Ahmed Bilal

Your blog has its own personality, regardless of whether you actively cultivate it or allow it to develop haphazardly. Your readers are attracted to your blog for a reason, and its personality plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and converting them into regular readers.

When your blog slowly converts passerbys into regular readers, a relationship of trust develops between your blog and them. It is this trust that forms the basis of how your blog deals with its readers and as such the blogger (you) must do what it takes to establish and maintain that trust.

This is where your blog’s character comes in.

Let’s discuss for a minute what I DON’T mean by character:

• I’m not talking about being morally right (immoral content goes, as long as that’s what the blog is designed for).
• I’m not talking about reporting only the facts (rumours work, as long as that’s what…you get the idea).
• This has nothing to do with the blogger (well, maybe a bit) – quite often the blog takes on a completely different personality from the blogger, and if that sells, that’s fine too. You don’t HAVE to be your blog, and your blog doesn’t HAVE to be you.

  So what am I talking about?

  Character in a blog means:

  • Delivering on what you promise (integrity and reliability are cornerstones for building trust).
  • Doing what you do to the best of your ability (effort and quality will be your secret weapons for converting visitors).
  • Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success (don’t allow short-term results to distract you from long-term objectives).

  You may not have the most popular blog, or the best looking, or the most profitable. All those things are important, and we’ve talked about how to achieve all these things at Performancing. You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.

  Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.

  This article was originally written on 19 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

How can you have charisma? Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you.
– Dan Reliand

Most people think of charisma as something mystical, almost undefinable. They think it’s a quality that comes at birth or not at all. But that’s not true. Charisma, plainly stated, is the ability to draw people to you. And like other character traits, it can be developed.

And as I’ve discussed earlier, your blog (and you) have a certain personality, a brand that can be nurtured, cultivated and molded into anything that you want it to be. Because the personality of a blogger can be one of the biggest ‘crowd-pullers’ for the blog, it’s important that you get it right.

To create a blog that attracts others, you need to integrate the following points into your blog’s philosophy:

1. Be Passionate and Positive
Who would you rather spend time with – someone who is grumpy, bitter and depressed, or someone that is cheerful, positive and passionate?

Blogs are the same – most people get turned off from whiners and are attracted to those who have a positive approach towards life (I wouldn’t say optimistic – there’s a difference in having self-belief and in distorting reality). Or, as they say, when you set yourself on fire (passion), people love to come and watch you burn.

Being positive is more than just avoiding the urge to criticise – it’s a conscious attempt to focus on how things can be made better instead of focusing on what’s wrong, it’s the drive to focus on the good rather than on the bad. You cannot be blind to a fault or a mistake, but you can choose what you spend your time on – pointing out what’s wrong or showing people how to fix it.

And just about every successful blogger I know speaks with passion and conviction – it’s not an add-on trait, this is perhaps the single-most important ingredient to blogging success (and success in life).

2. Expect the Best of People
How do you react when you first meet someone or as us bloggers are likely to do, meet them online? Do you judge them on their name, on their past, on their reputation? Or do you start off by thinking of the other person as a “10″, expect the best from them and give them all your attention?

How we interact with others directly influences what they think of us. If you treat them as perfect 10’s, they’ll remember you as someone who makes them feel good about themselves – and that’s what you need to get them to come back.

With blogging and bloggers, this works on two angles. First is your approach to networking – how you interact with fellow bloggers, readers, journalists, sales reps, etc. Second is through your blog and how you treat your readers – whether you appreciate them and encourage them to do better, or whether you talk down to them, insult their intelligence and expect them to fail.

If you appreciate others, encourage them, and help them reach their potential (both through your blog and through your networking efforts), they will love you for it.

3. Give People Hope
Are you all doom and gloom or are you confident that despite hardships, it’s within your hands to achieve results? Hope does not mean optimism, it’s the confidence in your own ability (and that of others) to do what is necessary to overcome obstacles – and it is this confidence (or lack of it) that will shine through and either inspire your readers or turn them away from you.

One theme you must have noticed here is that of confidence – the kind you have in yourself and your beliefs and the kind you show in others. To be honest, because we’re online and protected by relative anonymity and our blogs, this kind of self-confidence can be faked for some time, so fake it until you yourself believe it to be true.

Take a hard look at your blog and see whether it inspires hope or instills misery – unless the answer is firmly in the corner of ‘hope’, you’ve got work to do.

4. Share Yourself
Make yourself available to your readers – whether it is in terms of replying to comments, to email, sharing your IM details on your blog or just giving more of yourself in terms of personal experiences and resources. In a recent article titled “27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog”, I talked about how important it was to ‘give first’ and ask later. Sharing yourself is all about giving in terms of your personal time and attention.

In networking, this means helping out people you meet in solving their problems – trust me on this, if you just go out and help the next person who asks you, without asking or expecting anything in return, the rewards are tremendous. And you don’t just have to do this in person, you can do it on your blog as well. If you readers want something, give it to them, even if it means you having to spend extra time on your blog to make it happen.

Examples
A lot of the more ‘popular’ bloggers are well-known not only for being charismatic but also because they excel in their fields. However, to show you how sheer charisma can turn someone into a superstar, take the example of Edward Harrison.

Ed is a 60-something retired IBM employee, who started a blog about the football club Newcastle United in April 2007. Within a couple of weeks, his blog was gaining traction and in 2 months one could safely say that it was a roaring success. In the 5 months since the blog has been live, we’ve received over a hundred emails from readers and thousands of comments on the blog telling Ed that his blog is the first thing they check in the morning.

For me, that type of loyalty and appreciation cannot be bought, it has to be earned. Ed did not win over his readers by being the best writer, or the most knowledgeable, or the most insightful. Instead, he did it by doing 4 things right:

• He’s a passionate Newcastle United fan, and it shows in the hard work he puts in the blog (anywhere between 5-8 posts per day) and in everything he writes. He’s also positive about his team – it shines through in his writing, is infectious and his readers love him for it.
• He’s built a close rapport with his readers by trusting them to police themselves on the blog. Where you might see snarkiness run rampant on sports blogs, Ed’s blog is usually clean – and if there’s a troublemaker, it’s not Ed who has to speak up, it’s the readers. The community keeps the house clean.
• He gives his readers hope by seeing the positives in his club and constantly thinking of how the team can go forward (as opposed to constantly criticising them). If you follow a sport, you’ll know the value of hope – and Ed gives that to his readers in spades.
• Ed shares himself – responding to each email personally, taking the time to answer comments (which in my estimate takes him an hour a day) and has given his readers what they want by going the extra mile to fulfill reader requests for things like team stats and adding a forum, which takes up even more of his personal time.

When it comes to talking about something he loves, Ed is incredibly charismatic. He’s been my benchmark for a while now, and he’s the perfect example of how a blogger can become #1 in his niche by sharing his passion and enthusiasm for a subject with others.

Barriers to being Charismatic

• Pride – Do you think you’re better than everyone else? How many arrogant, pompous, self-important bloggers do you know who are well-liked (and popular, for that matter)?
• Insecurity – If you’re not comfortable with who you are and lack confidence in yourself, how can you make others feel comfortable and confident about you?
• Moodiness – You may accept being nice one minute and snarky the other as perfectly acceptable behavior for yourself, but put it the other way around – how would you treat a person who behaved like this with you? Not with too much confidence and trust, I imagine.
• Perfectionism – Like it or not, no one’s perfect. A perfectionist zeal can cause to focus on the small stuff – the 20% of the problems that aren’t important. You may love to nitpick (I’m a sucker for it) but resist it the first time.
• Cynicism – Do you shoot down the ideas and opinions of others or do you encourage them to chase their dreams?

Self-Analysis
Self-analysis is a bitch – it makes you feel like hell and as a result most people resist the occasion to find flaws in themselves (you can’t be too self-critical though). I admit, I have all the traits I listed above, and for me it’s a conscious effort every day to not succumb to being cynical or snarky, and it’s quite tough at times to find the self-confidence to move forward with conviction.

However, I think that once you believe in something for long enough, it starts being your reality. In terms of habits, this is doubly true.
So take a good hard look at your blog and your own blogging habits. Chances are, you’re not doing everything as well as you thought you were. Chances are that you could use a gut-check and increase your blog’s charismatic appeal.

And to make it happen, there is just one thing you really need to remember:

When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is other-mindedness.

This article was originally written on 19 Sep 2007 from Performancing.com.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably have certain blogging ‘habits’ and tips that you swear by. This article is a collection of such tips, designed to help you build a better blog.

Warning! You may have read some of these before – heck, all of these will be familiar to you. There’s a very good reason – they work extremely well for the bloggers who swear by them and while it’s hard to get bloggers to agree on what the important tip of them all is, they will agree that IF you take out XX days and implement each of these tips ONE day at a time, your blog will be be kicking ass in your niche, in your blogging community and in the search engine results by the end of it.

So let’s get started.

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A friend of mine asked me this morning if he should put ads on the blog he’s launching next week from the first day. There are two opposing ways of thinking about it – some people prefer to have their ads in from the first day while others tend to add them later on once they’ve built up their reader base.

Readers are usually tolerant of advertising as long as they don’t have a preconceived notion of a specific site being ad-free. We are bombarded by advertising so much in our lives that we understand and accept it even on a personal reading level when browsing online.

Showing ads from the first day helps you avoid false expectations that your readers might develop about an ad-free blog which could later prove to be a hurdle when you finally do show ads.

On the other hand, it may make sense to hold off on showing ads and instead use the ad space to highlight key areas of your blog to new readers. Later on when you’ve got a lot of traffic (especially search engine traffic) you can then consider showing AdSense or other advertising on your blog.

What do you do – show ads from day 1 or delay it until your blog has enough traffic?

This article was originally written on 14 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

Shane wrote about staying motivated and staying consistent in your early blogging days when the rewards may not be as immediate or … rewarding … as you’d like them to be.

It’s sound advice and it can be extended to blogging in general. Blogging for the most part is all about delayed gratification. When you see a successful blog that gets 100s of comments for each post, you see potential and an opportunity for you to be successful as well. What you don’t see is the sheer amount of hard work that went into building that success.

What you don’t see is the daily slogging and an insane amount of consistency behind the blog.

This works both ways. If you’re consistent and work hard all the time, your blog will eventually grow and become successful (but that success won’t show up now – it’ll show up 3-4 months later). On the other hand, if you have a successful blog and you let up your blogging efforts for a few weeks, the crash won’t happen then but in a few months as you’ll find your user base eroding and your blog set back by anywhere between 6 months to an year because you took your foot off the gas.

The next time you sit down to write on your blog, remember that you’re not blogging only for your readers today, you’re also blogging for your blog’s success several months down the line.

This article was originally written on 12 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

A growing trend of consolidation in Blogging and in the online world in general has seen many blogs and bloggers join blog networks in a bid to leverage pooled resources (brand promotion, advertising rates, design / programming / promotion help, etc).

Whether you’re starting your own blogging network or just hiring bloggers for your blog, there is one question that always leads to a lot of questions and debate:

How do you compensate the bloggers?

There are 5 different methods of compensating bloggers – let’s look at each of them briefly:

1. Blogging for Free
   Whether it is out of passion for the subject, love for the blog or because the blogger wants to build their own profile (see yesterday’s post on guest blogging), free content is the cheapest but also tough to manage. Bloggers are rarely consistent if their only compensation is ’satisfaction’ of writing, and quite often quality control weeds out 90% of submissions.

   It may be a smart idea to have bloggers kick off for free if there is already a ‘main blogger’ running the show, but apart from sporadic submissions you cannot rely on free submissions except in a few niches (and then there’s the issue of quality).

2. Pay Per Post
   $5 / post or $10 / post rates are quite common in blog network circles, and there’s the added advantage of attracting a LOT of bloggers who can work on your blog part time and write as much or as little as they need to.

   Personally I’m not a fan of this approach – blogging is a continuous experience, not something that should be broken up in terms of per-post payments. It seems to work for some networks, but out of the 5 options mentioned here this is the one least likely to produce good long-term results. You are better off hiring a blogger and pay them $100 for 20 posts per month than to have 20 different people write 20 posts for $5 each.

3. Profit Sharing
   It’s a popular way to motivate bloggers to get involved in the success of a blog. This usually works by either giving the blogger a share of the profits (50%-80% from what I’ve seen) or by giving them 100% profits from one revenue stream and reserving another for themselves.

   One strategy I’ve used on some blogs is to give bloggers 100% of AdSense revenue but to reserve ad slots in the sidebar above the fold for the network. In the long run, when the combined power of the network (let’s say 2-3 mil PageViews / month) is big enough to command high CPM rates, then those ad slots will earn the network plenty.

4. Contract / Salary
   Another popular method is to pay the blogger a monthly fee (ranges from $100 to $1000+) in return for a minimum number of posts per month. It’s an expensive but ’safe’ choice, because you get in people who are committed to doing a minimum amount of work each month and while the blog may now earn much in the beginning this approach in popular niches can allow you to make a lot of profits while keeping bloggers happy.

5. Profit Sharing + Salary
   This hybrid model is perhaps the most popular that I’ve seen after the contract model. Basically, you pay the blogger a fixed monthly salary plus give them a share of the site profits. This gets you the best of both worlds – giving the blogging financial security AND giving them an incentive to contribute to the blog’s success.

I’m interested in hearing about how you pay your bloggers. Do you use the hybrid approach or pay a fixed amount each month?

From a financial point of view you need some capital to start a blog network and paying salaries can rapidly become the single biggest drain on your resources. If you’re starting out, using the profit-sharing approach (where you give them 100% of one revenue stream and take out ad space in the sidebar, like I’ve done) could be a decent way to go forward and motivate bloggers to grow.

What’s important to remember is that while not everyone blogs for money, money IS a driving force for most people and if someone feels that they are not getting what they deserve for their efforts, then there will be disagreements between them and you and eventually you will lose them. The takeaway is to ensure that a) bloggers know what the benefits are and b) those benefits should make the cost of moving away from the network quite heavy.

Or at least you should get your bloggers to think that way.

Also Read: Chris Garrett on Blog Network Payment Strategies – he does an excellent job of discussing the pros and cons attached with each of the options mentioned above.

This article was originally written on 10 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

I’ve been thinking a lot about blog promotion in the last couple of days and one strategy that I’ve always seen being under-used is guest blogging.

There’s no downside to it – unless your blog is #1 in its niche, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take time out from fussing over your own blog and write a killer article for another blog.

What guest blogging can do for you (and your blog):

• You get several deep links (if you link back to your own articles) back to your blog which from a high-ranking blog can pay off in the long run).
• A good article will inevitably gain your blog new readers and increase your RSS subs (so be prepared to follow up with more good articles on your own blog.
• If you’re looking for consulting work / paid blogging gigs, guest blogging is an excellent way to position yourself as an authority.
• Builds a good relationship with fellow bloggers, something you’re going to need if you want them to notice you and link to you.
• Reaching new audiences keeps us on our toes to keep our blogging at a high level of quality, and guest blogging itself pushes us to write better than our comfort zone would allow us to.

Ultimately it all boils down to quality writing and giving people what they want, but if you’re looking for ways to improve your blog’s profile guest blogging (like having an article published in an offline publication) is a reliable, effective method to apply.

Usually we hold back from guest blogging either because we’re lazy (Ryan) or because we’re hung up on our own egos to go anywhere else and write. In some cases the later can be a good thing in a person who is talented and motivated enough to build a #1 blog, but usually it’s a case of limiting your blog promotion options and being too pig-headed to take advantage of what’s on offer.

Deb, Chris and Liz are just 3 excellent examples of using guest blogging to build their own profile – and it’s not a surprise that these 3 are some of the more successful bloggers that I know.

So… where are you guest blogging next?

Also read: Matt’s thoughts on guest blogging.