It’s so nice to see that the blogosphere has room to stretch. Especially with A-Listers like Robert Scoble.

On Sunday, Scoble began by Pissing off the Blogosphere with his rant about bloggers not linking to other bloggers and linking to sources like the New York Times instead. That created a bit of backlash. Just read some of the comments.

A little while later he posted, Do A-List Bloggers Have a Responsibility to Link to Others, with a little help from Sue Pollinsky’s question, Do big(ger) bloggers have an obligation to smaller or newer ones to link to them? Which lead to Scoble saying:

I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but, yes, I try to link out to as many people as possible. I got found because other people linked to me, and I view it as my responsibility to link to other people as well. I also leave my comments open so people can post their own opinions and links to things.
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Being a web business developer, I know quite a bit about strategy, planning and marketing a static small business website. I know how to drive traffic and convert that traffic down a marketing pipeline into your products and services. It’s basically just a formula, mostly.

Over the years I’ve seen my static site’s traffic fluctuate up and down a bit – but never in large amounts. Traffic usually just went up steadily. Sometimes I’d get blips by placing articles or running campaigns, but they were never huge spikes and they often returned to their nice, easy upward slope once the campaign was finished.

Then I got into blogging. Really just three weeks ago. Yeah, I’ve got older posts I wrote during my psuedo-live development time. But I wasn’t pinging and had no outgoing feeds. So I think of my blog as beginning three Sundays ago when I ‘officially’ launched it.
And boy have my traffic patterns changed.

Almost from the first day, I saw increases in traffic. And over the first week, as I posted once each day, got involved with MyBlogLog and commented on other blogs, I saw a much more agressive upward trend – with some really interesting spikes in my traffic patterns. My blog had definitely changed my reach just in the first week.
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I love posts that are short, simple and to the point. So I was refreshed this morning to see Ben Yoskovitz’s post, The Most Important Question You Can Ask When Networking.

How Can I Help You?

This question is so effective because:

1. It shows you care.
2. It gives the person an opportunity to talk about themselves.
3. It opens up opportunities.
4. It’s easy for the person to reciprocate by asking the same question.
5. It gets to the heart of networking.

So, how can I help you?

That’s the entire post. Didn’t I tell you it was short?

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I’ve already written about how much I’m Digging MyBlogLog. My community is growing and I’m meeting some really great people with some interesting blogs.

As of today, MyBlogLog community has only 12 members. Yet, I’m so pleased that they’ve joined my community that I’d like to acknowledge them right here:

• Micah Schaeffer from Blogging on Blogging (MyBlogLog link)
• Mike Sansone from Converstations (MyBlogLog link)
• Catherine (cat) Morley from Designers who Blog (MyBlogLog link)
• Gary Conn from Google SEO, Successful Blogging, Online Marketing (MyBlogLog link)
• Chris Brown from Branding & Marketing (MyBlogLog link)
• Internet Strategy Blog (MyBlogLog link)
• Daily Domainer News (MyBlogLog link)
• Debojit Chowdbury from Free Life Coaching (MyBlogLog link)
• PayPerPost (MyBlogLog link)
• Tim Kevan from The Barrister Blog (MyBlogLog link)
• Laura from My Journey to One Million Dollars (MyBlogLog link)
• The SEO Fox Blog (MyBlogLog link)

So check out these blogs and their communities on MyBlogLog. And while you there, stop by my community and tell me about yourself.

It looks like I hit a nerve with my post Why Would I Possibly Want to Link to My Competition? So over the weekend, I poked around the blogosphere and found a nice post from Steve Rubel, about co-opetition. According to it’s wiki

co-opetition focuses on cooperation between companies in imperfectly competitive markets

Much of Steve’s post focuses on the competition between bloggers for higher rankings – especially those who don’t link back, trying to protect their traffic from similar businesses. Yet, Steve writes:

I have come to the realization that we shouldn’t be competing with each other, but trying to help one another – particularly newcomers from outside our blogger ghetto…

Yes, I so much agree. Sharing and helping one another is what blogging is all about. It’s how blogs have gotten popular and how blog posts go viral.

When similarly competiting blogs share comments, trackbacks, permalinks and list each other in their blogrolls, they both benefit. More importantly, however, the reader benefits.
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I like Google. And I want every single page of content on my site in Google’s search database. Likely, you do too.

Now we could each wait for Google’s bots to crawl our sites and find our content – both old and new. Or, we could force the issue a little bit by taking advantage of a Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Part of Google’s Webmaster Tools is Google Sitemap. With Google Sitemap, you can submit a site map of your website/blog to Google and their bots will pick up your new content right away. Much faster than waiting for the bots to come back around your server.

My new friend Gary Conn covers the ‘how to’ using WordPress and a WordPress plugin in a great post from a couple of days back. Read his post for the details. But here are the highlights:

Step One: Add Your URL to Google.
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Think about it, you’ve worked so hard to get that visitor to your site. You’ve designed, edited, optimized and submitted your site ’til it’s just right. Now that you’ve ‘got ‘em,’ you need to keep ‘em, right? You gotta convert ‘em! And the last thing you want ‘em to do is leave your site for the competition. Hence your website becomes like an island where you want visitors to land, but not leave. Am I right?

Well, that’s the perspective of many ‘so-called’ web marketing experts. And it’s certainly the perspective of most small business owners I know. A perspective that isn’t without merit if you’re struggling to get traffic to your site in the first place. That includes almost all traditional small business websites.

Then along comes the blog. And it blows out of the water many of the traditional marketing approaches. Now, not only is it not necessary, it’s not even wise for your website to be an island that keeps visitors from getting off.

Blogging changed everything. Now you get rewarded for linking to your competition with more visitors, higher search engine rankings and greater readership.

And you get to build mutually beneficial relationships. Yes, with your visitors. But also with your ‘competition.’ You comment on and link to their blogs and it’s likely that they’ll comment on and link to yours. That extends your blog’s reach into ‘their market.’ And even if they don’t link to you, you can leave a link to your blog in the comments you leave – which will reach other commentors. That, in turn, can increase your readership.
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Well, not exactly digging in the sense of digg.com. But, you know what I mean, right?!?!

On Monday I signed up for an account with MyBlogLog – a great little community site I first heard about from Tony Hung’s How to Market You Blog in 2007 marketing post at ProBlogger. Then I found a post about it on Chris Brown’s Branding and Marketing blog. I dig both of these bloggers, so I checked it out and got an account.

After a few minutes of scanning and joining a few of the communities, I found myself making connections with other bloggers. Albeit, I wasn’t inundated with contact requests – I’m a small fish in the sea, after all.

But I have had a few positive comments on my blog. A couple of people have told me they’ve subscribed to my feed. And I’ve already had an email exchange with another blog owner who found me on MyBlogLog.

As I’m very much interested in meeting and sharing with other bloggers, I am so very excited about MyBlogLog.

Go and get an account. And when you do, look me up. Say ‘hi’ in my comments and add me to your contacts. I’ll do the same for you.

So many of my clients and peers are concerned about the size of their email newsletter/ezine list. But does size really matter?

Mark Brownlow from Email Marketing Reports suggests not. He sites the example of people being afriad to loose numbers from their list. His take is that good lists are not necessarily large ones. Good lists, are those whose members respond to our messages.

I have to agree. There’s so much focus on the size of lists today that people forget about the quality.

Take two clients I have. One has a list of around 10,000 while another has a list of about 3,000. You’d think by sheer numbers the person with the largest list would be getting more business, right?

Wrong. My client with 3,000 has really taken the time to understand how to leverage his list. He write really good articles and makes just the right offers that get people to act. The result is that he gets about 3 times more business through his list than my client with the larger list.

Why, because he’s not obsessed with the size of his list. He’s more interested in the quality of the people on this list. And he understands what they want and need. Much of this is accomplished by his very clear web copy. When you signup for his list, it’s because you really want what he’s offering.

The other client, with the larger list, does great work, but her site and newsletter lack the clarity that my first client has. Her business is flourishing. She’s just not leveraging her list in the same way as my first client is.
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Finally, we’re to part 5 of my comments on “the five prerequisites for having a successful blog” from ProBlogger written by Tony Hung of DeepJiveInterests. Doing these comments in five parts was an experiment – one that I don’t think I’ll repeat anytime soon. While I love the topic, it became a bit boring for me to continue to write on this topic. So let’s close it out with a look at Focus.

Blogs that are fascinating, regular reads, that are also are reader-centered do best when they are also focused like a laser. And I mean “focused” and consistent in every single way. Focused in their identity and writing style, focused in their content, and focused in their intent to serve their reader. Blogs that are wishy-washy, who don’t know who they are, who change their kind of writing “voice” repeatedly, who vascillate on their opinions, who introduce nonsensical and unrelated topics are blogs that will find it difficult to succeed.
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