I’m always amazed at people who think that bloggers mostly write about their personal life.

Think about how often you’ve heard someone say, “why would I want to blog? I don’t care about what someone at for breakfast.”

What’s often missed in statements like this is that blogging isn’t just about sharing your personal life. It’s also about sharing your business.

Unlike a traditional, static website however, a blog - or as I like to call it a personal publishing system - gives you the opportunity to connect directly with other people. People who may be in your target audience. Or peers and others who gain something from reading your posts.

But a blog is more than another medium for connecting with people in your target audience and peers. It also provides a platform to engage in conversation. Those conversations can lead to relationships. And those relationships can lead to increased business.

[ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

Every business owner wants to make more money.

Doesn’t matter whether you sell products or pitch a service - you probably want more clients, customers, buyers, patrons, consumers, subscribers, users, etc. Doesn’t matter what you call them - you’d like more.

After all, doesn’t more subscribers equal more people to market too? More patrons mean increasing sales? And increased sales equals more revenue. Isn’t that how it works?

Most of us know that. Yet many business owners set their focus too strongly on increasing revenue. They spend their time, their energy and their resources focused on making more money. And so they become like a hamster running around the wheel of trying to increase their profits - often, getting nowhere.

But what if you took some of that time to build relationships with your clients and customers? What if you took some time to build relationships with some of your leads? Better yet, what if you spent some time and resources to build relationships with other business owners? Businesses that compliment yours in one way or another. Or grew relationships with other business owners you have other interests in common with? What could happen?

[ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

Remember the days when the internet was like listening to news radio? You’d search the dial for news and interesting topics.

Then came talk radio. Now people could call in and add their two cents to the topic discussed by the host. I often think of social media as being like talk radio.

For instance, now people can interact with the ‘hosts’ of blogs; engaging in interesting, lively and informative conversations. Or they can meet each other in Facebook or on StumbleUpon. Yet it goes further than that. Now, rather than just commenting on topics, social sharing and networking sites allow users to have control over what content gets seen - which stories get pushed to the top. It’s really an amazing time. [ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

What browser do you use?

Being a Mac user I hardly ever think about Internet Explorer except when I’m coding and testing websites. Primarily I use Camino (love it) and Safari (now available for Windows). Sometimes I open Firefox, though most for StumbleUpon. And I really love OmniWeb’s thumbnail tabs. And, of course, I didn’t mention probably the best browser I don’t use much - Opera. Okay, maybe I have a bit of an obsession, but each of these have some great features that the others don’t.

But most people, however, don’t use multiple browsers. They choose one browser and stay with it. And it appears more and more people are choosing Firefox.

And that’s exactly what my stats in Google Analytics showed me this morning. Two-thirds of all my site visitors this year are using Firefox. And less than one-third are using Internet Explorer.

Now I do have a bit higher rate of Mac users - around 12%, but that certainly doesn’t account for the huge percentage of Firefox users.

What I’m thinking is that a large number of bloggers use Firefox. Why? And why are so few using Internet Explorer? And what does this say about browser trends?

An article from Popular Science that I saw predicts that by 2009Â Firefox’s market share could be as high as 50%. When I read it I thought, “no way.” But looking at my stats makes me think otherwise.

Then I found a post from PC World reporting that Firefox’s market share in Europe is nearing 30% - almost double the U.S. market share.

Does it matter?

I’m not sure. But maybe you know. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

What browser is most used in visiting your site?Â

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’ve probably seen this meme going around called the Ultimate Technorati Favorites Exchange. Dosh Dosh Gary Lee kicked it off as an experiment to “break into the Technorati Top 100 and determine the exposure and traffic benefits of being included in the Top 100 list.”

Now this ISN’T the Technorati Top 100 Blogs - which is a list of the 100 most linked to blogs. This meme was about breaking into the Top 100 Favorited blogs on Technorati. Very different.

Well, with a lot of work and a whole bunch of links from other bloggers (thank you, by the way), I got into the top 100 last Tuesday. “Pretty neat,” I thought, “Now let’s see how it increases my traffic.”

So giving it a week or so, I checked my traffic this morning and found no change in the past week for referrers coming from Technorati. I did have a massive spike that began on Friday and went through the weekend. But that came from StumbleUpon.

My conclusion - all the time I spent exchanging favorite links and commenting on blogs so they would favorite my blog was a complete waste of time. It was certainly a waste of time for me. And I know it was a wasted post for you. So I want to say I’m sorry for wasting your time with that post as well.

I’ve decided that I’m done with memes that are just about trying to generate more traffic. I don’t just want more traffic. What I’d like are more people who want to read and create conversation on my blog. So I’ll leave the traffic-building memes to the roadrunners. I’m tired of jumping off cliffs.

Now, I will continue to participate in memes that I find useful to you - such as Ben Yoskovitz’s Ultimate Guide to Productivity, Wendy Piersall’s What Does It Take to Write a Great Post (which I’ll get to tomorrow, Wendy) or Liz Strauss’ Why On Earth Do I Blog (which I’ll get to soon as well). These memes are about a lot more than just building traffic. And I know they add value to your life and blogging as well.

So what’s your opinion on traffic-generating memes? Have you found any success with them?