I’ll be the first to admit it…I love blogging. It’s done nothing less than enhance the way I do business; opening relationships and opportunities that just weren’t available before I started blogging.

So I’m a huge advocate for people who want to begin blogging. As a matter of fact, while I still design and build websites (and blogs), I’m doing far more coaching and consulting with people who want to use their blog to increase their reach and grow their business.

One thing I’m constantly doing is suggesting blogs that new bloggers can read to learn more about blogging. And it’s been my intention for quite some time to create a list of blogs as a resource for new bloggers. These would be blogs and bloggers who I hold in high regard and who I, myself, continue to learn from.

But it looks like my colleague Drew McClellan beat me to the punch. He’s just released his New Blogger’s Toolbox. The Toolbox is a listing of bloggers who many of us consider great resources for learning the art of blogging. And since his list is pretty much the same as the one I’d put together, I thought I’d simply recreate here for you and all the people I speak with about blogging.

Drew also divided his list into useful categories. So here you go:

Chock Full of Practical Tips

• Converstations
• Creating Comments
• Yotophoto
• Daily Blog Tips
• Logic + Emotion
• Business Blog Angel
• ProBlogger
• Perfect Blogger
• Internet Marketing Monitor
• WebWare

Living Lab on Writing Compelling Blog Posts

• CK’s blog
• Priscilla Palmer
• Noah Brier
• I’ve been mugged!
• Electric Venom
• Styles of Blogging
• CopyBlogger
• Copywriting Maven
• Modern B2B Marketing
• Servant of Chaos

How to Build Community

• Viral Garden
• EMoms at Home
• Dawud Miracle
• Robyn McMaster
• Noah Kagan
• Christine Kane
• Come Gather Round
• Create Business Growth

Teach Marketing Tools

• Lonely Marketer
• Drew’s Marketing Minute
• Todd And
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Diva Marketing
• David Meerman Scott
• Small Business Marketing Mavericks
• Russell Davies
• Greg Verdino
• Jason Lonsdale
• Matt Dickman
• MP Daily Fix
• BizSolutionsPlus
• PodPress Forum
• Seth Godin
• CrapHammer
• Blogopreneur
• Hee Haw Marketing
• Conversation Agent
• Note to CMO

Welcome Wagons for Newbies

• Successful & Outstanding Blogs
• Converstations
• The Good Blogs

Contributors to Drew’s Toolbox:

• Robyn McMaster
• C.B. Whittemore
• Lori Magno
• Janet Green
• Joanna Young
• Paul McEnany
• Mario Vellandi
• Richard Cockrum
• Ryan Karpeles
• Liz Strauss
• Lewis Green
• Patrick Schaber
• Gianandrea
  
• Facchini
• Chris Brown
• Spinning Silk Multimedia

Thanks Drew, for putting this list together and making it available to all of us. You know, if you combine this list with my Ultimate WordPress Resource Guide, you’ve got just about everything you need to be a successful blogger.

And, if you have a blog that you think should be included that isn’t, please let me know in the comment box so I can add them and pass them on to Drew.

Also, in the future I’ll be sending lots of people to this page as a resource. So if you have comments on how any of these bloggers have helped you, please include it below…and know you’re helping someone who is learning how to blog.

(note: image Confused from An’veula on Flickr)

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?

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?