Posts tagged ‘Blogging Challenge’
Day 29: Be a Rock Star
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
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5cfd314c-4ff7-4566-ab52-f7f15b73de12)
Day 26: Tag, you’re it.
Today’s challenge revolves around one of those concepts in blogging that is often misunderstood: tags. Tagging is more of an art than a science, but it does serve a few very specific purposes. Not every blog employs tagging, nor would I say that it’s absolutely required, but understanding how tags work and what they can do for you is certainly knowledge that every blogger should possess.
At it’s most basic level, a tag is a keyword that you create that serves as an identifier or link for the purposes of searching and/or filtering. By strategically tagging your posts, you provide visitors yet another way to filter through your entries without creating 100′s of categories. For example, while you may put a blog post in the Web 2.0 category, you might tag it with each individual tool and technology mentioned or referred to. Categories are generally higher level and more strategic, tags are typically used in a ‘the more the merrier’ type of approach. You’d never get criticized for using too many tags, unless you’re applying tags that have nothing to do with your post.
One of my early experiences that really drove home the power of tags was when I was doing a search on technorati for “education” and found out that the related tags were Policies, News and…. Warlick? Yes, Warlick was clearly identified as a related tag whenever somebody did a search for “education”. Why? Because he was diligent about tagging every blog post of his with the keywords “education” and “Warlick”. Look up education and you’ll find Warlick. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you blog regularly about mobile devices in education, by adding those tags along with your name and your blog name to your posts you create ways for you to be associated with those topics in searches.
Another purpose for tagging is to add in the keywords that you may not have mentioned in your post. For example, if you’re discussing a new report about social networking, it’s entirely possible that you may not have included some words which might be pertinent to people searching for such information. You may have mentioned that the report covered common social networking sites, but never mentioned any specifics. With this in mind, you might be interested in tagging the post with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other social sites. That way, if people search for “education” and “Facebook” they have a chance to find your post, even if you didn’t specifically mention Facebook in your text.
One last purpose that I’d mention is it has become common practice for people to use unique tags to track posts revolving around an event or topic. A perfect example of this is Warlick’s Hitchhikr site. Look up any conference there and you’ll find suggested tags to use. So long as everybody that posts about that conference includes that tag, then sites like Hitchhikr will be able to aggregate them together. It’s becoming increasingly common on microblogging sites, as more and more posts are being created with hashtags.
Some people have much more eloquent explanations of what a tag is and how it’s used. For example, Sue Waters (have I referred to her enough during this challenge?) has an excellent post comparing categories and tags. If you look at the comments on that post, you’lll also find a real gem there. Also, it seems a little cliche, but Wikipedia can always be counted on for some good information.
So what’s the challenge? Simply this, KNOW thy tagging system. Most blogging engines have a way to tag posts. Different versions of WordPress (and Edublogs) have a Tags field below the main content box. Other sites, have it off to the side or down near the bottom of the page. However, just because you add tags to a post, doesn’t mean that they’ll show up there. My current template was not set up to display the tags I added to a post through WordPress. When I realized that none of my tags were showing up, I went into the code of the template and added them in. Take a good close look at your blog engine, determine where the tags go, and start using them in your posts. Remember, you won’t get fined if you use too many tags. But if you use too few, then you may be preventing people from finding your content in searches.
One last related tip. Not all blog engines do have a way to add tags to a post. If not, that’s ok. Just type them in yourself:
Tags: toys, slinky, metal, spring, stairs, fun, cat
Technically, that’ll be enough for search engines to pick up on them. However, you can get bonus points by linking them up to Technorati searches for those keywords. It’s pretty easy to do and Technorati does have instructions. But basically, you put the tag into your post in the following format: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/TAGNAME" rel="tag">TAGNAME</a> Copy that into your blog post as many times as you need, and then just substitute in your tags for the TAGNAME slots. Consider that the poor man’s tagging method!
Ok, one more idea, just because I thought it was pretty novel. While doing some searches on tagging, I found a post describing how he put a tag cloud onto his site’s 404 page. So whenever somebody found a dead link (we don’t have any of those anymore though, do we?), instead of just getting a “The page you are looking for could not be found” error, they get a little paragraph explaining things and a tag cloud of all the content on his blog. That encourages people to dig a little deeper to find your potentially missing content, instead of just getting turned away. Love the idea. Just may have to try that one myself!
Do you tag your posts? How do you decide what tags to use? Have you ever found particular benefit to tagging, or is it just a habit at this point? When you visit somebody’s blog and want to explore, do you head off to the categories or the tags first?
Tag image by Amergioland