31DBBB – Days 3 & 4

By
Lynda Giddens
– Thu July 22, 2010Posted in: Blogging

Y’all, I am so busy with TheSITSGirls 31DBBB Challenge that I cannot even take the time to link you to the challenge. If you haven’t heard of it, look through my archives. As mentioned the other day, I was asked to be a Community Lead over at SITS on BlogFrog for this challenge! It has been so much fun, but very demanding of all my free time. In fact, the past two nights I’ve stayed up until 3:30am and that needs to stop. I wouldn’t say I’m overextending myself yet because I love just about every single second of it, but I think I may be overextending my family a bit.

In addition to reading through all the challenge threads at BlogFrog and responding in most of them and of course visiting challenge participants and commenting on their blogs, I volunteered to put together an RSS Feed of all the participants’ blogs. Inspired by today’s challenge to analyze a top blog in your niche, I also put together a survey to get participants’ feedback about which categories they belong to. (Damnit, I’m going to have to use links after all.) The result is my 31DBBB Niches Page.

It is eating up a lot of my time to maintain it, but I hope everyone will get their links in soon and this won’t be a daily thing. I’m quite proud of it and hope to add another page or set of pages with a blogroll of all participants blogs. That’ll be easy, but the queue has to slow down first. Did I mention that the free version of survey monkey only allows 100 responses? So I can’t let it get too full.

07-16-10 - Red Flowers - Taken by Mark

This photo was taken by Mark!


A Challenge on Top of a Challenge

There are over 500 bloggers participating in this challenge! And they’re all being led 5 CLs: Erin (the brainchild of this challenge!), Kathy, Rachael (who by the way, has a 10 week old baby and still manages to comment all over the place!), Jen and myself, along with Francesca of SITS. There is so much going on all over the place and these wonderful ladies are not only making it look easy, but fun! I can’t speak for them, though I have a sneaking suspicion they are, but I am definitely having fun.

But as much fun as it is, I’m not doing this all out of the goodness of my heart.

The Traffic!

First, there’s the traffic. My number one means of traffic has always been return visits from commenting on others’ blogs and forums. I’m not talking about stopping by a blog for 15 seconds and quickly typing in “Your site is great! Please visit mine!” I’m talking about actually reading the blogs and taking a few minutes to respond to their submission to the world. Especially when an article has none or very few comments, I cannot resist leaving feedback. I find it very important! We were talking about this on the SITS BlogFrog forums today and Anna pointed out a very relevant article she wrote on the basics of commenting.

The challenge allows me to do the same as usual, but on a much larger scale where everyone is already pumped and ready to interact, comment and subscribe.

I’m interested to see how well the traffic holds up after the challenge. Part of learning to build a better blog is learning how to drive traffic to your site. That’s what yesterday’s task was all about. For example, many of the ladies in the forums had successes with StumbleUpon. I’m familiar with this tool, but I’ve never truly used it before. The traffic didn’t seem to produce any quality results. But when I dug further, I found an interesting experiment performed on StumbleUpon. I’m going to give them a shot now and have my Google Analytics all set up to show me what’s going on with that traffic source.

07-20-10 - Simplicity eCourse - Week 3 - Composition 2-3

I photographed these little guys for a photography ecourse assignment this week on composition. This is one of the photos I rejected because the negative space is too distracting.

Future Opportunities

The very moment I was asked to be a leader I squealed and jumped on it. I find I’m naturally pretty good at it, plus I have several years professional leadership experience. I’m also organized and efficient as sin. I knew I’d be able to offer something valuable. All the leaders for this event are astonishing. I definitely plan to put this experience on my resume and hope they do too, if they have any interest in such a profession.

It’d be my dream come true to one day make money from something I’ve done for the past decade in my spare time while lounging around my house. The SITS and Problogger 31DBBB experience are both allowing me to realize the depth of my skillset and it’s pushing me to my absolute limits. (Remember, I have a day job which is fortunately very flexible with its hours. I took today off, as a matter of fact.)

I can’t wait to see where this challenge takes me and make connections with some of the other super talented bloggers participating!

Having put together the RSS feed, I’ve seen content from or been to the site of nearly every single participant! You know, usually every fifth time I hit up a new blog it’s just mega-stupid (not YOURS, of course!) But while pulling up the 31DBBB SITS participants’ blogs, I was continually blown away. Even brand new blogs which had been created for the challenge were more thought out than most of the blogs I see in my web travels on a daily basis.

Regardless if you’re participating in this challenge, I highly recommend taking a gander over on the Niches page and subscribe if any categories interest you! They’re high quality blogs and I know you’ll be as thrilled with them as I am.

I was supposed to write a photography post today, but I never got around to it. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. It’s not like this is a photography blog or anything…

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