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

One of the most significant things about the internet is the able to connect different pieces of it through hyperlinking. In fact, it is often said that hyperlinks are the glue that hold the entire internet together. Can you even imagine an internet without hyperlinks? You’d have to memorize every site you want to visit and type them all in one at a time when you wanted to switch between sites. However, in blogging they have a slew of other purposes.

If you think of blogging as a conversation, it is hyperlinks that allow us to connect the voices together. It is a means for citing information, recognizing original ideas, and giving credit where it’s due. It also allows us to make subtle recommendations for further reading and directs traffic between like minded individuals. Additionally, it provides a reference for the people being linked to, in order to see who has taken their material and spun off of it. There are thousands of plugins, widgets, and snippets of code that are designed to take embedded hyperlinks and add functionality. Some provide previews of the page being linked to, others recognize if it’s media and provide a means for consuming it, while others simple tally the links and aggregate them together.

So what’s the point? If you ain’t linking, then you ain’t thinking. One of the most common questions I get asked is “How do I get people to visit my blog?” Pure and simple, the easiest way is to simply link to others. And not just once either, again and again and again. I may be more egotistical than your average bear, but I certainly don’t think I’m alone amongst bloggers to be keeping an eye on every person who links to me. More often than not, I’m following those links back to see exactly what is being written in reference to my own material. I want to know who is linking to me and why. That has often become the first step to a much more personal relationship. It’s the easiest way to get people’s attention and make them aware of your blog.

So long as we’re on the ego part, let’s just flat out say, most bloggers want a larger audience. Whether you’re willing to make that a priority or not is a whole different conversation. But nobody would mind terribly if more people knew about them and read their work. Google is a big piece of this, and one way that Google determines your page rank is links. Being religious about linking is always something that makes Google happy. Especially if that link winds up being returned.

Image via WikipediaOne thing to keep in mind is that when you’re linking to a blog, there are two ways to do it. There is the general link and the link to the specific post, or permalink. For example, if I wanted to talk about Scott McLeod’s recent blog post regarding how various EduBlogger’s rate according to Technorati, I could do so in three different ways. The first is to refer to Scott McLeod and his blog in general. For this, I would just highlight his name and/or blog and link directly to it, as I did. This allows readers to follow back to Scott, AND if Scott has any sort of EgoFeed created, that link will show up.

However, since I’m referring to a specific post of his, I should also be sure to link directly to the permalink. The permalink usually is available in one of three places: the title of the blog post, the date/time of the post (if it’s hyperlinked) or at the end, referenced by the word Permalink or sometimes Trackback. Copying any of those links and then providing a direct link to them, will not only allow readers to follow through and alert the original author (Scott) of the connection, but it will also send a signal to the BLOG ENGINE, letting it know that I’m linking to it. Some blog engines will then be smart enough to list information about that link as a special comment known as a trackback or pingback.

Finally, the last type of link is linking to a specific comment. Many blog engines assign a different permalink to each individual comment, so if you happen to be referring to one, you can link directly to it. This level of linking is really more of a service to your readers than anything else, as it prevents them from having to search through the post to find what you’re referring to.

And of course, you may find yourself needing to combine all three in a single post, or even a single sentence. For example:

In Scott McLeod’s recent blog post about the Top 50 EduBlogs, Miguel makes a great point about the impact moving your blog to a new URL can have on your ranking.

While that may seem like a little overkill, trust me it isn’t. Each link there serves a very specific purpose and is useful to your readers.

So long as I’m in full disclosure mode, I’ll ‘fess up to the fact that I have one really poor habit I’m trying to break. I tend to write my blog posts in one fell swoop, and then going back and linking everything in. Unfortunately, when I do that, I tend to gloss over some links and rush things, often missing significant links. Case in point, when I missed the link to Lee Kolbert’s Meme on Day 27. Thankfully, she pointed out the error to me and I corrected it. For that reason though, I do recommend that you link as you go. Yes, that’s a personal preference, but I find it to be more efficient. And don’t forget, mo’ links is mo’ better.

So today’s challenge is twofold:
1) Go back through your last few posts and hunt for links that you may have missed. Could you have done a better job? Are there any things that you should have linked that you might have missed? Any places you could have added value by inserting more links?
2) The next blog post you write, go crazy on the linking. Every paragraph, think to yourself… Should this be linked up to something providing more information? Should I include a link to a definition for people that may not know the term? Should I share a few examples via links? It’s OK if it looks silly, it’s just about retraining the brain a little. And sometimes you just gotta dive in headfirst to get some quality swim time in.

What have your own experiences with linking been? Do bother? Are you religious about it? And don’t forget, when you create your blog post, share a link to it here!

One other thing, if you haven’t already listed yourself on the Wiki, please do so! Don’t worry if you haven’t ‘kept up’. This is an ongoing challenge, so even if you’ve only done one day, or have just followed along vicariously, share your own information on the wiki so people can find, visit and support your own efforts to be a better blogger!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 3: Write a thank you note
• Day 20: Go on a dead link hunt
• Day 15: Find Thyself
• Day 21: Give a comment a promotion
• Day 16: Your Greatest Hits

Today’s challenge is another one that I read through on ProBlogger’s site and it immediately clicked with me. Every website that’s been around for a few years suffers from link rot to one degree or another. Sites that you linked to may disappear. Even worse, if you’ve moved your blog from one site/engine to another, many of your internal links may be invalid. Often blog posts will move over from one system to another just fine, but the links within those posts won’t be updated. Teach42 started off on Radio userland, then it moved to pMachine, and then I made the final move to Wordpress which is what I’ve stayed with. Without a doubt, I’m sure I’ve got some dead links in there that I’ve just been avoiding hunting for all this time.

There’s nothing worse when you’re reading a blog post, you find just the link you were looking for, try to click through and find that it’s dead. It can be incredibly irritating to readers, and discouraging enough to drive people away from your site. There’s a few well known bloggers that have moved a few times, and I know how bothered I’ve been when I try to navigate through their archives only to find that all their internal links have gone awry. It certainly doesn’t encourage me to make a return visit.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those tasks that just feels like it’s going to be an absolute nightmare to do so everybody puts it off. However, this challenge is all about taking a good close look at our blogs and doing all the unmentionable tasks that would normally be swept under the rug. So it’s time to grab a broom and dustpan and do some dirty work.

There are two sites and one PC based tool that I’ve had recommended to me. The tool is Xenu, and the two sites are Dead-Links.com and the W3C link validator. All of them do the same basic task, which is to crawl through your site and test each individual link. If it thinks the link is invalid, it flags it for you. Based on the specific way each tool/site does this, it may come up with different results than the others. That’s why you will probably want to do at least 2 of the 3 tests. I’d suggest running one test, checking the results and making changes as needed, and then running a second test.

More than likely, this is going to take a while. I’d suggest starting the test up and then going to watch CSI or taking a nap. By the time you’re done, the spider should have some results for you. I’m going to be running this for myself overnight tonight and then making any corrections I find over the weekend. I’ll report back on what the results are and you do the same.

Let us know what the spider found. Did you have a mess to clean up or was your site all spic n’ span? If you want to have some fun, try running your school’s website through it and see how it does! Then you can add a few items to your webmasters todo list! But let’s be honest, better to know than to not know, right?

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 15: Find Thyself
• Time and the lack thereof
• Who is copying your content?
• What’s your favorite Web 2.0 site?
• Link exchange for ‘custom term papers’