How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Peers

This is the 4th article from the series: “How To Build Reputation With A Blog”. If you came here directly, you may want to read the first articles too:

How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – The Series
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Write Constantly
How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience

Who Are Your Peers?

In short, they are people who are doing exactly what you are doing. They are bloggers performing on the same field as you are. From a traditional (and also, completely dumb) point of view, they are your competition. From a smarter point of view, they are your peers.

Why do I think that perceiving them as “competition” is a dumb approach? Well, because blogging is a very specific business. Although it shares a good deal of common points with traditional businesses, blogging is completely different in some key areas. And one of them is branding.

In traditional business, if two companies are making shoes, they are competing against each other. They are building the same object, using more or less the same technologies. If two bloggers are writing about personal development, they are not competing against each other. They are completing each other and, in a larger sense, they’re feeding each other audience. Although they are building the same type of “product”, which in this case is “motivation”, they’re not using the same “technologies”. They’re creating their products using their personal experiences. Putting their own life on the line. And that brings diversity and originality to the mix. Although in the same market, the final products will be really different. And consuming each product will increase the demand for similar products.

That’s a fundamental difference. The more blogging products you’ll have on the market, the bigger the demand. Your audience will always want to consume some new, fresh perspectives on their topics of choice. So, two bloggers writing on the same topic will never be competitors. Unless they are dumb enough to copy each other posts sentence by sentence which will totally wipe out any trace of authenticity in their products.

Now that we eliminated one of the most common and handicapping confusions regarding competition in blogging, let’s see how you can really interact with your peers.

Guest Posting

The simplest way to interact with your peers is to guest post. Writing blog posts that will fit in other people’s blogging pants is a great exercise. There are some unquestionable benefits like: increased exposure, enlarging your circle of influence, refining your writing skills and so on and so forth. But the real, hidden benefit is the interaction with the host blogger. I know I built a long term relationship with all the bloggers who accepted guest posts from me. Some of them are way closer than the circle of influence. They are in the circle of friends.

Massive Guest Posting

This is a special case of guest posting. Basically, it combines a series of articles with guest posting. In a massive guest posting project, you publish a few related blog posts (preferably from the same series) on a few blogs, all at the same time. I did what I think it was the first massive guest posting ever on the internet last year and believe me, it was an incredible experience. The links and exposure were great, but the connection with some of the bloggers who participated in this challenge grew tremendously over the last year.

Hosting Guest Posts

This is the obvious counterpart of the one above. Open up your blog and give other people the opportunity to guest post. Again, the visible benefits will be in the line of: more content for your readers, a little bit of diversity and so on and so forth. But then again, the hidden part of this iceberg will be the connection you build with the people who are guest posting on your blog.

Collaborative Projects

Every once in a while a collaborative project surfaces my inbox. Every time I am asked to do some writing for a collaborative project I’m incredibly motivated. I’m not accepting every request, mostly by lack of time, but the requests I accept are quickly climbing to the top of my priority list. Here are few types of collaborative projects I’ve been a part of so far, or I admire from a distance.

1. Free / Paid Ebooks

I’ve been a part of some very interesting projects, with both paid and free ebooks. One of the most interesting ebooks was How To Network Awesomely by Colin Wright, a book which I totally recommend. There are tons of other bloggers sharing their insights on networking in that book, not to mention Colin’s own thoughts on this topic. As for the free ebooks, you can check out one of the latest, Small Ways To Make A Big Difference.

2. Memes

A meme is usually a challenge launched by a fellow blogger. I get far more requests than I can handle on this area, so I decided to go on only if the topic is really close to me. One of the memes I’ve been doing lately is Abubakar Jamil’s 3 Life Lessons. Check out the page because you will start to understand why interacting with your peers is never competition.

3. Blogazines Contributions

Every blogging niche has some blogazines around. They can be collective newsletters, like the very fine SharingLifeSkills, of which I’m proud to be a part, or they can be magazine style, like The Daily Brainstorm. Of which I’m also honored to be a part of, by the way.

4. Shared Content Products

Another way to interact with your peers is to create shared content products. Put together your expertise, your strengths and some time, ask around one of your peers, brainstorm a little and voila, you created a common product. For an example of such a product you can check out Charlie Gilkey’s and Johnny B. Truant Jam Sessions.

Social Media Interactions

The same rules that applies to audience interactions applies to peers interaction when it comes to social media. If you want to read them, go back and check out the audience interaction article in this series. One word though, when it comes to peer interaction, you are what you retweet. People who are on your stream are a measure of your own value. Pick them wisely and stick with them.

The Real Value Of Links

Now that we saw the practical side of interacting with your peers, let’s talk a little bit about links. And by that I understand at least 2 interpretations of the term “link”. The first one is “link as a human connection” and the second one is “link as a hyperlink in the internet”. As you will see, there is a big confusion between those two meanings, with a huge balance towards the second one. Many bloggers are valuing hyperlinks to their blogs over real life connections with other people. Which I think is totally wrong.

The focus of bloggers on Google ranking is understandable, to a certain degree. The problem is that the vast majority of bloggers are going way beyond this degree. Meaning they’re starting to obsess over it. I know I’ve been there and I’m not ashamed. It’s just a fact and now I’m over it. And I’m also able to explain it a little bit better, since it’s something that I experienced first hand.

In order to understand the importance of page ranking (and, subsequently, the real value of links as hyperlinks) I would like to give you an army example. You know the military ranks, right? A captain will always have a smaller rank than a colonel, and a colonel will always have a smaller rank than a general. This is how it works. And you identify their ranks by looking at their insignia.

The page ranks works exactly the same. You have a 3 PR page, which will always be smaller than a 5 PR page, which in turn will be always put to shame by a 7 PR page.

Many bloggers are trying to advance in this hierarchy by trying to acquire as many stars (read: page ranks) as possible. From a certain point of view, they think that a certain rank will give them access to a certain level of reputation. This is where the big mistake is taking place. A PR rank is just like a military rank, it will just say that you’re a captain, a colonel, or a general. Nothing more. It will never say something about your ability to influence other people. Nothing about your value as an individual. Nothing about the value of your products. It will just say you have a certain rank.

Of course you can guess a little bit of information about a military by his rank. A certain degree of experience or skills. But the real value of a military is never given by the rank. It’s given by what that person is doing on the field. By how that person is engaging in combat. By how he’s applying the strategy right there, in the trenches. There’s no rule that will say that, once in the trenches, a general will be spared by a bullet just because he’s a general.

Page ranks, just like military ranks, are just a way to categorize your blogs with an incredibly large tolerance. They will never say something about your reputation.

In the army, if you do your job constantly, in time, you’ll be promoted. You don’t have to do something especially for this. Just go to work every day and you’ll be promoted. In blogging is the same. If you keep your blog alive long enough, it will eventually receive a higher page rank. At some point, you’ll receive a rank of a general.

But, please pardon my French here, I don’t really give squat on that general.  I’ve been through a real war, and I saw how bureaucratic captains were acting on the field. A real life disaster. No, siree. Those generals are not for me.

On the other hand, there were some officers who were really inspiring those days. Courageous, generous, brilliant in terms of strategy and so on. Those officers were wearing the same insignia as the bureaucratic ones. From the outside, they looked the same. But they were fundamentally different.

The same goes in blogging. Two blogs with an equal number of links will get an equal page rank in Google, Alexa or whatever. But more often than not, the real audience of a successful blog is a few orders of magnitude higher than of other, equal blogs in terms of ranking. You start to get it now?

I’m not saying that using aggressive linking and social media automated strategies won’t give you a certain Google page rank or a certain Alexa rank. I’m saying that, form a certain level of performance, those rankings are useless. They’re not building reputation, they’re building empty numbers. It’s blowing in the wind.

On the other hand, when focusing on real life interaction, on building honest relationships with your peers, you won’t generate only links and empty numbers, You will generate a movement. You will generate support and you will ignite new ideas. You will create inspiration. I don’t know how to measure inspiration. I don’t think there’s such a thing like inspiration ranking. But in my experience inspiration is far more powerful than any Google page rank.

At the end of the day, a PR 7 blog which is there only by aggressive linking and social media automated techniques, will have the same PR 7 as a blog that reached there by creating genuine trends, by providing real value, by inspiring people to propagate its message and spontaneously create links for it. From the outside, or, to be more, clear, from the mathematical point of view of the rank, they will be the same. But on the inside, those blogs will be completely different. The second blog will generate far more in interaction (and, if you really want to know, yes, far more sales) than a blog which relies only on page ranking techniques.

You will get results on both cases. And the choice is entirely up to you. You can choose to be a bureaucratic general, and you’ll be wiped out by the first genuine revolution on the Internet.

Or you can be a general to lead that very Revolution.

The First Year Of Blogging – Writing

Welcome to the first post of this series about my first year of blogging as a business. Today will talk about writing, which is the cornerstone of your blogging. You couldn’t really have a blog without constantly creating quality content. This is why writing is one of the most time consuming blogging activities. But is also one of the most rewarding, if you do it right.

Posting Speed

The most important question, and also one of the most subtle factors in shaping your audience is: how often should I post? This is what I call posting speed.

When I started to blog in October last year, I set up a 15 posts / month posting speed. Seemed reasonable enough for my niche, which is personal development, and also comfortable for myself in terms of assigned time. That comes down to one post every other day. During the first few months, I was almost constantly over this speed, with around 18-20 posts per month.

But after the first 6 months something changed. I was comfortable with writing 15 posts per month so I thought it would be time to expand a little. To go for more. The increase my posting speed. And that took me by surprise. I decided to go for an experiment called massive guest posting. I will go into details about it a little later, but for now suffice to say it was implying writing an extra 7 posts in May. I was able to write those 7 posts, but I wasn’t able to keep up the speed in my own blog. So I ended May with only 8 posts in my blog and 7 guest posts at other blogs. Surprisingly enough, traffic wasn’t affected.

After May, I decided it’s time to slow down on my guest posts and get back to my regular routine. And so I did, until July, when I decided to write 2 more guest posts. This time everything went well, so I waited another month and in September I did another 2 guest posts. Those guest posts were smoothly inserted in my posting speed.

If I draw a line, my posting speed was constant during the first year. I wrote at least 15 posts each month. That makes more than 180 posts in a year, almost all of them over 1200 words each. Which is a lot. This adds up and creates a solid foundation. Something you can build upon.

If you’re going to have more visitors, at some point they’ll want to read more of you. And you don’t want to have just a dozen of beautiful posts and then nothing. Or at least I don’t want that. I do have something to say and I also created the discipline to say it.

First lesson: start slow when trying to increase posting speed. Don’t try to grow faster than you can. Expanding too much without careful planning will most likely break your current posting speed.

First benefit: keeping a stable posting speed is crucial. Although your traffic won’t be hurt if you screw it one month, it’s compulsory to get back on track as fast as you can. Posting speed is not about the traffic you get, but more about your commitment to your blog (or business). Outside symptoms won’t alert you immediately and it may take several weeks until your traffic will really go down, but you got to have internal mechanisms which will put you back on your best speed ASAP, before this will actually happen.

Guest Posting

Now, about the real guest posting. This first year I had 4 guest posts, as I already told you, grouped in July and September, respectively. Writing guest posts was fun but I have to admit it took longer than my usual posts. Here are some reasons:

1. I tried to fit into the host policy. Some hosts are suggesting that you write a maximum number of words and others are being strict on their topics. Sticking with this guidelines is sometimes cumbersome.
2. I was a little bit nervous, somehow like visiting somebody I didn’t know for the first time. I was very careful with my words, trying to make a good impression. Guest posts went out a little bit too serious because of that.
3. I was a little bit too much of a censor, meaning once I finished a blog post I waited a few days and then read it again. If it sounded ugly, I started to refactor.

Other than that writing guest posts was fun and inspiring and I will certainly do more of that in the next year.

Lesson: guest posts need a different approach then usual posts and requires more energy, focus and time than your own blog posts.

Benefits: I got a few new readers every time I landed my guest posts on a new blog. Met some interesting people and engaged in nice conversations. I also got quality links from quality blogs and that certainly helped my rankings.

Massive Guest Posting

During May I did an experiment. It was called Massive Guest Posting and as far as I know it was an Internet first. Basically, all I did was to publish a post about The 7 Ages Of A Business. But then I thought it would be nice to write a follow-up in which I will write in more details about each age. And then I thought it would be even nicer to have those follow-up posts as guest posts on other blogs. And then, of course, I thought it would be really awesome to have the follow-up posts published at the same time on all 7 hosts.

Easier said than done, of course, but a great idea. I had an immense fun doing it and I have to confess the whole thing was a huge success. You can see how this turned out once you click the link above. Several things emerged out of this:

1. Massive Guest Posting is a fantastic tool for networking. I connected to a lot of quality bloggers and created long lasting relationships.
2. On top of what I wrote about guest posts above, when you create a Massive Guest Post project you have to keep in mind a coherence between all the guest posts. Which can be pretty challenging, knowing that each blog has its own personality, preferred topics and established readers.
3. After a Massive Guest Post you’ll end up with the same benefits as for guest posting, only multiplied by 7 (or the number of blogs you will pitch).

Lesson: there is always room for innovation. This experiment was a first on the Internet and it was a success.

Benefits: a lot of traffic coming from the host blogs, great relationships with the blog owners and many inbound links. Not to mention the ninja writing skills I ended up with after the whole thing was done.

Blog Audit

This is a blogging tool, in the form of a wordpress plugin. I wrote it because I needed something to monitor my progress as a blogger. I still use it constantly and although it’s one of the simplest wordpress plugins out there it proves to be really helpful.

With blog audit you can set up blogging goals in the following areas: posting speed, comments density and pingback volume. Those are actually blog metrics, which will help you assess your current blogging performance. I set up my posting speed, for instance, in blog audit, and I was constantly monitoring it. If you’re meeting your goal, the numbers are colored in green, if you’re under your goal, the numbers are colored in red. I was so happy when my blog audit page started to be greener than a Greenpeace activist. Besides is statistic function, blog audit is also a little bit of a motivator. Don’t know if you’re going to find the “struggle for green” motivating, but for me it surely was. And still is.

Lesson: you need tools if you want performance. The same way you can’t really chop a tree with your bare hands, you can’t expect to become better and better without using tools.

Benefits: I started to have a much better understanding of what’s happening in my blog. I can see how comments density is changing or how the pingback volume is increasing or decreasing. I can adjust my strategy and move forward.

List Posts

I decided to write a special paragraph about list posts here, because there is quite a polarized attitude towards them. On one road, people who are nuts about list posts, thinking they are a by-product of the information age, and on the opposite road people who are hating the guts out of list posts, thinking they are here to make us even dumber than we are.

I won’t chose my road yet. I will just give you the information. I wrote 4 list posts in the last few weeks and all I say is that the traffic was sky-rocketing. And I mean it. All the posts got featured on almost every social media website, from reddit to delicious or hackernews. I ended up with a lot of recurring visitors and subscribers.

If you’re curious about the lists posts, take a look at them here:

100 Ways To Live A Better Life
100 Ways To Improve Your Blog
77 Tips For starting An Online Business
33 Ways To Get And Keep Yourself Motivated

There was a tremendous learning going on, from the early moments of getting on the home page of a major social website, up to several weeks after publishing the blog post. All I can say is that the posts are still retweeted at this moment, although some of them are older than a month.

Lesson: adjust your message to your audience. Keep in mind you’re writing for your readers first and find a way to get into their cone of interest.

Benefits: by far the most sudden traffic surge I ever experienced. Huge number of visitors, increasing subscribers with 50% and a lot of new relationships opportunities (especially on Twitter, where I can actually start a conversation with people who are retweeting my content).

My E-Book: 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset

Writing an ebook was a fantastic experience. It was so fun writing my first one, that sooner than I realized I wake up with more than 4 books already cooking so hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have at least another one out. Writing the book took several weeks and it was a rather difficult process. Writing blog posts is one thing but keeping your focus on something that is 90+ pages long is a totally different deal.

The book is about a millionaire mindset and it’s based on a series of posts I wrote one year ago. It was interesting to see that one year ago I was struggling to write a list post with 30 items (the sentences, that is), broken down into 3 separate blog posts, and now I can write a 100 list post in less than 2 days.

Another huge surprise was that the book really sells and the whole process is actually working. I’m still not shamelessly rich out if it, but I sold copies to people I never heard about. Which is something that amazes me, to be honest. If you want to know more about the book, click on the link above, and keep in mind that you can also join as an affiliate and earn a decent commission out of every sale.

Lesson: you can monetize a blog in a much more direct and profitable way than by using contextual or display advertising. Now I have real proof that writing something valuable actually sells.

Benefits: I will not mention the experience I accumulated by writing an ebook, this is something obvious, I guess, but I will take into account the fact that I actually earn money out of this product. Not only I make money out of it, but I can also help others making money, through an affiliate program.

Writing Roadblock

No, it’s not about writer’s block. I don’t have something like this and never had. You can put me in front of a computer, with nothing around me and I can keep writing for hours. It’s about something related to my market choice. I write in English for an English speaking market. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Romanian and English is my second language. Or, to be honest, it’s my fourth language. I learned French in university and Russian in college. And I never had an English lesson in my life. That’s making English my fourth language.

One of my 2009 goals was to drastically improve my English skills. I’m making progress but not as fast as I want. One of the reasons I chose to have a constant posting speed, a part from keeping the blog afloat, was to practice my English skills more often. Other than writing constantly on my blog and reading other blogs I don’t do much to improve my English. Yet. There are a few months left from 2009, right?

Lesson: if you want to penetrate a new market, be sure to learn its language first.

That’s it for the writing part of my first year of blogging as a business. Would love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments.