With only two days to go, I’ve been struggling with how to wrap this challenge up. The closer I get to the end, the more I realize how much more I’d like to share. Part of the dilemma for me is that this challenge has not really discussed the ’spiritual’ side of blogging very much. I’ve tried very hard to make each of these challenges an actionable item, something concrete that you can actually DO to improve your blog, your blogging toolbox, and your skills as a blogger. However, there’s certainly more to blogging than widgets, feeds, links and comments. I was very thankful that the tips shared by other bloggers on Day 27 hit on so many other pieces that I thought ought to be covered. However, there’s just a few points that I wanted to share my own spin on.

For lack of a better way to describe it, today’s challenge is to go out there and be a rock star! What’s the difference between a rock star performing in their garage and a rock star performing in a stadium filled to capacity? Absolutely nothing… in their own mind. A true rock star puts as much effort into every rehearsal and every show, regardless of the size of the audience. They do so because they love performing and they want to share it with anyone and everyone.

Blogging is very similar to this. Every blog starts off with an audience of zero. We all started out talking to ourselves. We all tried to figure out how to draw an audience. We were all thrilled and amazed the first time we realized that a few people had visited our blog. We all get a smile on our face when we see that someone has taken the time to leave a comment, and a scowl if we learn that it was spam! But if you were to compare yesterday’s blog posts to many people’s very first blog posts, I don’t think you’d find them all that different.

So with that in mind, consider this carte blanche to go ahead and blog as though you already have an audience of thousands. Go ahead and promote the blog posts you’re proud of in full confidence that they’re worth sharing with anyone and everyone. Be bold enough to ask other people to participate in your surveys, polls and memes, regardless of whether you feel you’re ‘on the same level’ as them. Rankings be damned, we’re all educators who are linked together by our common desire to share and learn with each other.

Educators are not marketers, and I’ve found that more often than not most budding bloggers are almost embarrassed by their blogs. When they tell me about their blogs, they add to their descriptions phrases like, “well, it’s just a first effort” or “it doesn’t have any readers yet” or “I’m just playing around” or “I’m just trying to catch up to everyone else.” I can’t help but think to myself that anybody who is putting themselves out there and blogging should be nothing but proud of their own efforts! It takes time, commitment and confidence to stand up and share your thoughts with the world, and anybody who does so should be applauded.

With that in mind, I truly think you should take pride in your efforts. Don’t be shy about listing it as your URL on social sites. Add it to your signature in emails. Create yourself a set of Moo cards for when you meet other educators. Let your colleagues at school know about it, as well as your administrators (if you don’t feel comfortable sharing it with them, you might want to spend some time thinking about why). Let your parents, friends and relatives know about it so they can check it out too! Announce your blog posts in places like Twitter, Plurk and Ning. If you think somebody specific ought to see a post, email them a link. Share comments linking back to your blog on pertinent posts from other people.

I truly feel that even if you are the 1,000th person to chime in on a specific topic, your thoughts, ideas and opinions are just as valuable as the first person to chime in. Nobody else has your specific set of experience. The lenses through which you see things are completely unique to you and you may have a spin on things that are pertinent to people. Let’s face it, even if there’s only 2 people out there that would benefit from what you have to say, isn’t that worth the time spent sharing it??

Image by AdamNF via FlickrJust as a concrete example of this, think about this 30 Day Challenge in itself. It’s based on Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog challenge. I had the challenge flagged for about a year and a half as something that I was interested in. It took me nearly 18 months to finally be ready to act on it. His challenge has had hundreds of participants along with an immense amount of spin off challenges created from it. I could very easily have just taken his challenge and followed through it step by step and added my name to the list of participants, which was my original intention. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be more valuable to ME to create my own mashup of it, focusing on challenges that would be pertinent to educators. There are plenty of other places to get blogging advce or challenges to participate in, but I was hoping that there might be a few people who would get some benefit from joining me for this one. I’ve been stunned by the turnout.

Point being, this could have been a month long fiasco! Some of my other endeavors have been spectacular failures before. But you have to put yourself out there and give yourself a chance at success. It’s all a learning experience, regardless of the result.

When you get right down to it, the best way to be a successful blogger… is to be one. To put yourself out there, to be bold and promote yourself, to be confident in your worth and quite simply to be the Rock Star you truly are.

So today’s challenge is to give yourself the rock star treatment. The details are entirely up to you. Maybe you’ll direct message a few people on Twitter and ask them to take a look at a recent blog post of yours. Maybe you’ll add your blog to your email signature. Maybe you’ll give some friends a call and ask them to check out your blog. Maybe it’ll just be leaving a comment here and asking people to come visit it and leave a comment. Only you can know what kind of Rock Star you are, so do what feels right for you.

Then take the time to share what being a Rock Star means to you.

And tomorrow, we wrap the whole thing up! Anybody else getting misty eyed?

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 7: Invite Somebody to Be a Guest Blogger
• Day 22: Why do you blog?
• Day 21: Give a comment a promotion
• Day 16: Your Greatest Hits
• Day 30: Choose Your Own Adventure

My blog posts tend to be fairly text heavy, but one thing I’d been trying to do in recent months is to add a little color to them by including images. Without a doubt, there’s no better way to grab someone’s attention than by incorporating an image that piques one’s curiosity. Considering that most of your audience is most likely going to be exhibiting more characteristics of digital natives than immigrants, it bears considering the fact that natives tend to prefer multiple modes of media, and will gravitate to visual media before written.

There are four types of images that you may typically use in a blog post: Screenshots, logos/icons, photos and mashups.

Screenshots are typically used for demonstration purposes. If you’re using a mac, it’s incredibly easy to get screengrabs as the tools are built right into the operating system. On a PC, you need to work at it just a bit more. You’ll need a third party tool to make it easy, and personally I recommend Jing if you don’t want to spend any money. If you don’t mind spending a few bucks, I think Snagit is one of the best, most comprehensive screen capturing apps out there. I’ve never regretted buying it. Either way, screen captures can be incredibly helpful when trying to describe the steps you’re taking to do something, or if you’re discussing a particular feature in an application. Why waste words describing it when you can just be more effective and just show it to them?

The second type is logos and icons, which can be useful when you’re referencing a specific tool, program or website. There may be times where people don’t recognize the name, but they recognize the logo or icon immediately. Even if they do recognize the name, sharing the logo itself in image form can raise all sorts of associations in a readers mind that may not be evoked by just the name. For example, some people get confused when I say I work for Discovery, thinking that it’s a brand of children’s toys or maybe even the Discover Card. However, if they see the Discovery logo on my business card, there’s no question in anyone’s mind anymore. Everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Next up is mashups. I guess I’m using this as a generic term, meaning anytime you’re doing actual customizations of an image. This could mean that you’re creating a graph/chart like Kathy Sierra did, or just marking up screenshots for emphasis and direction like Sue Waters does so effectively. Either way, even when you can’t find the perfect image, you can’t go wrong by making one. If you want to create your own quick and easy graphs, one of my personal favorite sites is CrappyGraphs.com. Yes, I know the name is awful, but it’s a wonderful tool for creating a quick and easy graph when the point you’re trying to make is more important that specific data plots. As for marking up images, I’d personally go back to Jing. For both windows and mac, it does a great job of capturing a part of the screen, uploading it to a server and allowing you to mark it up before you embed it into your blog post. Highly recommended.

Which brings us to photos. Unfortunately, when most people want a photo, they simply go to Google Images and… well, for lack of a better term, ’steal’ a photo. Even if you cite where you got it, if you don’t have permission to make use of it then you’re breaking the rules. This is such a shame, considering how many places there are to get high quality images that you actually have the rights to use!! I’m just going to share two of my favorites. Of course I’m going to mention Flickr, but not just Flickr in general, rather the Creative Commons section. There are literally millions of photos that you can use there that you can choose based on the rights you need. If you need to modify the image (crop, markup, recolor), then be sure to choose one that allows derivatives. If you need one that you can use for commercial purposes (incorporated into a fund raiser of some sort perhaps), be sure to chose images that allow commercial usage. But otherwise, there are nearly 30 million Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs photos for you to choose from. Not so bad at all. However, if that isn’t enough, one of my favorite sites for images, both for blogs and for presentations, is the Stock.xchng. This is high quality, stock photography that is available for the rock bottom price of… free. These images are truly professional photos that people have shared and are perfect for including into blog posts. The only trouble is that they tend to be rather large, so you’ll need to resize them if your blogging engine doesn’t do it for you (many do at this point tho).

So today’s challenge, in case you didn’t get the ‘picture’ yet (nyuk nyuk) is to incorporate an image into your next blog post.

Do you generally use images in your blog posts? Or do you know of someone who you think does this pretty well on a regular basis? If so, share a link!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Related Reading on Teach42

• Regaining what I miss from OSX – Magnification
• KISS your images with AllYouCanUpload
• Send To Flickr Bookmarklet
• Real world art
• Day 4: Own your CContent

This isn’t exactly the ideal time for this post, but I just realized that we’re one week away from the end of our 30 day challenge! So let me say a quick ‘hurrah!’ to everyone that is keeping up. Maybe you aren’t doing every challenge every day, but if you’re still tuned in and intent on improving your blogging ‘chops’, then major kudos to you! As I was saying, this isn’t the best time to be doing this, mostly because Thanksgiving is coming up this week, but since we’re running out of time we’ll step up anyway.

Today’s Challenge has to do with basic planning. I have to admit, I do most of my blogging spur of the moment. I’m not so good at planning in advance, but I do think many great bloggers do. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say even if the great ones don’t plan each post in advance, they at least HAVE a plan for making sure that their have frequent postings on their blog and ensure that things don’t go stale.

It’s a constant challenge for every blogger, especially when you feel like nobody is reading. When you don’t have a big community responding often, it’s easy to think nobody is reading, and when you feel like nobody is reading, you may not feel like writing. But if your blog isn’t showing regular signs of life, with posts coming at least once or twice a week minimum, then when people do visit they often just come and go. Not only that, but until you get into a routine, it’s hard to make the time in the day needed to blog. It takes a commitment for it to become habit and creating a posting plan can be a big part of that.

When everybody first starts blogging, they overestimate their blog-stamina. EVERYONE thinks they’ll be the one to blog every single day, or at least every other day. Some people even keep it up for a week or more. But for most people. especially with those who have a job, family or life, blogging day in and day out is simply unrealistic. So let’s step back for just a omment and think things through.

How often will you realistically be able to blog? Don’t think about how often you’ll post in an ideal world, be realistic and try to think what’s the minimum number of posts that you’ll do in a given week. I say week because if you really intend to be a better blogger, you should be posting at least once a week. And perhaps that’s all you want to commit to! There’s nothing wrong with that. If you feel up to two times or three times a week, even better, but don’t fool yourself into setting an unrealistic goal.

Once you’ve figured out your magic number, plan out how you’re going to hit that number for the week. What days do you want to make sure you’ve got your posts up by? Don’t let them build up so you cram them all in at the end of the week. Pick dates and stick to it.

In fact, if you want to take it a next step, you can even get them started right now. Create drafts with potential titles and save them. That way you can come back to them throughout the week and already have some of the work done. Instead of just flagging items in your aggregator to write about, or keeping browser tabs/windows open, grab the link and create a new blog post for it, even if you don’t have time to finish it just yet. Then save it and plan out in your own head when you’ll be posting it. That way when you realize that it’s the day you promised yourself you’d get a post up, you’ll already have your inspirations right there in front of you, ready to be fleshed out.

So even though it’s Thanksgiving week, plan out your blog schedule for the week and some ideas for what you’ll be posting. Obviously with the holiday and all, it’s a great time to look around and share what you’re thankful for, whether it be online or offline.

Are any of you ‘planners’ already? If so, share a few tips for how you organize your blogging schedule. It’s something that I’ve never been very good about but really want to improve myself!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Related Reading on Teach42

• As a blogger, how do you define success?
• Day 22: Why do you blog?
• Day 16: Your Greatest Hits
• Day 7: Invite Somebody to Be a Guest Blogger
• Day 30: Choose Your Own Adventure