With blogs popping up all over the web like weeds, the question is how does one build a successful blog. I guess the first question is how to define success? For arguments sake let’s define success as heavily trafficked and commented on.

I cam accross a very informatove post from mominisrael. She gives a list of tips that have helped her become successful.  Among her tips she writes: ” I started by commenting on other blogs that address similar topics. If a blogger begins posting here, I usually add that blog to my reader. (A reader is a web page that lets you know when the blogs you like have been updated. I use Netvibes, but Bloglines and Google Reader are more popular.) Lately I comment less (I hope temporarily), but I still read. ”

Doshdosh asks, ” So what’s the secret to building a large blog readership? Content dissemination and the development of a supportive core audience. And that’s really the key. It’s not just about the quality of your content. It’s about having broad distribution channels.

Once again, readership growth doesn’t only depend on the merit of your blog posts, but rather their circulation reach. It’s about how much attention your content receives.”

Finally, Positivityblog has a long list of tips to help you be a better blogger. Here is just one of the tips: ” Learn from more experienced people. This is so key - in any area of life really - and can really help you to improve quickly and avoid wasting time. I recommend not only subscribing to the two excellent resources called Problogger (about blogging) and Copyblogger (about communicating better and more persuasively). I also recommend delving into the archives of these two blogs. When I started blogging I spent two or three weeks reading lots and lots from the massive archives of Problogger. I learned a lot about blogging, marketing, monetization and what you should and should not do. Before I started this blog I knew very little about blogging. After those weeks I at least had a basic education that was very helpful. If you are thinking about creating your own blog or have just started one I recommend reading the big series Blogging Tips for Beginnersover at Problogger.”

Happy blogging.

As seen on the TheMomEntrepreneur, a great site for information regarding working mothers, raising kids, and running your own business.

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This post is one in a series of three about the phenomenon we call Twitter. Many people in The Mom Entrepreneur Support Group I run, and clients, have been asking about this form of micro-blogging. What is it? Why should I care? How do I use it? My goal is to answer these questions and more.

“New to Twitter - not quite sure how this works but I am sure I can figure it out. Love this social networking stuff.”

“I am here, now what?”

Start by posting some practice tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. My second tweet was:

“Working on my blogging clinic, which will be offered for four sessions in April in Barrington, NH.”

When the blogging clinic write up was ready on my website, I tweeted again about it and included a link to the page on my site. Now remember, you are limited to 140 characters. This can easily be used up with one URL; especially a blog URL. Visit http://www.tinyurl.com/ and turn your long URL into a short URL. You can even customize your URL so it is easy to remember.

Techcrunch had good coverage of Wikinvest’s launch of embeddable, annotate-able, wiki-able charts.  Wikinvest, which like it sounds, is a wiki focused on building out user-generated company and stock information.  Now, the site has developed charts that can be annotated and embedded into websites and blogs.

If you check out Apple’s chart (sorry wordpress.com doesn’t allow posting of javascript) and click on ‘B’, you’ll see that on June 10th, Apple reported a new iPhone with GPS and 3G capabilities, better battery life and improved audio quality.

Or, on Amgen’s chart, you can click on ‘L’ and see someone’s explanation for a continued slide in the stock price (which he/she attributed to a potential safety risk for Aranesp)

Google Finance has charts that attempt to pair up news events with movements in the stock price.  While it’s a really interesting cause-effect, Google Finance unfortunately doesn’t capture the news or information that is affecting stock price movement.  I attribute this to 2 reasons: 1) Sometimes it’s just impossible to explain price movement (sorry, financial commentators) 2) Google’s news set is in some cases unexplicable weird and picks up stories that seemingly have little impact.

Anyway, these charts powered by wikinvest are interesting for financial bloggers and may ultimately do a good job of providing numerous opinions as to what’s affecting individualk stocks at any given moment.  It would be very interesting for someone to look into the accuracy of wikinvest’s annotated charts and provide some metrics at some point (if this is possible to track).  If anything, these charts improve on Google’s charts (which I happen to like) by overlaying wiki-like UGC on top of stock charts.

Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com has a great article out this morning about the recent sale of DailyCandy.  A great site with some great content, I agree with Salmon that DC, with great content and a great vibe, has built a great email newsletter.  The design is top notch, extremely well designed and the right blend of

edginess.

Salmon’s belief for all those running a web business (or a business that utilizes the web channel) is that it is extremely important to turn web content into an email product.

Says Salmon:

It’s also an important reminder: if you want to make money from a website, put a lot of effort into turning your blog(s) into some kind of email product. Email reaches millions of people who never read blogs, and advertisers often adore it.

When thinking about utilizing the web to tap the power of social networks or using Sales 2.0 techniques to quickly scale your online business, email still remains one of the most powerful tools for reaching customers, selling advertising, and as we see with DailyCandy’s recently announced sale, monetizing your equity value.

Today it is generally agreed that a business is not serious if it does not have a website. People look to websites to find out more about businesses, see how the company presents itself, and what are the services that company provides. People also want to be assured that the business has other, satisfied customers by viewing client lists and testimonials.

However, that type of web presence is quickly becoming outdated…it’s so 1999. The typical corporate website has become irrelevant, and today it’s all about creating a “web presence.” A web presence means that you have a home base, i.e. a website and/or blog, but your brand can also be found in other places on the web, like social networks.

People are spending so much time on social networks, that they expect to find you and your business there:

“a recent Universal McCann report stat[es] that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.” (from ReadWriteWeb)

Four steps to a successful social media strategy

I often meet people who understand that they need to expand and diversify their web presence, but don’t know how. Some people feel lost, while others are sure that the way to being part of the social web is to…create a facebook group.

I created a facebook group. So why am I all alone?

Creating a facebook group, or even writing a blog or microblogging on twitter, are not strategies; they are tools for implementing strategeis. They may be the right tools for some businesses or organizations, but they also be the wrong place to invest time and energy for others. Choosing the tools or technologies that you will use to implement your social media strategy is actually the LAST step in the process.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target?
   Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

I need to build a house. I hear these tools are good so I think I’ll use them.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr