Watch out…I might forget the words as I’m type-synching…

I was going to let DW Web take the weekend off, but I’m happy to say Brown Baron gave me a reason to go ahead and post! I’m very honored to have been awarded one of the Breakout Blogger Awards. I was just as happy to get the chance to tip my hat to my very own favorite breakouts blog stars! This award was launched by Bob of Bobbarama.com to celebrate his blog’s first year anniversary.

Bob’s official description of the award:

This award casts a spotlight on bloggers who are just beginning to draw lotsa attention — the equivalent of a song with a bullet on Billboard’s Top 100 chart. Lotsa good posts. Lotsa good buzz. These bloggers are going places in a hurry.

So of course, I was really happy that Brown thought of me and would definitely have included Brown Baron in my list…but you already got one

So without further ado. I now give you my picks for the Break Out Blogger Award:

to YC at Internet Marketing Mind, Ad Tracker from Ad Tracker (what is your name Ad?) and Kate Hook with her very new blog Cheesy Marketing Ramblings.

YC is truly my internet marketing guru. The blogger known as Ad has won me over with her great posts with very tricky digg/link baiting titles. And Kate’s blog is new on the scene, but can that chick write!

Congratulations everyone! Beware the paparazzi when you leave your house in the morning

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Well, I actually managed to get it done!  This morning I launched my third blog…DanaWallert.com, another blog about blogging!

I’m excited to be able to blog freely about all the ins and outs of the blogosphere that I find intriguing!  And thank goodness, it’s finished so I can get back to writing and stumbling!

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Well, I don’t know that it’s definitively the number one blogging rule.  But one of the keys to blogging and online business in general is knowing your purpose and sticking to it.

Now, I’ve been having so much fun hanging out in the blogosphere with all my new found blogger pals, that it occurred to me this morning that I’ve gone a bit off track with this blog.

This blog is housed on http://www.dwwebsolutions.com - my small business website design site.  DW Web Solutions designs basic websites for small businesses and entrepreneurs.  Now, there’s a lot of gray area in here, but in reading through my posts from the last week, and my focus  has definitely shifted towards blogging about blogging.

Don’t worry I’m not regretting that trend, in fact I’m been enjoying it immensely!  But I think it’s time to bring this blog back to dealing with the business of taking small business’ online and away from the ins and outs of blogging and social media.

Now, you may be thinking shouldn’t those be one in the same?  Possibly, but for the majority of my clients, no.  My posts of late have been a little out of the realm of most of my customers, and I’ve had some feedback along those lines!

So anyway, I’m going to spend the weekend working on building my third blog…my blog about blogging…I know just what the world needs, another one of those!  But this one will be more fun for me, a place to talk and share with my fellow bloggers about  the ups and downs, the brilliant and strange of blogging and yes, my love of StumbleUpon and obsession with becoming a top stumbler!

I’m still going back and forth on the name…I have several domains in mind.  And you’ll definitely hear about it as soon as I have all the details straightened out.

Meanwhile, I will continue my daily posting here on all things small business, web design and search engine stuff…just a little less SU, Digg and Wordpress!

I hope you’ll all come visit me at all my online homes (hopefully just the three, but I don’t trust myself much when I’m buying domain names!  I tend to treat GoDaddy like it’s a sample sale at Jimmy Choo and buy, buy, buy!) 

PS If anybody has any great ideas for “bloggy” blog names for me, I’m always open to suggestions!

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1. Funny, strange or especially cute animals, kids or old people - pictures or videos are even better—see above!
2. Some number of must-have tools, plug-ins, etc.
3. Anything to do with why Digg sucks
4. Anything to do with why StumbleUpon rocks
5. All lists regarding insomnia and ADD especially inspired by SU
6. Any color hat techniques to beat Google
7. The Inside Secrets of or Things they don’t want you to know from Matt Cutts, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Seth Godin, ShoeMoney, etc.
8. Joke or Attack posts on George W. Bush, Hilary Clinton, or any other polarizing politician of any persuasion…pictures are great here too!
9. Everything Zen, Self-Improvement, Time Management, Life-changing!
10. How to get: Stumbled, Dugg, traffic, subscribers, MONEY!

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As I was sitting down to start working on a few new posts this afternoon, it occurred to me that my blogging routine is a little insane! I like to make things as simple as possible, so as I sit down to begin writing, I open everything I might need in Firefox tabs. As of right now, I have the following 8:

1. Bloglines - it’s always helpful to have a little inspiration from your favorite blogs!
2. My StumbleUpon Page - I am an extremely active Stumbler, so I always have things I want to blog saved on my SU blog!
3. LastFM - I don’t know if it’s just me and possibly my fellow Gen Y’ers, but I cannot write in silence!
4. IStockPhoto -although I don’t always include images, I like to when possible. I use IStock mainly because I like their search functions, their prices and the fact that for $1 I can avoid copyright and attribution hassles.
5. Thesaurus.com - I have a bit of a pet peeve about repetitive word use!
6. Google - when I’m working on a post or an article and coming up with titles, I like to make sure they are unique. A lot of times I find that what I thought was so brilliantly original has been written 10 times over!
7. Technorati - same reasoning as # 6
8. Digg - same as 6 & 7!

What can’t you blog without? Do you have a set routine for writing?

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 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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Here’s the thing…

You want to comment on blog posts that you think are great. You feel like it is appropriate to start out by acknowledging the greatness of the post. You have officially said “Great post!” 1,000 times this week.

Why not try something a little (or a lot) different? Come on, stand out from the crowd!

All of the following have at one time or another been used as synonyms for “Great.”  So pick one and fill in the blank “_____ post!”

• Admirable
• Amazing
• Awe-inspiring
• Awesome…Totally Awesome
• Bad
• Bodacious
• Brilliant
• Choice
• Cool
• Divine
• Dope
• Dynamite
• Enjoyable
• Excellent
• Exquisite
• Fab
• Fabulous
• Fantastic
• Far out
• Fetch … thank you Mean Girls
• Fierce
• Fine
• First-rate
• Fly…also including Super Fly
• Fresh
• Glorious
• Gnarly
• Groovy
• Ill
• Impressive
• Jiggy
• Killer
• Major- thank you Posh
• Marvelous
• Mega
• Off the hook…this includes all other forms including off the chain, off the hizzy…you know, all those.
• Outstanding
• Peachy
• Phat
• Phenomenal
• Primo
• Rad
• Radical
• Remarkable
• Sick
• Slammin
• Spiffy
• Splendid
• Standout
• Stellar
• Stupendous
• Sublime
• Super
• Super duper
• Superb
• Superior
• Sweet
• Swell
• Terrific
• Tremendous
• Tubular
• Wicked
• Wonderful

Feel free to use any of the above or add your own in comments…

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After spending a good part of the day stumbling myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that today must in fact be the official (or possibly unofficial) blog about StumbleUpon Day!

It makes sense to me that those of us in the US might be stumbling a bit the day after a long holiday weekend, but the trend seems to be international.

But I digress…I don’t claim to be an expert on my newest addiction (seriously, over 5 hours today), but I will testify to the power of the Stumble as my traffic has definitely been skyrocketing these last few days. I thought for the benefit of anyone who stumbles by my blog I would just share with you a collection of the great posts I stumbled into today that gave me a much better understanding of how the whole thing works…

• A Definitive StumbleUpon Guide- Driving Traffic To Websites from Shaun Low
• Building a StumbleUpon Power Profile from Cristian Raiber
• The Importance of Building your Stumbleupon Network from Blog About Your Blog
• Analysis: StumbleUpon’s Top 50 Stumblers  and Interview with a Top StumbleUpon User from ViperChill
• The Secret Features of Stumble Upon from NowSourcing

Note: not all of these were posted today…but they are all from within the last week!

Anyway, sorry for the lack of original thought, but I want to make sure everyone possible is hooked up with my latest habit.  To be sure, I will be advising all of my clients to start Stumbling right away too.   Now if I could only master Blackberry-stumbling…that would be Stumbleriffic!

 Want to Stumble together?  Be my Stumble friend!

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