31DBBB – Days 3 & 4
Posted in Blogging on Thursday July 22, 2010 | 18 comments
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.
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.
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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How fortunate that the other day you’re on my blog and now I get to visit yours for Day 4 #31DBBB! Wow, your photography is awesome and you should be making money from something you do everyday. Mark’s flower picture also very good! Talent runs in the family, I guess?
All the best with completing the next (how many??) days. I look forward to visiting your blog again!
Britty
Thanks so much Britty! My husband loves photography too and has a talent for it, but is missing my passion.
Twitter: @lynda
Lynda, first thanks for the commitment you’ve made to being a community leader. We an all truly benefit from your expertise. I’m so happy that you’re on the way to realizing your dream. I did spend some time on your blog today from work, whenever I had the chance and you’re truly an inspiration. I love the photographs, and even though I have an eye for photography, i don’t have a creative bone in my body, so I can’t help but be impressed by your images. I went the other way and work in editing & printing field. Purely technical. I’ve been thinking about your comment the other day about what else I want to blog about and i thought maybe I can publish some Photoshop tutorials. Then I realized how expensive PS is and not many moms may have it. I’ve got to find time to dig around and find out what other moms are using, maybe I’ll start a discussion in the community about it. If you have any insight, please let me know.
Please get to bed early tonight!
Vanita
Vanita´s last blog ..Another List Post on Signs That Your Baby May Have A Milk Allergy Day 2- Write a List Post
Twitter: @vsafterbedtime
Have you tried GIMP – it’s an open source product completely free and does the same things as photoshop – i moved to it about 6 months ago when my copy of PS went down with my old laptop’s harddrive. It’s all i use now!
Anna´s last blog ..cfp- “Role of Translation in Nation Building- Nationalism and Supra-nationalism” New Delhi- December 2010
I am so interested in GIMP and I’m going to need to try it out one of these days! There SHOULD be more GIMP tutorial sites out there. Crazy that it’s saturated with Photoshop and Elements.
Twitter: @lynda
There are some good ones – GIMP tutorials (http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/), http://gimp-tutorials.net/ and http://www.ghuj.com/
I also use Scripts in gimp – they’re like photoshop actions and save a stack of time.
I love that it’s completely open source!
Anna´s last blog ..cfp- “Role of Translation in Nation Building- Nationalism and Supra-nationalism” New Delhi- December 2010
Vanita, you’re welcome; it is my pleasure to assist with the challenge! Thanks for the many kind words about my site and phtoographs.
Photoshop Elements is what MANY amatuer photographers use. It’s under $100 and almost as powerful as its $800+ rival, Photoshop.
Have you heard of Picnik? It’s a web-app that allows you do to some basic photo editing for free, but it is actually VERY powerful too! They have a cheap premium version (I think around $5/month). The photography niche is saturated with Photoshop and Elements reviews (and I even see some on GIMP every once in a while) but it is sorely missing some Picnik tutorials!
If you’re thinking about trying to provide something unique and helpful to the photography niche, promoting Picnik would probably be a good way to do it!
I got to sleep at midnight last night (better than nearly 4am!) and I feel like crap today. I think the lack of sleep caught up with me.
Twitter: @lynda
Lynda thanks so much for all the info. You truly put your all in everything – even comments. I’m so happy to have “met” you.
And girrrl, when the lack of sleep catches up, i get a migraine. it’s awful.
Picnik actually has it own tutorials. I used it today and I can tell you the auto correction feature stinks. But otherwise, the free version was good. I’d really like to get a good feel for the premium version and see if the tutorials cover the things I can uncover. Thanks for the great idea. I’m so excited. I guess I need to change my pitch a bit. Thanks again. Ok, enough visiting, time to get a move on my own post.
Vanita´s last blog ..Another List Post on Signs That Your Baby May Have A Milk Allergy Day 2- Write a List Post
Twitter: @vsafterbedtime
I’ve been following your remarks on the #31DBBB Challenge and appreciate them so very much. Thank you for all of your efforts in our behalf. I look forward to reading more of your blog and participating with some of my photographs. Thanks again. Hope you get some sleep tonight.
Cynthia At A Shimmy In My Spirit´s last blog ..The 31 Days to Build A Better Blog Challenge – Day 4
Thanks Cynthia! I’m heading over to your blog right now. If you’re on Flickr at all, you might want to check out my weekly photo challenge, Friday Finds!
Twitter: @lynda
I really appreciate all your hard work and long days – the RSS feed was an awesome idea and i’m looking forward to seeing the blogroll. I’m really happy you found the commenting post helpful especially because i wrote it about a particular niche of blogs – SITS is really helping me to see how my very academicy (that’s a word! at least to me) writing can be helpful more generally! I really appreciate you taking the time to write substantive content based genuine generous comments with good constructive criticism. Know that you are appreciated…but don’t burn yourself out – we’ve got another 27 days of this!
Anna´s last blog ..Lovely Ladies from SITS
I am definitely going to have to dig around your blog more! That comment entry especially… not a word of it couldn’t be applied to ANY blog. Maybe you have a Blogging Niche Blog without even realizing it.
Twitter: @lynda
nah! but thanks for saying so. I’m looking forward to seeing what you dig up and comment on! I’d love to know what you think about my children’s literature posts!
Anna´s last blog ..cfp- “Role of Translation in Nation Building- Nationalism and Supra-nationalism” New Delhi- December 2010
First of all, that is such an AWESOME photograph!
Regarding that stumbleupon experiment article you posted… I was under the impression that you are not supposed to stumble your own posts..? Or am I missing something?
Kristina´s last blog ..Review and Giveaway! – Baby Prodigy Educational DVDs
Twitter: @kristinaQ
Hi Kristina! Thank you! I assume you’re referring to the beautiful flower photograph my husband took. I will be sure to let him know. He’s cute when I tell him how much people gush over his photographs.
The idea self-Stumbling is discussed a bit in the article. It looks like there are no RULES against it, but if you do it too much, you’ll stop receiving hits altogether from StumbleUpon.
Twitter: @lynda
The amount of work that you and the other leaders have been doing for this challenge is incredible. Thank you for all you are doing!! I hope that it pays off
Patrice´s last blog ..1 Minute in the Elevator With Me
Your photos are beautiful! Thanks for all your effort on the 31-day challenge. I had already bought the book and planned to do it on my own when I heard about the SITS collective challenge.
Anytime that many women get together for any single purpose, look out!
I’m in a different corner of the Metroplex. Take care.
Thank you so much! I’m glad you’re having a good time in the challenge. nice to ‘meet’ a neighbor!
Twitter: @lynda