choose a theme each week, and blog on it - its amazing how simple a topic becomes diverse and complex answers).
This week our theme was ‘niches’ - which is important to bloggers.
All of the answers that were posted resonated with me, but Heather’s post was the best for bloggers.  So, go read it, and then come back.

Via Steve Hodson

I saw this last year and didn’t say anything, because, at the time, I was still trying to work out where I *stood* in the blogging community…. The long and short of it is I’m not an A-lister, so I felt that I had to get closer to being ‘that’ before I started advising other people.

It now occurs to me that advising people on blogging is what I do as naturally as breathing, and though I’m tweaking my blogs to clean up the messages I’m offering.  I’m ‘branding’ each blog to be a lot clearer if you will.

If you’re interested in anything RSS, you should probably head on over to my blogging blog, where all will be revealed

Completely Blogging is also offering *free* blog reviews, in exchange for a link back to Completely Blogging. We also offer lots of informationon blogging, social bookmarking and more.

Blogs have several necessary and needed elements. It used to be enough to place static posts on your site - now, people have designed reams and reams of scripts, designed to do everything, except, possibly, what you expect.
The most common question I’m asked about blogging is ‘what IS a blog exactly?’
A blog is a weblog. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, what are the best functions - the definitional attributes of a blog?