38Pitches Take risks. If you win, you’ll be happy; if you lose, you’ll be wise.

Why do some of us get there and others fall by the wayside? Why do some of our choices get seen through to fruition, while others fall foul of eroded momentum or a regrettable change of direction?

Drive and resolve are of course instrumental in us fickle humans achieving a goal, but with the countless choices, challenges, distractions and indoctrinations we are bombarded with daily, there’s a bit more to it. A little formula held onto throughout the journey goes a long way. Remembering key techniques can keep you on track while working towards achieving a set goal, and can also reassure us as a simple, oriented statement amid the noisy turmoil.

Talents may be either innate or lacking, but – as they say – genius is 1% talent and 99% sweat. So, whatever your god-given constitution and attributes, never give up on following your heart. I hope the following tips help in this quest.

Remember Your Goals
Once the ball is rolling, many find that merely the inertia of having started a project is enough to feel relief and release from stagnant energy, and stop there, often moving on to another project, and then yet another project, never seeing any of them through to completion. Although the buzz of breaking the seal on leaving the starting blocks is present, the long-term effects in this pattern can only be frustration and lack of fulfillment.

If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. One must remember why the aim was acted upon in the first place. Remember the dissatisfaction when things were last de-prioritized, and keep at it.

 

Choose Yourself
Another aspect to remembering why the hell you’re hacking away at your pet project when you could be in a hammock or sleeping or otherwise doing what you love, is that – if your goal is in keeping with your nature – the outcome will be in line with what you love. In other words, meaningful aims in life which bring satisfaction, are ones which are in tune with who you are, not what you are told you should want. The hammock follows generating a passive income. Sleep follows a job well done – rest is always deeper when it feels deserved.  

 

Choose Realistic Goals
Wanting to be the first man on Mars or the richest woman in Texas might sound all very exhilarating, but if inordinately mammoth goals become something that are taken seriously, and the ego entangled in their outcome, reaching for the stars may bring only aggravation, a deflated sense of self-worth and self-ability, and therefore damage your courage to embark on further exploits.  When choosing an aim, before the specific game-plans are wrestled with, ask yourself these two fundamental questions first:

1.     What is the intrinsic value in the attainment of the goal? (Do I really want to be the richest woman in Texas, or is this a meaningless thing to strive for, made attractive only by media and acquaintances who are also could up in cycles which are not bountiful?)

2.     What can I do? Not what am I doing now that I can simply do more of, as that provides no personal growth or sense of achievement from conquering challenges or movement out of comfort zones. Instead, ask what is on the periphery of your abilities – within your sphere of competence at a push. Achievable but with a healthy challenge.

And not concentrating on a desired outcome which involves learning an altogether new skill or personality trait. Cats don’t have dogs, as they say.

Keep it realistic.

 

 

Pursuit of a Happymess

Working at a goal where the road to it is completely dry and uninspiring can only last so long. It’s the ambitious version of a diet of wheat crackers. Sure, you can see the weight falling off and the figure you want in sight, but deep down you know that as soon as you’re in the place you want to be (if not before), you’ll be sick of the way you got there, and stuff your face with chocolate.

As exercise regimes are only sustainable and realistic if worked into the natural, complimentary pace and function of your everyday life and rhythms, so must be the working towards your goals. Consider a pace which is not off-puttingly harsh, and of course choose aims that genuinely appeal in the first place (not always as obvious as it sounds – as the saying goes: if god is cruel, he might just give you exactly what you asked for. 

 

Reward Yourself
Not just at the end; the completion of the project will be reward enough. The road can get rocky and this is not to be ignored or unsupported. If there are tough times, a patch of unavoidable drudgery, consider a reward system: reaching a milestone equals a treat. This is certainly not ineffective, childish, or below you. It is one of the most powerful psychological tools and underpins the path to many great achievements. There’s naught much tougher a goal than quitting smoking, and the United Kingdom’s government-run quit smoking programs use exactly these techniques. A massage, a film, a long hot bath – whatever you need to both reward yourself and also to help you unwind, thereby having the bonus of fuelling you for the next leg of the journey (which will hopefully be more enjoyable too).

While monitoring your progress with milestones, take these markers also as an opportunity to pause and assess any particularly successful or destructive habits and techniques. If you can identify specific strengths and weaknesses, adjust your behaviour to employ more of the good and less of the bad.

 

Specify
“I want to have a house in the country” helps no-one. We all want a house in the country. And most don’t get one.

How will you get it? How much will it cost? What will you have to sacrifice to earn that much money? When do you want to move in? Are there alternative, cheaper, greener ways to build it? What size house?… when there are too many variables, the plan usually smells of a lack of experience in goal-setting, and a convoluted route to a let-down. The plan is too vague, has too many facets.

Instead of gauzing vaguely at the horizon, look at your feet. You know the size of your steps – take a few at a time.

And don’t overlook the various aspects to this desired new life:  “I want to lose 15 pounds in 4 months” is a fantastic goal – achievable, specific, measured, healthy (what good is a fat house if your health is not vivacious enough to enjoy it?)

“I want a self-generating income of $15,000 a year by the time I’m 50” is infinitely more achievable and sensible than “a house in the country” – again: time-specific, amount-specific, realistic, and if not setting you up nicely for repayments of the country house, may even supersede that dream anyway as that money is ample to keep you in hotels and exotic foods in many countries around the world. The concept of a house can be a fluid one after all. This is the kind of outcome that is hard to argue with: it will likely help you no matter your future orientations, tastes and choices.

 

Be a Buddhist
Buddhists (and all sorts of sensible people, meditating or not) appreciate the power of now. Appreciate that at any moment – at any second you choose – you can start again, with a fresh slate. If we feel we are unready for the achievement of something significant and rewarding, that is our choice. That is our clinging to whatever constraints we picked up in the past. It’s easier said than done to press the reset button and run into a task when we don’t feel like it, but we need to remember three important things here:

We are in charge of our own destinies.

A good outcome will outweigh the slog.

Our identity – including any low self esteem or poor view of our abilities – is entirely our choice. Our program, which we are free to ignore.

 

 

 

Aim to Improve, Not to Perfect
There will always be people better than you. At anything you turn your hand to. If you have trouble accepting that, you’ll need to look at why you have unobtainable desires, and overly harsh self-judgement. Considering others’ varying opinions (you can’t please everyone), rapid degradation and outmoding of the latest creation, ‘perfection’ may not even exist. Instead, focus on identifying your skills or potential areas of talents, and on improving these. Developing strengths will do you no wrong and stand you in good stead for a successful, rewarding life. Jumping for perfection on the other hand, will most likely only make you feel like a deflated loser, sooner or later.

 

 

Don’t Burn Out
It’s of course exciting to embark on a mission to improve your standing in life, or the way you see yourself. But many people get so carried away with the energy of the route to the goal, they exhaust themselves. Pace and patience are perhaps even more useful than initial energy and drive when it comes to stamina and long-term success.

 

Myth #1: Anxiety Helps Us Perform

When someone asks you how you feel when you are performing at your best, is “stressed out” one of the terms you use? Not likely. Terms describing our anxious moments are usually associated with our least productive times. It stands to reason then, that anxiety is not a true factor in motivating ourselves or someone else to peak performance. Terms describing our feelings when we are performing at our best are generally positive in nature, such as “in the zone” or “marvelous.” Anxiety may be a factor in producing physical energy or motivation from low points in our lives, but it comes at a cost and it will never drive us to our highs.

Anxiety fogs the mind; we do not think clearly and are more impulsive in our reactions. We do things without thinking them through when we are anxious. In a supervisory role, this type of behavior can have serious implications. Anxious energy, and its unwanted side effects, can have an impact on those you lead. This is especially true if a supervisor is acting on the false notion that creating anxiety is a motivator. Negative emotions are created when a person in authority uses anxiety as a motivator and his/her subordinates are less likely to perform at their best. If a supervisor is acting in anxious manner, this can also have a trickle down effect on his/her subordinates. Successful leaders use stress management techniques to reduce anxiety. They behave in a positive way and create positive energy in the workplace — for positive results.

Myth #2: Multitasking Is More Efficient

Humans lack the ability to perform cognitive tasks simultaneously. When we think we are multitasking, we’re merely juggling focus between tasks.  Focus on one always comes at the cost of another.  Checking your email while on a conference call?  You aren’t actively listening, you’re distracted.

Exactly.

We aren’t robots, our brains suffer a latency in “switching time” between cognitive tasks.  Our brains playing catch-up only increases the amount of time it takes to actually finish each task. Contrary to popular opinion, multitasking is extraordinarily inefficient.

Writers block effects every type of writer from time to time. Bloggers are no exception, especially when we write about the same things on a daily basis. It is not easy to come up with new ideas when you write in the same niche every day. Sometimes you need a little inspiration to try to tell the same story from a different point of view or come at it from a different angle. On these occasions, I usually get my inspiration from the experts. By experts, I mean the writers and public figures that were astute enough for their words to be quoted. I break out the old Bartlett’s book of quotations or browse through Wikiquotes until I find something that peaks my interest.

For me, good quotes contain a goldmine of inspirational ideas that are just waiting to be excavated. I do not do this because I plan to write anything that will end up being quoted on such a large scale. I am just digging for something that will spark my creativity again, and get that article written.

For example, if I am planning to write a post about success, I search the content for success and I come up with this by Faulkner:

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

Now something like that has to get your juices flowing again. Maybe I would write something about how we are all worried about being a better writer than this person or that person. When all we really have to do is be better than we were. Another angle could be about how we measure success. By what other people think or by what we think of ourselves. There are many other ways to think about it, but the idea is to think about it and break that mind block.

Here is another one about success by Jonathan Winters:

“I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.”

That one has many implications and the ambiguity of the quote itself can get your mind moving in different directions. You can jot down the different ways you can interpret the quote and work from there. Bang, the mind block is gone and I am moving ahead without it — thank you Mr. Winters. Now that is success!

It does not matter what the topic is. If you search long enough you can find a quote on just about anything. The good ones will clear up writer’s block the first time you read them. You will be sitting there writing your post and will not even remember you were stuck in the mud an hour ago.

Consider someone who blogs about the movies. Jean-Luc Godard said:

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

I do not blog about the movies, but someone who does can find many ways to write a post on that quote. They could agree with it, disagree with it or just write about how true it is. The truth of the matter is, if you cannot find a way to write about that statement, then something is seriously wrong with you. You may need medical attention. That or you can just search for another quote, because you still have writer’s block. Find something that creates that spark.

You do not have to search only for specific topics in your niche. If you blog about blogging or smartphones, for instance, you are not going to find many quotes. They have not been in existence long enough. That does not mean quotes cannot help you get over your mental block. You just have to be a little more creative and deeper with your searching. You may want to try a little insight into things that have been bothering you lately or think up general concepts to your topic. Many quotes on emotional issues and self-insight can easily be found with the correct key words or you can browse by author until you find the right one.

I have listed five very general quotes below on the topic of the human condition. No matter what type of blog you write or the niche you are in, I bet you can get at least one blog post out of them. Not only that, I bet you will be looking for quotes the next time you need a little inspiration to get you started. If you look hard enough, you will find them too. People remembered and wrote down these quotes because it helped them out in some way. They wrote them down because they knew they would inspire and help future generations. Make use of these words of wisdom — that is why they are there.

Robert Benchley: “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”

Jane Austen: “Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.”

Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Oscar Wilde: “Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”

Mark Twain: “The funniest things are the forbidden.”

Benford’s Law describes a curious phenomenon about the counterintuitive distribution of numbers in sets of non-random data:

A phenomenological law also called the first digit law, first digit phenomenon, or leading digit phenomenon. Benford’s law states that in listings, tables of statistics, etc., the digit 1 tends to occur with probability ~30%, much greater than the expected 11.1% (i.e., one digit out of 9). Benford’s law can be observed, for instance, by examining tables of logarithms and noting that the first pages are much more worn and smudged than later pages (Newcomb 1881). While Benford’s law unquestionably applies to many situations in the real world, a satisfactory explanation has been given only recently through the work of Hill (1996).

If you list all the countries in the world and their populations, 27% of the numbers will start with the digit 1. Only 3% of them will start with the digit 9. Something very similar holds if you look at the heights of the 60 tallest structures in the world — whether you measure in meters or in feet.

This phenomenon helps auditors detect fraud in things like taxes and elections, but it also connects up in striking ways to modern physics and mathematics (e.g., power laws in statistical distributions, as well as ergodic theory).

Benford’s Law often strikes people as unintuitive because it seems that every digit should have an equal opportunity to start country populations or heights of skyscrapers, like this:

This egalitarian intuition about leading digits turns out to be misleading. The situation where every digit is equally likely to start numbers is actually the anomalous one.

The fact that the nonuniform pattern is the common one was named for physicist Frank Benford, who, in 1938, showed that it holds in a wide variety of real lists of numbers (river lengths, molecular weights, street addresses, etc.) . But the fact was first discovered in 1881 by Simon Newcomb.

He noticed it while using logarithm books — book-length tables giving the logarithms of various numbers, used at that time by scientists to do arithmetic with large numbers. Newcomb became intrigued by the fact that the pages listing numbers starting with 1 were far more worn than the other pages. This would not happen if every digit occurred equally often as a first digit in the numbers scientists worked with.

The fact that most people making up lists of numbers conform to the ‘intuitive’ uniform distribution rather than the nonuninform one that reality seems to prefer is the reason Benford’s Law is useful in fraud detection.  The leading digits in large spreadsheets of legitimate financial numbers (light green in the figure below) tend to be very close to Benford’s Law (blue), while ones filled in by guessing randomly look way off (orange), and fraudulent numbers (red) tend to look even more bizarre. When tax sleuths notice these tell-tale patterns of numbers with unnatural sources, they call people in for a human audit.

 

 

What are the fraudsters missing?
To get a sense of why the uniform distribution isn’t so natural, we can reason as follows.

First, observe that if you multiply a number by 2, then very often the first digit of the result will be 1. Certainly if the original number started with 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. So if you begin with the intuitively appealing uniform distribution of leading digits (every leading digit being equally likely) and then multiply all the numbers by 2, the distribution of leading digits will no longer be uniform — there will now be a lot of leading 1′s. Weird, eh?

(To describe this phenomenon, I say that multiplication by 2 privileges 1 as a leading digit.)

This already tells you that the uniform distribution of leading digits is not really very stable. It doesn’t like to persist. It is easy to upset by the innocuous operation of multiplying everything by 2, which is difficult to avoid in the wild!

Second, it turns out that many naturally occurring tables of numbers can be thought of as arising from taking some original list and multiplying each entry by a random number of twos.

In view of this, it is natural that we see lower digits overrepresented, and higher digits underrepresented, in many naturally occurring data sets.

To explore the explanation in more depth, let’s focus on the example of country populations. These tend to grow over time. Think of growing as starting from a random size and being multiplied by 2 a (random) number of times, different for each country (depending on growth rate). Since multiplication by 2 privileges the digit 1 as a leading digit, it’s not surprising that a lot of the final numbers start with ones. More than start with nines.

By the way, it’s not just multiplication by 2 that privileges 1 as a leading digit. Multiplication by most numbers privileges lower initial digits, in a sense that is made precise below. So does division by most numbers.

With building heights, there are two potential explanations. One is the same growth story that we have for cities. Our building ability improves by some random amount every, say, 20 years, and that leads to structures that are some percentage taller than the tallest previous structures. An alternative explanation comes from the fact that we are looking at the largest examples of some phenomenon — the top few “order statistics”. A well-known regularity is that when we are looking at such statistics, the number of structures exceeding height X is proportional to to some power of X. And it is also known that statistics distributed according to a power law follow Benford’s Law.

Maybe the way to think about it is this. To get a list of numbers not to satisfy Benford’s Law you need to build it that way (say, by writing down a list of 6-digit numbers and rolling a 10-sided die to pick all the digits). And then you need to make sure no creature comes along after you are done and multiplies all of them by something a bit unpredictable. But actually, it’s very hard to exclude such a creature, because sometimes it is nature (as with population growth) and sometimes it is another source of unpredictable proportional change. And those idiosyncratic multiplications (or divisions) typically privilege lower initial digits.

This explains the qualitative phenomenon that 1 appears as a leading digit more often than 9 does. But what explains the quantitative Benford’s Law distribution? That is, why do we expect to see that about 30% of numbers start with 1, while 10% of numbers have a leading 4, and only 5% of numbers start with 9? Where do those percentages come from?

We saw above that the uniform distribution of leading digits — an 11% probability for each potential leading digit — is not stable when you multiply all the numbers by 2. If every leading digit starts out being equally represented, that stops being true after you multiply by 2.

It turns out there is a distribution of leading digits that does not get upset after multiplying by 2 in this way — it remains stable. That magical distribution is precisely the Benford’s Law distribution in the first figure. And that’s not just true for multiplication by 2 — the distribution is stable when you multiply by any number between 1 and 10. The Benford’s Law distribution is the only one that has this property, and once you know that, it is easy to work out what it has to be.

For more detail on this and many other mathematical facts about Benford’s Law, see the beautiful blog post by Terry Tao, as well as a presentation (slides only) by Michelle Manes.

AKA, How To Show Your Fear Who’s The REAL Boss and Live Your Dream

How many times have you sat in your cubicle, staring into space, dreaming about that life you should have had? We’ve all done it, stuck in a job we hated but we needed to pay the bills. Some move on, but  even more, tragically, get trapped in their cubicle. They’re simply too scared to make a change.

After all, it’s been drilled into you and others, time and time again: the economy is bad, you’re lucky to have a job at all, face it, your dream isn’t realistic, and that’s why it’s a dream… don’t be a fool, just thank your lucky stars for what you’ve got and keep at it…

If you hear that enough times, it’s only so long before you accept it. Tragically, your dream has been lost – and for what?

- Fear of failure (“I’m not good enough; this is just a stupid dream”)
- Fear of losing respect from your peers (“Hey, did you hear what Don did? WHAT A NUTCASE!”)
- You’ll lose everything  (“I have my mortgage, my car payments… if I can’t keep those up then…”)

There are a million reasons you can beat yourself up and prevent yourself from taking a leap of faith into following your dream. But have you ever tried looking at it from the other side? You could succeed, just as much as you could fail – but by not trying, you’ll never know, and you’ll be robbing the rest of the world of your talent.

Take a look around you, at your friends, family and community. Chances are, you’ll know a few people who took that chance and too that leap, and made it. “Sure, but he got lucky, and anyway, he’s super-talented at sales…” you might be thinking.

It doesn’t matter if it’s sales, writing, design, embroidery, carpentry – whatever it is, it’s your dream. If people like Jack Passion can make a living as a beardsman (a man who enters beard and moustache competitions), then your dream is also ripe for success.

Try these 3 little tricks to help you bypass the big old Fear Monster that’s rattling around your head – he’s not welcome here – tell him to go back to “touching fire to see what happens” or as I call it: FEAR 101.

DECLARE IT: if someone asks you what your dream is – tell them! You will be surprised at how positive the response will be in many cases – don’t listen to the voice of fear inside you – listen to the voices of positive support and confirmation outside.

BELIEVE IT: many times, those closest to us are more cogizant of our best traits and our worst than we are. From the outside looking in, it’s easier to judge a person by their whole. When you look at yourself, it’s difficult to separate all of these, and sometimes your best gifts can be buried under modesty. How many times have people told you that you’re a wonderful artist before you quickly dismissed it with a modest comment?  If you really want your dream, have the humility and the grace to believe in yourself.

DO IT: You know the old saying “if hopes and wishes were loaves and fishes, then we would never go hungry again”? A saying that essentially tells you to forget about it – you want to eat, right? WRONG. There is absolutely no reason that you can’t follow your dream and keep your job in the beginning. Balance it out; test the waters. It’s not sink or swim; it’s more about making slow and steady steps towards an attainable goal, and constantly building up on it. One day, you’ll discover that you’ve made it. It’s actually come to a point where you CAN quit your job and focus on your dream. Fear won’t even get a look in – it’s all there in your accounts.

In order to live the life that you dream of, you must start to take steps that lead towards it. Waiting for a genie to pop out of a bottle and grant you your heart’s deepest desires will lead you nowhere, and you’ll spend the rest of your life working with sentences that begin with “I could have…”, “I should have…”. Failure is just part of the adventure of life – embrace the lessons which it brings, instead of being scared of its potential knockbacks.

When you fail, pick yourself, dust yourself down – and go for plan B. Stop dreaming and start doing! The rewards will be greater than you could have ever imagined. You’re the boss of this life – not fear!

Have you ever decided to ignore your fear and just do it instead? Share your stories and experiences.

Sometimes you wake up, and it’s all gone. Your ideas have dried up, your inspiration has gone on vacation and writing is much less fun and more one big looooong grind. But worse, you’ve got to churn out some writing for your blog. Another task cluttering up your day and you can’t think of a single thing to write about.

The good news is that this happens to everyone – yes, even world-famous writers like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling have ‘off days’.  So what is their secret? Are they superhuman typing machines blessed with magical writing superpowers?

Well, not quite.

What they do have is one thing that all professionals have – a writing strategy toolbox, ready to fix up even the most tired writer and get their fingers tapping. Here are 4 tools you can add to your toolbox now to give your writing pep even on your most lackluster day.

GET INSPIRED                      

Get away from the desk, with its crumpled notes of defeat, white screen glaring disapprovingly and a graveyard of abandoned, failed ideas.

Just get out there!

Leave the room. Go outside. Go for a walk, or even a run, and let the fresh air and kickstart your brain. Go see a movie and relax.  Cook yourself some nice food, or check out the new restaurant that everyone’s talking about.  In short, do something that’s new and different for you. The experience won’t just relax you, it will also rejuvenate you and spark some ideas in the process.

USE EXISTING CONTENT TO MAKE NEW CONTENT

You don’t need to start on a voyage into the unknown with never-before seen content when it comes to writing your article. Instead, you can take a familiar subject and bring your own spin to it. Reviews of products are a great way to follow this – have you used a service lately that you loved – or even hated? Easy. You don’t need to coax out your creative juices – just explain what you thought of it. Boom – one fresh article, ready to publish.

In a similar way, you can talk about yourself – your career, your successes, failures, and offer them out there are a case study to readers. If you really can’t find the energy to pick up the pen, why not link to a ‘best hits’ of your content, which might have missed by newer readers? Simply add a theme or deconstruct something you wrote a few years back.

PICK IT OUT OF A HAT

Maybe you want to write, but you just can’t think of anything original to write about.  This is pretty simple to solve. With this tool, you can literally jump-start your creative juices that will get you moving in the right direction. Ready?

Take two unrelated things and mash them together – then write about them to create a unique post. It’s easy!

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• The Mad Men Guide to Perfect Content, Everytime

These three strategies are a great addition to your writing toolbox, allowing you to create powerful content when you feel that you just don’t have anything. Remember – it’s 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration that counts. Don’t make inspiration be your only muse when it comes to writing content!

When you are inspired, use this one bonus strategy to ensure that you’re never caught short next time your writing mojo goes on vacation. Ready? WRITE. Write everything.  As many articles as you can. And when you’re done, put them all in your ‘rainy day’ folder.

Congratulations – now you’ve got a folder full of emergency articles when you’re fresh out of ideas and feel you can’t write. There is no great secret to writing awesome content all of the time. It’s just about having the right tools and being prepared.

Do you have any tried-and-tested methods when it comes to pulling content ideas and articles out of thin air when you’re just not feeling creative? Leave a comment below and let us know!

A Professional Writer’s Tips for Quality Blogging

We moved out of the caves, we killed all the dragons, we have electric can-openers.

We’ve arrived: we have The Internet.

Now anyone can publish a blog, a book, white paper, podcast, and get it out there. We can all taste the delights of being ‘a writer’ (whatever that means), one of those rich and clever people who make the books we see everywhere. Wonderful!

With one problem. No more than maybe 1 in 20 internet writers can actually write.

Beloved brethren of the Earth and of the keyboard – allow me to impart some tough love.

A list of your breakfast items; top 237 recommended activities to do in Bangkok (available from any guidebook, written by better writers); or soulless ‘top ten tips’ for attracting more business, lifted from someone else’s website and ploddingly rejigged with disdainful ennui – these things add as much enjoyable value to the human thought-pool as a fart in a crowded lift.

And, dear bloggers, an inarticulate and bitchy analysis of the “funny way” your girlfriend looked at your friend, then went to Pizza Hut and didn’t reply to your texts for 2 hours (and you have the ‘flu’, your left knee feels weird, and now your ‘phone battery has died)… this may be mesmerising for you and scratch some dull itch on the periphery of half-arsed existential query, but it adds to the world not a jot.

The central consciousness of our distracted and misled species is clouded with toxic detritus. You are not addressing it, you are adding to it.

But fear not! With the following tips, this odd person you have never met and who uses the word ‘ennui’ will now put all that badness to bed, and guide your dreams so that your pen-hand wakes up tomorrow aggressively sentient, and as fertile as a fothermucking randy Chihuahua. And with a bit of luck, you’ll be one of the 1 in 20.

Talk Rubbish

An accomplished writer has both the confidence and the ability, to employ the art of relaxed play in his writing. To loll about, for an acceptable period, in his own reverie. He can mention dragons in a respectable internet writing guide. He can give risky and slightly misleading subtitles to its advice segments because it amuses him, and so will likely amuse others too.

He can say “didoodoodoo” if he damn well wants. If it’s good enough for The Police, it’s good enough for me. After all, we are but children of various ages. Show me an ‘adult’ who doesn’t long for occasional constructive nonsense to ease the flow of a potentially dry topic, and I’ll admit I’ve got it all wrong and run naked through the woods (again) to press the reset button.

The prose’s proving is in the stamina of the readability, not the impressive poetry or complex technical correctness of every sentence.

But – linger too long in the formless void, and you’ve lost the reader. If you do not consider an alienated or bored reader, that is exactly what you shall have. And if the colourful tangent is too irrelevant to the writing’s comprehensive aim, or too self-absorbed, it’s also bye bye Mister Readingman. Employ well-placed illustrative or restful diversions, and don’t let them drag on.

Laugh or Die

Please, if you are a person who still believes that others absorb facts better – or will continue to volunteer their time to your writing – without the medium ever being funny, kindly return to the teacher’s desk of my Catholic secondary school business studies class where you belong, and die.

With such a dry and lightless approach to life, death will surely be merciful and swift.

I assume you are above such an archaic and hideous misconception, so shall continue without issuing further wishes of corporeal destruction.

We all know there is disturbing darkness in the world – some people sell films of themselves stamping on puppies’ heads for God’s sake. So if a piece of writing requires you to embrace a meaty issue, do so head on, then get the hell out of there before it sucks you – and all who look upon it – limp. Then, after not too long a wait, do your utmost to flush the paragraph with laughter, that warmest of temperers.

Strive to exist in that beautiful pendulum rhythm, swinging balanced between the exhilaratingly thought-provoking, and the refreshingly mindless and amusing. This can be applied to everything from a blog on our approach to business, to a romantic novel.

Reward Strangers

Why would anyone read your blog? Why would any human read any writing? Because they want something, or need something. We externalise our inspiration, our therapy, our entertainment, even our introspection. We often look to others to think for us. If you do not provide these humble seekers with some sustenance, you have done them a disservice.

If you write for yourself, put it in a private diary. That’s what it’s for. But if you’re publishing in a public blog, you are stating that what you have to say is of value, and asking for interaction with strangers, including feedback on this value. If you have not considered those strangers, not given them something from the heart that adds something to their life, don’t be surprised if you’re shot down as a waste of good reading time. “I’d rather nail my eyelid to a moving train than read another post from this cheese-dick”, or words to that effect. And you’d deserve it.

The already savage world of internet comments is bursting to tear even half-decent writers to shreds. People are often merciless when they know they’re anonymous.

Compromise

No artist is utterly, unreservedly proud of their work. If they are, they’re probably not very good. Mama’s vegetable soup was a profound metaphysical experience. It was so good it made me smile. Something about it – beyond its organic, untainted, skilfully handpicked ingredients – made it exhilarating. Maybe it tasted of love.

But every time she made it, Mama would – without exception – denounce it as “too sweet”, “too creamy”, “too bland”, “too green”, “too…  carroty”. Yet she served it up, much to my pleasure. She was a culinary genius.

Any writer worth their weight in pen nibs will share this healthy self-depreciation. Given a chance, a great writer will quickly decompose into a twitching neurotic mess of doubt and infinite re-edits, locked alone in a darkened room, aching and dribbling for an hour over which is the most complimentary adverb.

But the divine vegetable soup must be served. It’s good. It might not be perfect, but people like it.

So just do a good, solid, proofread job, with heart and with humour; swallow; and get it out there. You don’t have time to achieve the ultimate prose. It’s probably impossible anyway. Yes, you have a responsibility to spread quality, but you also – if you’re any good – have a responsibility just to spread. Better something you’re 80% happy with than nothing at all.

Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople

When asked what makes them different from the average sales person, most top sales representatives can not give you a specific and accurate answer. This is mostly because they are doing what comes naturally to them — it is ingrained in their personality. The rep is not really aware of the differences, because they happen at the subconscious level.

I have interviewed and administered personality tests to over one thousand top ranking salespeople over the past ten years to try and narrow down just what it is that helps them succeed. The business-to-business representatives were employed by some of the biggest companies in the world. To gain a better understanding of the attributes that make up a successful sales rep, I measured five categories of personality: extraversion, agreeableness, negative emotionality, openness and conscientiousness.

The corporations involved were mostly high tech and business service companies. They took place at strategy workshops I conducted and some were taken at incentive trips or Presidents Club meetings, which top representatives are rewarded with for superior accomplishments. I then broke down the results and separated them by an annual quota percentage. These results were then further broken down into high, average and low performance.

These separate categories were then correlated and compared to one another to determine the key personality traits that differ between top, average and below average sales results. In the end, I came up with seven main traits that have a significant influence on high performance as well as the impact the trait has on selling style and successful results.

1. Achievement Oriented

Successful salespeople are generally over achievers. They constantly measure their past performance with their current goals and find ways to improve their performance. Eighty-four percent of top sales representatives had high scores in achievement and goal orientation.

This goal orientation is highly political in nature during sales cycles. Successful sales reps intuitively seek out key decision-makers in their targeted company. They focus more on the people they are selling to in the organization and how the product will benefit the organization than the product itself.

2. Curious

The craving for knowledge and longing to discover how things work is the best definition for curiosity and a strong trait in successful sales people. There is nothing more impressive to a customer than an individual who has an in depth knowledge of their company and products or a deep seated interest in them. Eighty-two percent of the top salespeople scored high on the test for this trait.

This curiosity also allows the sales rep to discover very early in the game whether he/she is going to close the deal. Strategic and well thought out questioning of the customer helps to close the gaps in information and gives the rep the intuition to proceed on the sale or move on.

3. Lack of Sociability

This trait was very surprising. Top sales representatives scored thirty percent lower on tests for gregariousness than average or below average individuals. These tests distinguish a preference to friendliness or being around other people.

The logical conclusion is that top sales reps strive for dominance and an overly friendly representative is too intimate with a customer to achieve a dominant stance. In a dominant position the sales rep is more respected and a customer tends to follow his/her advice and recommendations.

4. Modesty

Another surprising result that flies in the face of typical stereotype is that successful salespeople tend to be modest. Ninety-one percent of the top sales reps scored high in humility and modesty tests while the underachievers lived up to the egotistical and pushy typecast. The obvious conclusion is that the flamboyant salespeople tend to drive away far more customers than they win over.

Rather than focusing on themselves, the successful salesperson promotes other individuals in the organization as the main focus of attention; winning the customer over with a team spirit and “we are all in this together” attitude.

5. Conscientious

The top salespeople in the study had very high levels of responsibility, duty and reliability. They took their jobs extremely seriously and felt a deep responsibility for their company and their customers.

Rather than reacting to customer or competitor actions the successful sales rep takes full control of his/her account in the sales cycle and in this way controls their providence. They do not put the blame on other individuals and strive to take control of any given situation.

6. Lack of Self-Consciousness

Under five percent of the top sales people were self-conscious, embarrassed easily or were bashful. Inhibition was not a part of their chemical makeup. They are not meek in any way and are not afraid to defend themselves.

The tests showed that the successful salespeople were aggressive and willing to put up a fight to defend their arguments. They were not afraid to upset any customers in the process. Action oriented, they will defend what they know is right and refute what they do not agree with. In this way they earn respect, especially when they can prove their point in a debate.

7. Lack of Discouragement

When tested, fewer than ten percent of the top sales people had high levels of discouragement. The majority of these individuals never got overwhelmed with a workload or felt saddened by life events. They had the ability to bounce back quickly from tragic events.

In several interviews I have conducted over the ten year span I discovered that many of these individuals played sports in school. I found a strong correlation between the ability to accept defeat in life and the individuals who played sports. In my opinion this prepared them mentally for the losses and gave them the ability to prepare themselves for the next competition in sales.

Not all people who go into sales become successful. Many individuals with the same education level and given the same tools of the trade have varying levels of success. Some succeed, some fail and some fall somewhere in between. Although luck and personal contacts play a part in the process this evidence suggests natural personality makeup plays a large part in determining a truly successful sales person.

Here’s an engaging infographic which shows the current situation of the Top 20 brands on social media. Because of the constantly evolving nature of social networks, the number of Facebook likes and Twitter followers are an approximation.

It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we’ve grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There’s an art to increasing a blog’s traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we’ve observed.

NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007. This post is intended to be useful to all forms of bloggers – independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies. Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should be applicable and useful.

#1 – Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

When strategizing about who you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord (like this one), beautiful videos that tell a story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).

If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a terrible decision (particularly if that’s where you passion or your target audience lies), but it will decrease the propensity for your blog’s work to spread like wildfire across the web.

#2 – Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers

Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don’t a Google search will take you much of the way). From that list, you can do some easy expansion using a web-based tool like DoubleClick’s Ad Planner:

Once you’ve determined the communities where your soon-to-be-readers gather, you can start participating. Create an account, read what others have written and don’t jump in the conversation until you’ve got a good feel for what’s appropriate and what’s not. I’ve written a post here about rules for comment marketing, and all of them apply. Be a good web citizen and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you’ll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.

#3 – Make Your Blog’s Content SEO-Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I’ve written before, “SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing.” In 2011, Google received over 3 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing:

sources: Comscore + Google

Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.

SEO for blogs is both simple and easy to set up, particularly if you’re using an SEO-friendly platform like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. For more information on how to execute on great SEO for blogs, check out the following resources:

• Blogger’s Guide to SEO (from SEOBook)
• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO (from Moz)
• WordPress Blog SEO Tutorial (from Yoast)
• SEO for Travel Bloggers (but applicable to nearly any type of blog – from Moz)

Don’t let bad press or poor experiences with spammers (spam is not SEO) taint the amazing power and valuable contributions SEO can make to your blog’s traffic and overall success. 20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible; embrace it and thousands of visitors seeking exactly what you’ve posted will be the reward.

#4 – Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts & Find New Connections

Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Google+ has nearly 100 million. LinkedIn is over 130 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog.

Leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, study, attention to changes by the social sites and consideration in what content to share and how to do it. My advice is to use the following process:

• If you haven’t already, register a personal account and a brand account at each of the following - Twitter,Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn (those links will take you directly to the registration pages for brand pages). For example, my friend Dharmesh has a personal account for Twitter and a brand account for OnStartups(one of his blog projects). He also maintains brand pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
• Fill out each of those profiles to the fullest possible extent – use photos, write compelling descriptions and make each one as useful and credible as possible. Research shows that profiles with more information have a significant correlation with more successful accounts (and there’s a lot of common sense here, too, given that spammy profiles frequently feature little to no profile work).
• Connect with users on those sites with whom you already share a personal or professional relationships, and start following industry luminaries, influencers and connectors. Services like FollowerWonk andFindPeopleonPlus can be incredible for this:

• Start sharing content – your own blog posts, those of peers in your industry who’ve impressed you and anything that you feel has a chance to go “viral” and earn sharing from others.
• Interact with the community – use hash tags, searches and those you follow to find interesting conversations and content and jump in! Social networks are amazing environment for building a brand, familiarizing yourself with a topic and the people around it, and earning the trust of others through high quality, authentic participation and sharing

If you consistently employ a strategy of participation, share great stuff and make a positive, memorable impression on those who see your interactions on these sites, your followers and fans will grow and your ability to drive traffic back to your blog by sharing content will be tremendous. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch, when SEO is a less consistent driver.

#5 – Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results

At the very least, I’d recommend most bloggers install Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over. If you want to get more advanced, check out this post on 18 Steps to Successful Metrics and Marketing.

Here’s a screenshot from the analytics of my wife’s travel blog, the Everywhereist:

As you can see, there’s all sorts of great insights to be gleaned by looking at where visits originate, analyzing how they were earned and trying to repeat the successes, focus on the high quality and high traffic sources and put less effort into marketing paths that may not be effective. In this example, it’s pretty clear that Facebook and Twitter are both excellent channels. StumbleUpon sends a lot of traffic, but they don’t stay very long (averaging only 36 seconds vs. the general average of 4 minutes!).

Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you’re succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don’t ignore it, or you’ll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential.

#6 – Add Graphics, Photos and Illustrations (with link-back licensing)

If you’re someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service likeFlickr to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.

When using images, I highly recommend creating a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits you as the content creator. For example, you could have a consistent notice under your images indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post. You can also post that as a sidebar link, include it in your terms of use, or note it however you think will get the most adoption.

Some people will use your images without linking back, which sucks. However, you can find them by employing theImage Search function of “similar images,” shown below:

Clicking the “similar” link on any given image will show you other images that Google thinks look alike, which can often uncover new sources of traffic. Just reach out and ask if you can get a link, nicely. Much of the time, you’ll not only get your link, but make a valuable contact or new friend, too!

#7 – Conduct Keyword Research While Writing Your Posts

Not surprisingly, a big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It’s hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research, and luckily, there’s a free tool from Google to help called the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Type some words at the top, hit search and AdWords will show you phrases that match the intent and/or terms you’ve employed. There’s lots to play around with here, but watch out in particular for the “match types” options I’ve highlighted below:

When you choose “exact match” AdWords will show you only the quantity of searches estimated for that precise phrase. If you use broad match, they’ll include any search phrases that use related/similar words in a pattern they think could have overlap with your keyword intent (which can get pretty darn broad). “Phrase match” will give you only those phrases that include the word or words in your search – still fairly wide-ranging, but between “exact” and “broad.”

When you’re writing a blog post, keyword research is best utilized for the title and headline of the post. For example, if I wanted to write a post here on Moz about how to generate good ideas for bloggers, I might craft something that uses the phrase “blog post ideas” or “blogging ideas” near the front of my title and headline, as in “Blog Post Ideas for When You’re Truly Stuck,” or “Blogging Ideas that Will Help You Clear Writer’s Block.”

Optimizing a post to target a specific keyword isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds. 80% of the value comes from merely using the phrase effectively in the title of the blog post, and writing high quality content about the subject. If you’re interested in more, read Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization (a slightly older resource, but just as relevant today as when it was written).

#8 – Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others

The web was not made for static, text-only content! Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines. When you reference your own material in-context and in a way that’s not manipulative (watch out for over-optimizing by linking to a category, post or page every time a phrase is used – this is almost certainly discounted by search engines and looks terrible to those who want to read your posts), you potentially draw visitors to your other content AND give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.

Perhaps even more valuable is referencing the content of others. The biblical expression “give and ye shall receive,” perfectly applies on the web. Other site owners will often receive Google Alerts or look through their incoming referrers (as I showed above in tip #5) to see who’s talking about them and what they’re saying. Linking out is a direct line to earning links, social mentions, friendly emails and new relationships with those you reference. In its early days, this tactic was one of the best ways we earned recognition and traffic with the SEOmoz blog and the power continues to this day.

#9 – Participate in Social Sharing Communities Like Reddit + StumbleUpon

The major social networking sites aren’t alone in their power to send traffic to a blog. Social community sites like Reddit (which now receives more than 2 billion! with a “B”! views each month), StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr,Care2 (for nonprofits and causes), GoodReads (books), Ravelry (knitting), Newsvine (news/politics) and many, many more (Wikipedia maintains a decent, though not comprehensive list here).

Each of these sites have different rules, formats and ways of participating and sharing content. As with participation in blog or forum communities described above in tactic #2, you need to add value to these communities to see value back. Simply drive-by spamming or leaving your link won’t get you very far, and could even cause a backlash. Instead, learn the ropes, engage authentically and you’ll find that fans, links and traffic can develop.

These communities are also excellent sources of inspiration for posts on your blog. By observing what performs well and earns recognition, you can tailor your content to meet those guidelines and reap the rewards in visits and awareness. My top recommendation for most bloggers is to at least check whether there’s an appropriate subreddit in which you should be participating. Subreddits and their search function can help with that.

#10 – Guest Blog (and Accept the Guest Posts of Others)

When you’re first starting out, it can be tough to convince other bloggers to allow you to post on their sites OR have an audience large enough to inspire others to want to contribute to your site. This is when friends and professional connections are critical. When you don’t have a compelling marketing message, leverage your relationships – find the folks who know you, like you and trust you and ask those who have blog to let you take a shot at authoring something, then ask them to return the favor.

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to spread your brand to new folks who’ve never seen your work before, and it can be useful in earning early links and references back to your site, which will drive direct traffic and help your search rankings (diverse, external links are a key part of how search engines rank sites and pages). Several recommendations for those who engage in guest blogging:

• Find sites that have a relevant audience – it sucks to pour your time into writing a post, only to see it fizzle because the readers weren’t interested. Spend a bit more time researching the posts that succeed on your target site, the makeup of the audience, what types of comments they leave and you’ll earn a much higher return with each post.
• Don’t be discouraged if you ask and get a “no” or a “no response.” As your profile grows in your niche, you’ll have more opportunities, requests and an easier time getting a “yes,” so don’t take early rejections too hard and watch out – in many marketing practices, persistence pays, but pestering a blogger to write for them is not one of these (and may get your email address permanently banned from their inbox).
• When pitching your guest post make it as easy as possible for the other party. When requesting to post, have a phenomenal piece of writing all set to publish that’s never been shared before and give them the ability to read it. These requests get far more “yes” replies than asking for the chance to write with no evidence of what you’ll contribute. At the very least, make an outline and write a title + snippet.
• Likewise, when requesting a contribution, especially from someone with a significant industry profile, asking for a very specific piece of writing is much easier than getting them to write an entire piece from scratch of their own design. You should also present statistics that highlight the value of posting on your site – traffic data, social followers, RSS subscribers, etc. can all be very persuasive to a skeptical writer.

A great tool for frequent guest bloggers is Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest, which offers the ability to connect writers with those seeking guest contributions (and the reverse).

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are also great places to find guest blogging opportunities. In particular, check out the profiles of those you’re connected with to see if they run blogs of their own that might be a good fit.Google’s Blog Search function and Google Reader’s Search are also solid tools for discovery.

#11 – Incorporate Great Design Into Your Site

The power of beautiful, usable, professional design can’t be overstated. When readers look at a blog, the first thing they judge is how it “feels” from a design and UX perspective. Sites that use default templates or have horrifying, 1990′s design will receive less trust, a lower time-on-page, fewer pages per visit and a lower likelihood of being shared. Those that feature stunning design that clearly indicates quality work will experience the reverse – and reap amazing benefits.

These threads - 1, 2, 3 and 4 - feature some remarkable blog designs for inspiration

If you’re looking for a designer to help upgrade the quality of your blog, there’s a few resources I recommend:

• Dribbble - great for finding high quality professional designers
• Forrst - another excellent design profile community
• Behance - featuring galleries from a wide range of visual professionals
• Sortfolio - an awesome tool to ID designers by region, skill and budget
• 99 Designs - a controversial site that provides designs on spec via contests (I have mixed feelings on this one, but many people find it useful, particularly for budget-conscious projects)

This is one area where budgeting a couple thousand dollars (if you can afford it) or even a few hundred (if you’re low on cash) can make a big difference in the traffic, sharing and viral-impact of every post you write.

#12 – Interact on Other Blogs’ Comments

As bloggers, we see a lot of comments. Many are spam, only a few add real value, and even fewer are truly fascinating and remarkable. If you can be in this final category consistently, in ways that make a blogger sit up and think “man, I wish that person commented here more often!” you can achieve great things for your own site’s visibility through participation in the comments of other blogs.

Combine the tools presented in #10 (particularly Google Reader/Blog Search) and #4 (especially FollowerWonk) for discovery. The feed subscriber counts in Google Reader can be particularly helpful for identifying good blogs for participation. Then apply the principles covered in this post on comment marketing.

Do be conscious of the name you use when commenting and the URL(s) you point back to. Consistency matters, particularly on naming, and linking to internal pages or using a name that’s clearly made for keyword-spamming rather than true conversation will kill your efforts before they begin.

#13 – Participate in Q+A Sites

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on the web. Popular services like Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com,Quora, StackExchange, Formspring and more serve those hungry for information whose web searches couldn’t track down the responses they needed.

The best strategy I’ve seen for engaging on Q+A sites isn’t to answer every question that comes along, but rather, to strategically provide high value to a Q+A community by engaging in those places where:

• The question quality is high, and responses thus far have been thin
• The question receives high visibility (either by ranking well for search queries, being featured on the site or getting social traffic/referrals). Most of the Q+A sites will show some stats around the traffic of a question
• The question is something you can answer in a way that provides remarkable value to anyone who’s curious and drops by

I also find great value in answering a few questions in-depth by producing an actual blog post to tackle them, then linking back. This is also a way I personally find blog post topics – if people are interested in the answer on a Q+A site, chances are good that lots of folks would want to read it on my blog, too!

Just be authentic in your answer, particularly if you’re linking. If you’d like to see some examples, I answer a lot of questions at Quora, frequently include relevant links, but am rarely accused of spamming or link dropping because it’s clearly about providing relevant value, not just getting a link for SEO (links on most user-contributed sites are “nofollow” anyway, meaning they shouldn’t pass search-engine value). There’s a dangerous line to walk here, but if you do so with tact and candor, you can earn a great audience from your participation.

#14 – Enable Subscriptions via Feed + Email (and track them!)

If someone drops by your site, has a good experience and thinks “I should come back here and check this out again when they have more posts,” chances are pretty high (I’d estimate 90%+) that you’ll never see them again. That sucks! It shouldn’t be the case, but we have busy lives and the Internet’s filled with animated gifs of cats.

In order to pull back some of these would-be fans, I highly recommend creating an RSS feed using Feedburner and putting visible buttons on the sidebar, top or bottom of your blog posts encouraging those who enjoy your content to sign up (either via feed, or via email, both of which are popular options).

If you’re using WordPress, there’s some easy plugins for this, too.

Once you’ve set things up, visit every few weeks and check on your subscribers – are they clicking on posts? If so, which ones? Learning what plays well for those who subscribe to your content can help make you a better blogger, and earn more visits from RSS, too.

#15 – Attend and Host Events

Despite the immense power of the web to connect us all regardless of geography, in-person meetings are still remarkably useful for bloggers seeking to grow their traffic and influence. The people you meet and connect with in real-world settings are far more likely to naturally lead to discussions about your blog and ways you can help each other. This yields guest posts, links, tweets, shares, blogroll inclusion and general business development like nothing else.

I’m a big advocate of Lanyrd, an event directory service that connects with your social networks to see who among your contacts will be at which events in which geographies. This can be phenomenally useful for identifying which meetups, conferences or gatherings are worth attending (and who you can carpool with).

The founder of Lanyrd also contributed this great answer on Quora about other search engines/directories for events (which makes me like them even more).

#16 – Use Your Email Connections (and Signature) to Promote Your Blog

As a blogger, you’re likely to be sending a lot of email out to others who use the web and have the power to help spread your work. Make sure you’re not ignoring email as a channel, one-to-one though it may be. When given an opportunity in a conversation that’s relevant, feel free to bring up your blog, a specific post or a topic you’ve written about. I find myself using blogging as a way to scalably answer questions – if I receive the same question many times, I’ll try to make a blog post that answers it so I can simply link to that in the future.

I also like to use my email signature to promote the content I share online. If I was really sharp, I’d do link tracking using a service like Bit.ly so I could see how many clicks email footers really earn. I suspect it’s not high, but it’s also not 0.

#17 – Survey Your Readers

Web surveys are easy to run and often produce high engagement and great topics for conversation. If there’s a subject or discussion that’s particularly contested, or where you suspect showing the distribution of beliefs, usage or opinions can be revealing, check out a tool like SurveyMonkey (they have a small free version) or PollDaddy.Google Docs also offers a survey tool that’s totally free, but not yet great in my view.

#18 – Add Value to a Popular Conversation

Numerous niches in the blogosphere have a few “big sites” where key issues arise, get discussed and spawn conversations on other blogs and sites. Getting into the fray can be a great way to present your point-of-view, earn attention from those interested in the discussion and potentially get links and traffic from the industry leaders as part of the process.

You can see me trying this out with Fred Wilson’s AVC blog last year (an incredibly popular and well-respected blog in the VC world). Fred wrote a post about Marketing that I disagreed with strongly and publicly and a day later, hewrote a follow-up where he included a graphic I made AND a link to my post.

If you’re seeking sources to find these “popular conversations,” Alltop, Topsy, Techmeme (in the tech world) and their sister sites MediaGazer, Memeorandum and WeSmirch, as well as PopURLs can all be useful.

#19 – Aggregate the Best of Your Niche

Bloggers, publishers and site owners of every variety in the web world love and hate to be compared and ranked against one another. It incites endless intrigue, discussion, methodology arguments and competitive behavior – but, it’s amazing for earning attention. When a blogger publishes a list of “the best X” or “the top X” in their field, most everyone who’s ranked highly praises the list, shares it and links to it. Here’s an example from the world of marketing itself:

That’s a screenshot of the AdAge Power 150, a list that’s been maintained for years in the marketing world and receives an endless amount of discussion by those listed (and not listed). For example, why is SEOmoz’s Twitter score only a “13″ when we have so many more followers, interactions and retweets than many of those with higher scores? Who knows. But I know it’s good for AdAge.

Now, obviously, I would encourage anyone building something like this to be as transparent, accurate and authentic as possible. A high quality resource that lists a “best and brightest” in your niche – be they blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, individual posts, people, conferences or whatever else you can think to rank – is an excellent piece of content for earning traffic and becoming a known quantity in your field.

Oh, and once you do produce it – make sure to let those featured know they’ve been listed. Tweeting at them with a link is a good way to do this, but if you have email addresses, by all means, reach out. It can often be the start of a great relationship!

#20 – Connect Your Web Profiles and Content to Your Blog

Many of you likely have profiles on services like YouTube, Slideshare, Yahoo!, DeviantArt and dozens of other social and Web 1.0 sites. You might be uploading content to Flickr, to Facebook, to Picasa or even something more esoteric like Prezi. Whatever you’re producing on the web and wherever you’re doing it, tie it back to your blog.

Including your blog’s link on your actual profile pages is among the most obvious, but it’s also incredibly valuable. On any service where interaction takes place, those interested in who you are and what you have to share will follow those links, and if they lead back to your blog, they become opportunities for capturing a loyal visitor or earning a share (or both!). But don’t just do this with profiles – do it with content, too! If you’ve created a video for YouTube, make your blog’s URL appear at the start or end of the video. Include it in the description of the video and on the uploading profile’s page. If you’re sharing photos on any of the dozens of photo services, use a watermark or even just some text with your domain name so interested users can find you.

If you’re having trouble finding and updating all those old profiles (or figuring out where you might want to create/share some new ones), KnowEm is a great tool for discovering your own profiles (by searching for your name or pseudonyms you’ve used) and claiming profiles on sites you may not yet have participated in.

I’d also strongly recommend leveraging Google’s relatively new protocol for rel=author. AJ Kohn wrote a great post on how to set it up here, and Yoast has another good one on building it into WordPress sites. The benefit for bloggers who do build large enough audiences to gain Google’s trust is earning your profile photo next to all the content you author – a powerful markup advantage that likely drives extra clicks from the search results and creates great, memorable branding, too.

#21 – Uncover the Links of Your Fellow Bloggers (and Nab ‘em!)

If other blogs in your niche have earned references from sites around the web, there’s a decent chance that they’ll link to you as well. Conducting competitive link research can also show you what content from your competition has performed well and the strategies they may be using to market their work. To uncover these links, you’ll need to use some tools.

OpenSiteExplorer is my favorite, but I’m biased (it’s made by Moz). However, it is free to use – if you create a registered account here, you can get unlimited use of the tool showing up to 1,000 links per page or site in perpetuity.

There are other good tools for link research as well, including Blekko, Majestic, Ahrefs and, I’ve heard that in the near-future, SearchMetrics.

Finding a link is great, but it’s through the exhaustive research of looking through dozens or hundreds that you can identify patterns and strategies. You’re also likely to find a lot of guest blogging opportunities and other chances for outreach. If you maintain a great persona and brand in your niche, your ability to earn these will rise dramatically.

Bonus #22 – Be Consistent and Don’t Give Up

If there’s one piece of advice I wish I could share with every blogger, it’s this:

The above image comes from Everywhereist’s analytics. Geraldine could have given up 18 months into her daily blogging. After all, she was putting in 3-5 hours each day writing content, taking photos, visiting sites, coming up with topics, trying to guest blog and grow her Twitter followers and never doing any SEO (don’t ask, it’s a running joke between us). And then, almost two years after her blog began, and more than 500 posts in, things finally got going. She got some nice guest blogging gigs, had some posts of hers go “hot” in the social sphere, earned mentions on some bigger sites, then got really big press from Time’s Best Blogs of 2011.

I’d guess there’s hundreds of new bloggers on the web each day who have all the opportunity Geraldine had, but after months (maybe only weeks) of slogging away, they give up.

When I started the SEOmoz blog in 2004, I had some advantages (mostly a good deal of marketing and SEO knowledge), but it was nearly 2 years before the blog could be called anything like a success. Earning traffic isn’t rocket science, but it does take time, perseverance and consistency. Don’t give up. Stick to your schedule. Remember that everyone has a few posts that suck, and it’s only by writing and publishing those sucky posts that you get into the habit necessary to eventually transform your blog into something remarkable.

Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz