We’ve all heard the advice K.I.S.S- Keep It Simple Stupid…and I’m a firm believer in that acronym.  I thought I’d take it a bit further.  So in addition to KISSing your readers, why not give them a HUG too?

Helpful to reader - whether you’re writing for the sheer joy of it, for link building and SEO or for marketing and brand building purposes, always provide something for the reader: knowledge, tips and info. or even a laugh or a smile!

Unique voice - you may be talking about the same concepts as everyone else but find a way to own it!

Give them something to talk/blog about!

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Traffic Rank for Dwwebsolutions.com:

Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	153,455	991,631	6,940,2544

Those numbers are kind of unbelievable to me as this is truly the fruits of about 7 or 8 days of dedicated blogging!  Note the traffic numbers for September which are substantially larger than the previous four months and we’re only at Sept. 8th! 

I have had this blog going for over a year. Unfortunately, I had kind of let is slide over the first 6 months or so of this year. At the end of August, I decided to rededicate myself to blogging in general.

I have never had a lot of traffic coming into this site. Which was overall not that unexpected or problematic, as a very specific service business who was not focusing much on the traffic aspect, I was pretty happy when I could land 50 new visitors a week. I never even bothered to check the Alexa rank or many other stats programs for it because as I said, that really wasn’t my focus.

But as I’ve been significantly increasing my efficiency in actually designing my client’s websites, I’ve had a lot more time on my hands for other marketing methods. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve seen what blogging has done to help my client’s sites in terms of the search engines too.

What Did I Do?

• Write!  I consistently wrote at least one post a day, sometimes two.  By far the most popular post was 60+ Resources for New Bloggers   And let me tell you, that took some time to find all the resources, but it took exactly zero creativity…I’m not necessarily proud of that, but that seems to be the way blogging works.  And even if no one else had looked at that post, I learned a lot gathering the information and continue to reference it on an almost daily basis.
• Don’t Be Scared, Get Out There  Everybody talks about it, but I really believe it now…the key to blogging is to connect with other bloggers.  Not only does it help in the cold world of getting incoming links (yes, it’s questionable based on whether people do-follow or no-follows).  But more importantly, the blogosphere is full of amazingly talented and helpful people…not to mention, really fun people too!  So get out there and read as much as you can and interact!  See below for those who have helped me in my one week transformation.
• Social Networking, Social Networking, Social Networking  Again, this is nothing new.  But I have to put my two cents in that this is a huge, huge factor in what’s been happening around here.  I feel compelled to say it mainly because I read a lot about StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Technorati and all the others before and thought that’s nice, but it would never apply or work for me.  WRONG!  StumbleUpon specifically has been amazing for me.  I know different sites have different results with the different social sites.  But in my case, SU has become a really great marketing tool, fun addiction and great place to connect with some really wonderful bloggers!  I’m such a huge fan that I actually wrote a post earlier this week just pointing to a few great posts about SU from the week.   Definitely check out the articles mentioned in that post for all the information you could possibly want about StumbleUpon.  Or you can always add me as an SU friend and I’d be happy to help anyway I can!

So you can see, I really didn’t do any earth shattering…just implemented what all of the best have been recommending forever.  But what amazes me is that you don’t have to be a professional blogger or blogging expert to be able to get the results from any of these techniques.  All you have to be is determined and sleep deprived!

Only time will tell whether this new endeavor will have any real ROI in terms of my website design business, but I’ve already had several referrals from it…so my prediction would be definitely!

As I mentioned above, I have discovered a lot of great blogs and bloggers and online friends in general in the last two weeks or so.  Here are a few…check out their stuff and subscribe to their feeds.  They’re brilliant and even better eager to help!

• Jayne at About Blogging
• Sara at the Blog Experiment
  
• Sus at AdScoops
• Blog About Your Blog
• Chris G On New Media
• Internet Marketing Online with Shaun Low

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One of the first things anyone will tell you when you venture into the world of blogging is to get traffic and build readership you have to be active in the blogosphere. No successful blog is an island. The key to blogging is community.

But as I sit here this morning I’m at a loss. After reading through my feeds and commenting where I could, stumbling around my friends and my favorite keywords for a few hours and doing the same, I’m left with a bit of an “all dressed up and nowhere to go” feeling!

I run into this from time to time. In my experience, active blogging can be a lot like summer in Kansas…8 inches of rain and massive, overwhelming flooding one week followed by a month long drought soon after!

So I thought I’d put it out here…this is what I’ve been using discover new blogs and new blog friends…

• My BlogLog -dwoffice
• StumbleUpon - dwweb
• Technorati -dwoffice
• Exploring the blogrolls and commenters on my current favorite blogs
• Digg…although, I have to admit it’s not my favorite or maybe I just don’t get how to use it efficiently!
• Bloglines…I use this as my feed reader and have also used it to search for new feeds.

How do you discover new blogs? How did you get here? Any suggestions or even criticisms of what I’m already doing are welcome…I’m even open to gratuitous comment requests and self promoting namedropping and befriending on any networks!

Help me help you help me…or something like that

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I’ve recently had a number of clients asking about adding a blog to their site. They have so many questions, many of the same that I’ve had over the past year and a half. So I decided to compile a list of all the resources that I have found immensely helpful…at least those that I can remember and/or have bookmarked with one bookmarking tool or another!

I’m sure I won’t get them all on here…so no offense to anyone. And I will be updating this post with whatever new, awesome things I find as time goes by…feel free to add your sites or things you’ve found helpful in comments

The Basics of Blogging - Intro to Blogging

• Blogging Basics 101- “where there are no stupid questions” a very newbie friendly blog with great tips and information.
• Blogging Help- nother great place to get easy for everyone to understand blogging tips and also a very non-intimidating place to spend some time!
• Blogging Tips- again a wonderful resource for information about all things blogging without a lot of mumbo jumbo that you have to be at least an intermediate blogger to understand!
• Blogging 101- an intro to reading and writing a blog
• About Web Logs- I’m always a sucker for about.com for pretty much everything…their blogging section can be pretty helpful.
• Wordpress Codex Intro to Blogging
• Blogger Forum- helpful community for all blogger levels!
• Performancing- this one could really go in almost all of the categories of my list here…plus, it’s the home of several of my favorite free wordpress themes.
• Daily Blog Tips- exactly what it says with great stuff for new and seasoned bloggers.

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