Blogosis

What do you think about a blogger’s ability to stay absolutely anonymous? You know, I might not really be Justin Dupre. I might be your daughter’s next stalker or something, waiting for someone to give me their personal information so I can find them. Rawr. Is anonymity an issue and do you choose to stay anonymous on your blog? I covered this in an argument with Blogger Noob once, but I’m gonna go over my ideas, again.

I think there is just that much more power to a blogger that retains his anonymity. They can pretend to be something/someone they really aren’t if they are good at it. I’ve done this on a blog of mine to see the results. I’ve had some mistakes which got noticed by a few people, but before that, it was going relatively well. I was able to pretend I was a professional in the niche. People believed me! It was funny how easy it was to trick people.

For those that are honest, and let the world know who they really are, more power to you, too. You didn’t need tricks and gimmicks to put you on your blog. People know you because of you. People appreciate honesty, and will count on you for more information, even if you aren’t a guru on the subject. If you can tell people even a little about what they don’t know already know in a certain niche, you are helping out. It is much more ethical that pushing out a barrel of lies.

Why should you lie? Well, you shouldn’t, but you can. It is always an open option for anyone choosing to make a blog, and especially a successful one. It is difficult though. You can’t go around making claims that you don’t really have evidence to support. You might have to mock up some images, or get someone to help you in your plans. You’ll have to tell a bare minimum of information, as well. I got in over my head which is why my other blog failed. It was an experiment and for a while, a successful one.

I think if you are considering blogging to make money, this may be your best way to start out. Do a ton of research, make a second persona, and pretend you know what you are talking about. Copy what little, tiny starter blogs are saying (Many have awesome info that hasn’t hit the mainstream, yet) and start blogging about it.

For those that don’t mind taking it slow and steady, do it the natural way. Ultimately, it is all down to the content you provide and how many people you can get to read it, no matter how you do it.

For me, I keep it cool for you on this blog.

So, you sent out your interview questions in that email format I was telling you all about in the 1^st and 2^nd posts in this series. Now, have you gotten some responses? No? Well, let’s figure out why this is.

Too Busy

If you are sending out your questions to big bloggers, you can’t always expect them to reply. Some bloggers get a lot of questions and emails every day, and they don’t have the time, or patience to sit down and read them all. Honestly, they skip over a lot of them. This is why you need a unique subject tag. If it’s generic and something like “Hey” or “What’s up, xxx” then they may not respond. Those are things good friends and clients might send to each other, not complete strangers.

Boooooorrrrrringggggg

Did you make that email of yours way to long? I don’t want to read through 500 words to get to your main point. Like I said, make the intro and body short, and get straight to the questions. Make it easy to find the question to. Don’t bury it in a paragraph. Good formatting of your email comes into play.

You Should Already Know This

What questions did you ask? Are you asking questions they’ve answered 100 times on their blog? Avoid these questions that are already blasted on their blog. Read back a few months into their blog. If they’ve been questioned and answered, there is no reason to ask that blogger again. Ask unique and creative questions that they wouldn’t have normally come up with.

That will wrap it up for this series. I’m going to be emailing my interview questions to a few bloggers around the blogosphere and you should see some answers starts to arrive here soon.

Anyone want to see more short series or interview me? Send me an email at justindupre@blogosis.com and let’s get talking!

This will be Blogosis’ first short series of posts I will be doing. I’m doing this, because it is easy on my super busy schedule. I’ve got to make $500 dollars in the next 12 days so I can give out over $100 dollars in the Monthly Blogosis Contest. Hehe. Anyways, this series is about giving and receiving interviews, and is relevant as at the end of the series, I will post interviews I received from other bloggers experimenting with ‘the process of an interview.’

Making that initial contact with an interviewee is the most critical part of whether or not you will be successful in obtaining a proper interview with the blogger of your choice. Following in this series are some steps I have implemented to get more answers from bigger bloggers when attempting to get answers for my questions.

Get Personal

Whether or not you are interviewing 1 or 100 bloggers, you will want to be as personable as possible. This means no massive emailing plans with your interview questions. Don’t send out 100 emails with the others emails hidden in the CC address. None of that “Hello, and To Whom It May Concern” crap. This immediately lets your “interviewee” know that you know absolutely nothing about him/her, or that you weren’t interested enough in them to care to send an individual email.

Instead, send those emails out 1 by 1. Know the blogger you are sending questions to, their background, their age, their recent posts, and other miscellaneous facts. This will help you tune your question to the person you would like to interview. If you are writing to 13 year old Carl Ocab, you obviously wouldn’t write with the same verbatim as you would with some 60+ year old blogger that studies linguistics. Are you writing for a friend, or a very big and busy money blog? Changing your attitude towards different personalities is essential to get a good response.

The more effort you put into getting personal with them, the more likely they are to give you a response. You are generally looking for any kind of response, otherwise you know you are doing something wrong. Even a definite “NO! I will not answer this question,” is better than a “…”, although I think that means you may need a new question. Think of it like this. You see that hot girl/guy across the club floor. You can show interest, but until you get up in their face, you won’t get any answers (I know well how this feels. Haha).

If anyone wants to be a part of my interview, just make sure you have a blog (which you really should if you are here), and post a comment here. I’m sorry if I didn’t send it to you on my own already. I don’t read that many blogs anymore.

I want to that Mr. Polite for writing this title in my last post comments.

Anyways, for my dedicated readers, you probably noticed I wasn’t in the best of moods for the past week. This may have been from a lack of sleep, overworking myself, or just a silly mood swing, but did you enjoy it? General consensus was no.

Even had I been giving advice on how to make your blog better, which Andrew told me I hadn’t been in another post, but I still had a pissy, bitchy attitude, would you have listened to me? Chances are that you wouldn’t.

Do you listen to the guy at the party that talks about everything like he is an expert, and then you say something in denial of his facts, and that person will turn around to just tell you how wrong you are? I wouldn’t listen to that crap, no matter how right he was. I can’t stand people that need to be right, and when they are wrong, they won’t apologize. Don’t do this on your blog, ever. There could be thousands of people out there that have more experience than you in your niche or certain aspects of it. Open up and let them in on a discussion. Allow their ideas to flow in.

Make your blog friendly. Who honestly likes that bitchy, whiny ‘friend’ who will complain about all their problems without listening to yours? No one…

Thanks to my readers and subscribers for reminding me.

I am sick and tired of reading the same freaking thing 20 times in one hour on my RSS subscription list. Just because you see Problogger, or Chow, or Shoe or Cow or any of the other big names write on “How to Use Social Media”, or some other topic does not mean you should immediately go to your blog and post the same damn thing. I can’t take it. Save me, please.

There are a few instances, where I admit, this is okay to almost okay. If they are promoting a new affiliate program, and you want to get some sign ups under you, go for it, I suppose. Chances are, they saw it at the big blog first though. Another reason is for any news. I deem this acceptable, because not everyone may see the bigger blogs post. That is it!

The reasons I’m so upset about this, is because you aren’t being original. If you want subscribers and amazing commenters and everything that comes with a great blog, you need original content. You need to be the first posting your ideas on the “use of flibble-bibble” (I made that word up) in your blog. No body, I especially, wants to read the same thing over, and over and over again in the same day, week and sometimes the month. I just don’t care to read the same thing more than once. It’s boring, repetitious, and even tedious to have to read through the same type of post twice.

I don’t care if you use it as a reminder, but remind me after I forget. If you wrote a kick ass post on how to monetize your blog in a new way, I probably remembered it. If you read this post, and you want to blog about, link to it and write some ideas about it, but please, like I keep saying, do not repost a reworded post from someone else. You look no better than a “spinner” in my eyes. (A spinner is someone who takes an article, changes a few words, and then reposts it.) You are breaking laws! Copyrights and plagiarism laws could almost be in place for that article you just almost rewrote!

I’ve just been upset about this after some things that have been going on around in the blogging world. I obviously have been reading the same article too many times on different blogs. Older blogs generally know better than to do this. I see a lot of noobs doin’ it, probably because they don’t know anything about their niche. I also got upset when I saw this done with one of my articles. He was even on my RSS Feed. He posted what would have been a follow up post to a pretty big guest post I did, but did not include a link to the original post. He ended up just reiterating the facts, so it almost felt like my work was plagiarized. I was furious and let him know in the comments that “Hmm… I think I just posted this same article on another blog…” It never got any response, but a proper blogger should know better than this.

So, to you noobs into this: No more! You won’t get my subscription, and you don’t deserve anyone else’s. Take a stand against these bloggers, my readers! Wipe them off your RSS Feed list to let them know what they are doing is boring, not sufficient, and completely wrong!

Kitties. Alright, I didn’t really want to use that word, but I hope you get what I was implying by starting a sentence like that. This blog entry is not about you, but what should be affecting the way you write. At sometime, for those that are considering creating a successful blog, you the blogger will have to realize you are going to have to stop blogging for yourself, and start blogging for someone else.

These someone’s are your blog’s subscribers. Facing this fact is kind of a horrifying idea. You really want to be writing for yourself. You want to be in control of your blog. A successful blog, however, is built around its readership. If you are providing good content for yourself that is rubbish to your readers, you will only ever have one reader (Two if you encourage your mother to subscribe. Thanks, Mom.).

I really hate to classify you in this category, but subscribers are greedy and selfish. Blog subscribers are cruel, critical, and they will find any little way to condemn your blog that they can (The three C’s?). Even if they have a small reason, even one that may not directly pertain to them, that reason will be enough for you to see a drop in subscriber numbers. New readers won’t even have a reason to not click the back button if they find one thing they don’t appreciate about your blog.

They will hate you for your blog design, the colors of it, and how the ads are laid out. If they only like blogs with “magazine-style” themes and you use a traditional blog theme, kiss that reader goodbye. If they don’t like the personality you show off, a subscriber won’t want to read you. Have a typo or grammar error? No problem! Not. The worst thing they could hate you for, though, is your content.

Write original gripping content and a reader may be able to look past their dissatisfactions. Capture them with an amazing title, and drag them further and further into your content with “flow”. Use hooks. Use stories. Use twists and turns. Use your life experience. Show off creativity in your blog with images. Make it complex enough for a subscriber that reads your blog posts minutes after you post (Link love to ESVL), yet make it simple to hold a new readers attention.

It is an incredibly difficult balancing act between aesthetics in your writing, and whether or not your kitties have something to learn from reading your content. So please those selfish kitties. Write for them while maintaining that inner voice that they love from your blog content, are alter it so they will love it.

My Girlfriend (She’s a super model, btw), bought a couple rabbits. I certainly was not pleased to see them running around leaving their wonderful surprises all over my room, despite how adorable they actually were. I’ve had to take care of them, feed them, clean them, and whatnot. Now, it just seems so natural, and I have fallen in love with them (for the most part…). It has reminded me of blogging. You dread it, you hate it, especially in the beginning. I certainly went through this stage, but as you, the blogger, grow with your blog you can see it become a part of you. For some it may take some time, and for others, less than a week. If you want this to come easier to you though, you need to care for your blog just as you would any rabbit. Let me show you how.

• You need to feed your blog, and feed it correctly.

A rabbit needs  to be fed food and water several times a day. Your blog might only need it once a day or a couple times a week, but you still need to give your blog some original content. This isn’t all a blog needs though. If you feed a rabbit spoiled vegetables or dirty water you are left with, well, crap. If you aren’t writing original well thought out content for your blog, what are you going to get out of it? Just the same. Also, every once in a while, you might please your rabbit with a snack. This is perfectly fine. Put something fun on your blog. Write an entry that is off the seriousness of your niche. Make your blog a happy blog!

• You need to give your rabbit some shelter

Now what could this imply? You don’t want your rabbit running around on someone else’s property, otherwise, they can do with it whatever they please. What I am saying here, is get your blogs off of free web hosting. Set up your blog on the Wordpress CMS and pay 60 bucks for hosting and a domain name. Putting your blog on Blogger or Wordpress’ free hosting shows that you are extremely unprofessional, and not too serious about blogging. I can understand some may not have the money or credit card needed to get that hosting. Get a job for one day, work 8 hours, sign up at Dreamhost and get $50 dollars off when you use the code OSIS. Alternatively you could steal your parents credit card, but I don’t condone this, I am just getting you ideas. I don’t let my rabbits run off into someone else’s hands. Neither should you.

• Clean your rabbit and its habitat

After about 3 - 4 days, these rabbits stink. Their cage is full of crap and what not. It’s a total mess. My girlfriend (the supermodel) doesn’t always do this, so a lot of the time I am stuck with the chore. It’s not a big deal, but something that should be done regularly. You should always check your blog to see where you can clean up parts. You can clean up your blog posts, wash your sidebars, or scrub upon your new header design. You don’t need to do this every week though, maybe once a month is even too much. Make sure your blog presents itself nicely though. People love clean rabbits, just as your subscribers love clean blogs.

• Play with your rabbit and let it have a little fun
  

This is an important one. This will show that you really love your rabbit, and if you love your rabbit, it will love you back. Get involved with your blog’s community. Have a little fun with them. Converse, joke, tease, post interesting things related to your blog, make a contest. ENJOY IT! Being a blogger is a great ‘job.’ You get to write about things you love and are passionate about. If you aren’t passionate about it, maybe you need to think about giving the blog to a friend, or selling it. I would hate to do that to one of my rabbits, but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.

And that is how you love a blog like a bunny! Silly how all these connections really make sense to me. I dropped out of my philosophy class because of what a joke it all seemed to me. Now look at me. All life seems to be connected to blogging. I don’t need no stinkin’ philosophy class to teach me that. Maybe I’ve confused you, my subscribers though (At an amazing 45 after less than a month!). Need me to guide you more upon these connections of mine? Have any connections between your bunnies, or any animals for that matter, towards blogging? Let them be known. Comment!

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