15 Blogging Tips and Tools – Blog Case Study

The following post was submitted by Easton Ellsworth as part of the ProBlogger Case Study Series

Hello! I’m Easton Ellsworth, associate editor for the Know More Media network of blogs about business. I blog at Business Blog Wire about corporate blogging. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah with my wife and baby.

Know More Media launched in December 2005, using the publishing power and search-engine-friendly nature of blogging to establish an online network offering business news and information on a wide range of topics. Blogging makes it incredibly easy to publish on the Web, and has done wonders for our organic traffic (traffic from search engine results and other links instead of from paid advertising).

Business Blog Wire was one of the first six KMM blogs. There are now more than 45 KMM authors publishing about 100 posts daily to 50-plus blogs!

I published my first post on October 17, 2005 and immediately found blogging extremely enjoyable.

We currently monetize our blogs using a mix of Google AdSense and affiliate programs. So far, so good. Blogging is like farming: You typically must spend months of arduous labor before you can finally reap the fruits of your work.

Since I began tracking my blog’s traffic a couple months ago, I’ve averaged about 70 unique visitors and about 130 page views per day. You can see my Sitemeter stats here. Note: Since I began posting three times a day instead of one, my traffic has approximately doubled.

My future ambitions for Business Blog Wire include more reviews of corporate blogs, more interviews with corporate bloggers and more collaborative projects with my readers. I believe that the Web has tremendous potential as a tool for human collaboration – the Wikipedia is a shining example of that. And I hope to invite more of my readers to work with me to help other business bloggers be successful.

My favorite part of blogging is the fine people I have come to know in the blogosphere. I find it pleasantly ironic that the biggest names in blogging are typically the easiest to talk to – that is, they answer your emails and even your calls, and are almost always willing to help you. Lesson learned: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE. Do not be afraid to ask big questions and big favors of bigtime bloggers. Just remember to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and you’ll reap what you sow. “Enough preaching, Easton,” I hear you saying. Okay, enough – but I promise that following these simple ideals will bless your blogging experience tremendously.

Eight excellent tools I use:

1. Movable Type makes my blog publishing as easy as cake.
2. Newsgator enables me, as a network editor, to review every KMM post on a continuous basis.
3. Cocomment helps me track my online conversations.
4. Firefox improves my productivity with its speed, tabbed browsing, extensions, security and bookmarking features.
5. Gmail simplifies my email tasks.
6. Writely (what a godsend!) speeds up my word processing and notetaking.
7. MS Excel lets me keep a record of all kinds of statistics for our blogs and authors.
8. Know More Media has developed a special Author Control Panel (see http://www.knowmoremedia.com/2006/03/press_release_on_our_author_co.html) that eliminates most of my worries as a blog editor and blogging mentor.

My seven top blogging tips (from personal experience):

1. Post FREQUENTLY. Use a feedreader and write constantly about what you learn.
2. Think of your readers. What would help them the most? Write that.
3. Love your visitors. Encourage them to leave comments and contact you personally. When they do, take the time to personally thank them and invite them back.
4. Be different. Share your own original thoughts and projects.
5. PERSERVERE. An unending stream of good posts outdoes an intermittent trickle of outstanding ones.
6. Never stop learning. Your appetite for new tools, new practices and new knowledge must be insatiable.
7. Go out of your way to selflessly help people, and you will be amazed what rewards you will receive.