Blogs don’t become successful on their own. They need help.

I can say without a doubt that my blogging success is directly related the links other bloggers have tossed me. Thanks to all of you, by the way.

So, here are some bloggers I know. Many are beginning their blogs. Some may interest you. The most developed blog (and the most interesting to me at least) is Dave Schoof’s Engaging the Disquiet in Men. Have a look.

And check out these other blogs. Something here might interest you.

• BarryMorris.com’s Irresisti-Blog (blog appears to be down)
  Barry Morris – Helping copywriters become irresistible
• Blog: Business Heart
  Mark Silver – Can you heart it beating?…When you want to make a difference and need to make a profit.
• Breathing Space Home & Office Organizing
  Joanna Rueter – Creating space for who you are and what you do
• Conscious Cooperation
  Stuart Baker – how the decision to cooperate can drastically improve working communication and results in the construction industry and beyond.
• Engaging the Disquiet in Men
  Dave Schoof – Helping men who feel something missing in their lives
• Inquiry365
  Mona Grayson blogs for Daily Inquiry
• Mindfulness Maverick
  Jason Stein – Working Mindfulness with A Twist
• Synaptus Insights
  Dennis Stevens – Bridging the Gap Between Strategy and Performance
• Your Ideal Customer
  Elisa H. Gillispie – Clarity, Relationships and Results

If you search Google for any topic, you’ll find people calling themselves experts. From marketing experts to parenting experts to weight loss experts, they’re everywhere. Pick an area of interest and I’m sure you’ll find people calling themselves experts.

But how do they know they’re experts?

Is it based on how long they’ve been doing something? If so, I’ve been building websites for almost a decade, does that qualify me as an expert?

Or maybe I’m an expert at working with small businesses to plan, develop, and execute strategies to grow their businesses through their web presence (which is what I do today, by the way). Think about it, a web designer that understands business development, target marketing, and results-based web strategy. Very rare. But am I an expert?

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A couple of weeks ago I posted a rather benign comment on Aweber’s Blog. The title of the post was How to Tie a Download To Your Opt-in Form. The post was about how to assure that you’re collecting a valid email address in exchange for a download.

Aweber is an email list management and autoresponder service I’ve used for quite some time. I even recommend it to many of my clients. List management is good, delivery is great and their customer service has always been top-notch.

Which is why I was thrown aback after placing this comment on their blog:

I don’t use verified opt-in, so my strategy is slightly different, yet still secure.

I put the link to my pdf download directly in the autoresponder message. That way, if they’ve given me an incorrect email address, they don’t have access to link (because it’s not only the thank you page).

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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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