It can be frustrating to set up a blog, write great content, and then receive little traffic in exchange for your efforts. In order to build traffic and readership, it’s important to be an active member of the blogging community… to interact with other bloggers who write about similar topics, and to share what is commonly referred to as “link love”.

Building inbound links for direct traffic and SEO, and becoming known within the “blogosphere” as a respected source for information means networking with other bloggers to get the word out about your blog.

To make it easier to find other bloggers to help you raise your profile in the community, we’ve started a new group at LinkedIn. All bloggers are invited to join our Blogging for Business Group.

Once you join, start a discussion to introduce yourself and your blog and feel free to post articles from your blog. Ask and answer questions, share tips and ideas.

Most importantly, feel free to contact other members who write on similar topics to arrange:

• Link Exchanges
• Guest Posting on each other’s blogs
• Article Trading
• Blog Carnivals
• Any and all other mutually beneficial arrangements

The first step to starting your online business should be to start a Blog.

Find a host (if you’re reading this post, then you’ve found one), sign up for a hosting plan, register a domain name, install WordPress… and then BLOG.

This should even come before your business plan for several reasons… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not exactly news anymore, but a few days ago Blogrush shut down.

It seemed like a great idea to share traffic between blogs, give new blogs a bit of exposure, and put content in front of people who would otherwise never find it.

But, at the end of the day… it just didn’t work. From the official Blogrush website:

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

I for one am sad to see something with great potential disappear. Sure, it didn’t work as well as expected but in theory, it’s still a great idea and I believe many of these problems that led to the downfall of Blogrush can be addressed.

I’m posting this message to explore the possibility of developing a new open source replacement for Blogrush… the same in terms of helping bloggers gain exposure by sharing traffic… but obviously a very different implementation since the route Blogrush took wasn’t met with success.

If you’re a blogger who is interested in seeing something developed, or a programmer interested in participating in a new project then leave a comment. As I said, I’m exploring possibilities and I’d love some feedback before I make a decision either way.

Those of you who are new to blogging may not know the name John Chow, but if you want to become successful then it’s a name you need to know.  Even before the days of WordPress, before TypePad, before content management systems even existed… John Chow has been blogging. He started his first website in 1999… way back in the 20th century, and for all intents and purposes that site was a blog. He currently has nearly 39,000 RSS feed subscribers and earns in any given month, the equivalent of a year’s salary for most people.

The obvious path to success is to simply do what successful people do.  And what John Chow does is simple (don’t confuse the word simple with the word easy… there’s a lot of hard work involved).

So, what does John Chow do? Read the rest of this entry »