So much of the branding, strategy and marketing advice I see around the web answers two questions - what and why. What do you need to do and why do you need to do it.

But there’s a third question that I see rarely answered. That question…how! How do you actually do what and why?

For instance, if you have a business, you need to market your business. Perhaps you learn what types of marketing would work best for your business. You even learn why those types of marketing can help you be successful. [ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

Why? Why not?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since David Armano talked about it at SOBCon last year. His basic point was that “blogging is a commodity. Anyone can do it. We are human beings with passions and interests that come out in our blogs—not the other way around. Stop calling yourself a blogger. You are a… (designer, businessperson, marketer, artist, baker, mother, grandfather, etc). Calling ourselves bloggers takes away from what makes us unique.”

I have to say that I agree. I think the term blogger is overused and often misunderstood. When I talk with businesses about blogging, they often, even after all this time, think of journaling. They haven’t fully appreciated the breadth of what the term blogger can mean.

[ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

Does blog comment spam really work?

I guess it must because it just keeps increasing. And not only increasing, but it’s getting harder to spot - especially for those of us who often get a lot of comments and get a lot of spam.

Take a look at this image. Look at it closely.

Looks like a benign comment at first glance, right? But look closely at the text in the next image:

Notice all the little blue underlines under some of the characters? Each one of those is a link. Hard to see, huh? And if you weren’t looking for them, you might think this is a legitimate comment and let it through.

But it’s not a legitimate comment - it’s spam. All told, this comment had more than 25 links in it. It’s just, as you can see, they’re under individual characters - making them hard to spot at a glance.

This comment spam thing is a real pain in the rear. Darren Rowse even wrote about the cost of comment spam to our blogging. Can you imagine how much spam Problogger or Scobleizer get?

That’s why I’m siding with Lorelle:

You cannot stop comment spam on your blog…Comment spam can only be stopped when comment spammers are stopped. The efforts you make on your blog only stop comment spam from reaching the public eye.

…I’ve put out a call repeatedly to bloggers (read her post on The Blog Herald) to use the power of their blogging voices to put an end to the rewards of being a comment spammer. We need to put comment spammers out of business. Anyone listening?

As a united voice, I believe that the same creativity and sense of community spirit that built MyBlogLogs, MySpace, FaceBook, and Digg can put their energy into stopping the virus that infects all of us.

We know what spam bots do and can watch their behavior. I agree with Lorelle, we can’t stop spamming unless we stop spammers. So what can we do about it? Any ideas? Know anyone who might have an idea?

I love my blog.

Whenever I have something on my mind, it listens. If I need to explore a business idea, it patiently let’s me fumble around until I get it. If I’m down, it picks me up. And if I’m feeling inflated, I know it will bring me back to earth.

I love my blog. It’s a life-long friend I can really trust. But should I date my blog? Won’t that mess everything up?

Some, like Rory Sullivan, Kevin Mulldoon, George Manty and Google’s Matt Cutts think dating your blog is a necessity. Rory’s opinion is that dating:

“…makes the material seem timeless.The problem is with the word “seem”. Removing the time stamp is a trick, a gimmick.”

Yet, there are some, like Steve Pavlina, Dan & Jennifer, and the folks at Freelance Switch, that feel it’s unnecessary to date your blog. Daniel Scocco quotes Darren Rowse, who recently stopped dating his Digital Photography School blog, as saying:

“If the content is timeless and not ‘newsy’ in nature I think that removing the timestamp from a blog is a very worthwhile thing to do.”

And Maki, of DoshDosh fame, has also removed in the same post is quoted as saying:

“I don’t really have a concrete reason why I removed the time stamp, except that it doesn’t make the blog posts look dated. Going without dates also affects your marketing potential. For instance, it might make it easier to promote material on social voting/bookmarking websites.”

If you take a look at DoshDosh you’ll see that Maki had decided to date his posts on his homepage only. He doesn’t date his individual posts, however.

Personally, I like Maki’s approach. I just wonder - is it fair to my blog to only date it on the homepage?

What do you think?

We all want more traffic to our websites, right?

We dream of the day that we get that massive wave from Digg or StumbleUpon. And when we do, it’s a rush, right? We watch our stats climb by the minute - 500….1,000….5,000….10,000 visitors - “oh God, don’t let it end!”

But it does end. It ends as an ocean wave ends: breaking on the shore, splashing its wake up the sands and retreating once more to whence it came. Such it is with our blog traffic.

These social content sites are great, don’t get me wrong. And I’m not suggesting not to use them. I use them and will continue too. But the deluge of traffic they bring can often give us a false sense of our blog’s health.

Essential Keystrokes’ Char wrote about this recently in her Web Traffic - I’ll Take Quality Over Quantity. In her post, she explained how the traffic she got from Digg in a recent post was matched, and in quality perhaps surpassed, by a link in a post from a prominent blogger like Darren Rowse.

Now, don’t run out and link to Darren or Brian Clark thinking that’s the way to get traffic. Though it could be if you’re doing what Char does - write great content. Which is why Darren picked up her link.

But how did Darren find Char to link too? The relationship, of course. Darren had to know Char exists in order to find a link to her. That begins with the relationship.

Same is true of another good friend, Adam Kayce at Monk at Work. Recently, he had a post picked up by lifehack.org. Adam’s blog is fairly new, yet growing at a nice rate. However, when he got picked up by lifehacker, he got a nice, large traffic blip with a number of first-time commenters. His traffic has increased by a nice rate since. But most interesting is that his feed subscribers almost doubled in the few days after.

So even though social content sites are certainly useful, it seems that writing great content and building relationships is the key to building traffic.

What’s been your experiences? Am I right….wrong….short-sighted….somewhere in between?

Many bloggers, like Preston, have asked this question of whether they should fake comments on their blogs to begin the conversation. Darren Rowse had some great advice. As did Jason Kaneshiro from Webomatica and Dee of Blogozine.

They each had some great suggestions of writing more conversationally and more often, asking direct questions of your readers, and having realistic expectations. Also, consider creating a comment policy, and removing no-follow. All these are really great suggestions.

But I was thinking…what do we want from our blogs? If we want comments we probably want conversation. And if we want conversation, we likely want to create relationships. And through relationships, there’s even the chance we could create community.

So if we want conversation, relationship and, eventually, community through our blogs, why not just jump right in?

How? Find other new or newish bloggers whose content you enjoy. Sure, leave some comments on their blogs. You know they’ll come a visit. If they jive with your content, they’ll likely leave a comment or two also. If so, email them and start a dialogue.

That parts all pretty straight-forward, huh? You’ve probably heard that before.

But let’s go one step further…create an agreement where you comment on each other’s posts. That way the conversation can get started on both your blogs. And there’s no need to fake comments.

The beautiful thing is that your agreement has the potential of developing into a relationship that could help you both grow your blogs - and perhaps your business. And if nothing else, you’ll make more friends in the blogosphere.

So, have you tried this? If so, what have been the results?

You probably want more comments on your blog, right? I know I do. I guess I’m just greedy. Or maybe I love having these conversations so much with you that I want to see them ever growing.

So what do I do when the comment box goes dormant? Is there anything I can do to kick off the conversation?

Questions like these were asked yesterday at Problogger by a new blogger named Preston. Preston blogs on street magic and after 40 or so posts, he hasn’t gotten very many comments. His question to Darren, “Should I add fake comments to my blog?”

First, thanks Preston for your honesty in asking the question. You could have just faked a bunch of comments and been none the wiser.

Darren’s answer, of course, was don’t use fake comments to get the conversation started. And Darren’s speaking from experience having saying, “…on my first blog I did do a few fake comments in the very very early days. …however I can say from my experience of them that they didn’t work very well for me.”

Most of Darren’s commenters gave the same advice…don’t fake comments.� Instead, Darren recommends using the time you’d fake comments to:

• write an extra post a week
• email another blogger in an attempt to get to know them
• email a friend or family member to ask their opinion of a post you’ve written
• leave a comment on someone else’s blog
• think of a question to ask your readers

For me, I thought about this once early on. But it didn’t seem right to me. It seemed like I’d be beginning my blog with a dark streak across it. And I never really considered if anyone would find out. It was more that I’d know about it.

So what’s your opinion…can fake comments start the conversation? Would you fake comments if you were certain noone would ever know?