Ok, folks, and now that you have read my previous weblog post on “How to Drive Weblog Traffic” I guess there wasn’t any escape to this other weblog entry I have just bumped into: “16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog” where, indeed, you will find there listed 16 other different ways to promote your weblog with some really good tips, apart from the fact that you can also read through the link from Robin Good on RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites.

While I was going through that particular weblog post about the “16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog” I actually found out that I have been doing things that I didn’t think they would increase the weblog read count but that they eventually may help out a bit in the end. For instance, take the example from Bloglet. I know that I am not using this offering, but I am using though FeedBlitz, which seems to be a bit more powerful and user friendly and still do the same thing as Bloglet. At least, it took me no time to set it up and get things going.

Other good tips that I have been executing in order to help increase my weblog readership are engaging in the weblog conversations through comments; use Ping-o-Matic! to ping weblog directories; add my weblog address in my e-mail signature file, whatever that may be (I have been doing this for years with all of my weblogs actually); post often to keep attracting more subscribers to come back; use trackbacks to quote and refer to other people’s weblog posts; making a commitment to weblog every day (At least, 10 minutes a day, something that I have been doing all along and with very good results taking advantage while harnessing my interstitial time for some time and which I am hoping I will be able to continue like that); and use a hit counter to track my visitor stats, something that I am already doing using Miarroba.

In short, what I have just realised while reading through “16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog” is that there are lots of different good tips out there to promote your weblog readership, but at the same time most of those tips are actually common sense, because without having expected too much from that weblog promotion I am finding out I have been following quite a few of those tips all along. But then again I keep on wondering if it will all be worth while the effort. What do you think ? Do you think that it would make any difference at all ?

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Blog+Traffic, FeedBlitz, Pingomatic, Miarroba

As you may have been able to see from my last weblog post (Weblog Content Migration Is Now Finished), I am now back in full shape after having migrated all content. So it was time to take things into the next level; which is start spreading around the message to the whole world that I have got a new weblog and that it is up and running with all the content I wanted to keep. That is why I started looking for information on increasing weblog traffic, something which I am sure everybody who has been running a weblog for some time would be very interested in. In most cases most of the information that has been shared has got to do with promoting your own external weblog, which is what I wanted to do, so that is when I bumped into the superb reference from Robin Good’s article: RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission. What a fantastic resource ! That link alone, folks, would keep you busy for a few hours in order to keep promoting your external weblog !

In fact, that is what I have been doing this weekend. I have gone through each and everyone of the different entries to try to promote my weblog in most of them and although some of the services were not active, and Robin has been kind enough to let us know, I have been able to register my weblog with almost every other service. Now we would need to wait for a couple of weeks, in some instances a little bit longer, to see if it had any effect.

However, I wanted to add something more into the conversations taking place over at Robin’s weblog post . There have been a couple of other links that I have found particularly interesting when promoting your weblog. Most of the tips included in them could also be applied to any Internet weblog so I thought I would share them over here for anybody who may be interested in them, just in case. I have weblogged about those links in the past. They are available here in elsua , my external weblog, now that I have finally finished with the migration from all contents. So without any further delay if you would want to read some more about how you could promote your weblog check out the following links:

Technorati Tags : Metablogging, Blog+Traffic

Ok, folks, that was it ! As you may have been able to see over the last four days I have been rather busy moving all the content from my older weblog into the new one and I am now happy to announce that migration has been completed ! So you will no longer get in your feeds over 30 weblog posts a day, or something like that, from elsua.

What you will be able to notice as well is that I have not moved all of the different weblog posts but those which I thought would still be relevant to the purpose of this particular weblog. At the same time you will also be able to see that I have updated all the different URL links to make sure they would all be working and I have also added for each of those migrated weblog entries the following sentence:  (Migrated weblog post from LSR). That way you can see that the content was already available at my former weblog. I still need to decide what I will be doing about the different comments posted in my former weblog but for the time being I will leave them where they are and see what I would want to do with them.

With all that said and now that the migration is complete I will continue with my weblog in the same way as before I got started with the migration, sharing, at least, one or two weblog posts a day so that you would have something to read on a daily basis.

Once again, and from here, I want to thank the folks where I am hosting my weblog and also the Admins from Blogsome for making this migration so much easier than whatever else I had anticipated from the very first beginning. Thanks a lot, folks ! Much appreciated all your help and committed support.

Let’s now move on !

Technorati Tags : Metablogging

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

If earlier on today I was talking about Blogging Means Business I would think you would also be interested in the following article by eWeek: Next-Generation Blogging Platform Previews. According to the article, it looks like SixApart has been very busy on a new, and very innovative, weblogging platform (Named Project Comet) that will become available in early 2006.

I am not sure why but I have never been a big fan of everything behind SixApart regarding weblogging; call it TypePad, MovableType or LiveJournal, whatever. I have never found them appealing enough to give them a try out. However, after I have read the eWeek news article, I may change that opinion very soon. You may be wondering why, right ? Well, mainly because of a couple of comments mentioned throughout the news article:

“Six Apart executives envision the blog evolving into a personal communication tool rather than an exclusively public medium”

and

“Interactivity and community building features will be emphasized in the company’s new service, with special focus on the ability to aggregate several separate blogs into a single screen, either in whole or just in sections”

I really think that those two comments regarding some of the different new features would probably be the ones that would make SixApart’s next release a very interesting phenomenon to watch on how it is going to paint itself in the Blogosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily think that it would be of a primary interest to family members and friends alone to have a weblog under this new weblogging platform. All the other way around. I think that businesses would also be having an additional interest in it. More than anything else from the perspective where we would be able to see how SixApart is trying to fill in a gap in the Knowledge Management, Communities and Collaboration areas by providing a platform where people would be executing more on that new trend called Personal Knowledge Management. But at the same time that would not become an individual effort on its own, since it would also allow webloggers to tap into other people’s weblogs and create a connection, that is, the purest form of a community.

And that, to me, is what will make Project Comet a very interesting initiative to follow up on as it will be creating a cross link between how webloggers work with their own weblogs and their audiences and other webloggers through the creation of informal communities of weblogs. WOW! Exciting, eh? Well, we will just have to wait and see how it goes further, but one thing for sure is that this is not going to be the last time I will be weblogging about this particular topic since I know we will have great things awaiting for us with the new upgrade. We will just have to wait and see how that will shape up. Thus stay tuned !

… And then I will find out myself if I am ready to dive into SixApart or stay with WordPress, so far my favourite weblogging platform.

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

You have probably seen this already, as it was published during the course of yesterday, but, just in case, you may not have seen it yet, over at IBM - On Demand Business there is a very interesting article about an interview with both IBM executives Harriet Pearson and Willy Chiu around the topic of weblogs: Blogging Means Business.

There have been a couple of people already weblogging on the topic, including BL Ochman and Neville Hobson, and I have just watched and listened to the interview and I can seriously recommend it to anybody who feels that corporate weblogging is not as important and key as they may have expected. Certainly, after you have watched and listened to the interview your opinion about weblogs will be different. I am sure. Both Harriet and Willy have always been inspiring enough to deliver very powerful messages and this time around they have done it again. Just to give you a quick excerpt of what they both talked about in Blogging Means Business here you have got a couple of random thoughts taken out of the interview about what weblogging means for IBM:

Weblogs is all about sharing expertise, building (And maintaining) a connection between different people with similar interests. A key element though is to keep on listening ! Listening to people who have got something to say about you, your product, your company, you name it. You cannot longer ignore the weblogging phenomenon. Yes, indeed, this is something that I have been mentioning myself for quite some time now.

Weblogs is all about how open do you want your company to be as you will be communicating with the whole world, whether you have an Intranet or an Internet weblog. Having weblogs will create customer loyalty, they will speed up innovation, team and different collaborative services. In short, “Weblogging is the glue that brings all the experts together within the company”, and beyond.

Lots of good information out there, indeed, folks, including as well some statistics on the number of IBM internal weblogs. A must watch if you are planning to get into weblogs, but do not know enough on how to get things going, as another powerful enabler to encourage people to collaborate and share knowledge with one another in a much more intuitive and direct way.

Thus with all that said I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank both Willy and Harriet for taking the initiative to show how committed IBM is to weblogging. And as far as the credibility from both Harriet and Willy is concerned, since they do not have an external weblog (Yet), I can only say that having one of the first Intranet weblogs myself I have always found their own internal weblogs very inspiring about what the whole phenomenon of weblogging is all about. I am sure that sooner or later, at one point or another, they will dive into creating their own external weblogs and continue delivering those key messages on how beneficial weblogging can be for any company who wants to be open. So stay tuned !

Technorati Tags : CorporateBlogging, IBM, Blogging

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

Over time, you always have got a tendency to get the same types of questions over and over again. Yet, for some of them there are easier ways of finding a solution than for others where it would require some substantial work. Funny thing is that those recurring questions seem to be slightly more complicated every time they come up. And this is what has been happening to me over the last few months. Lots and lots of people have been asking me over and over again how they can go ahead and share their knowledge and collaborate with their peers when they are busy doing something else working on the different projects they may be involved with. The complicated item in here as well is the situation were lots of people think that sharing knowledge is a hardworking activity that would require substantial amount of time and therefore some people think that sharing knowledge is just not worth their time and effort. Boy, are they just so wrong or what?

Sharing knowledge and collaborating with your peers is just an activity you engage with just whenever you have got some free time for it, not when somebody tells you to do so. Sharing knowledge cannot be imposed on anyone, no matter what people say, and cannot be rewarded or incentivised like it is happening in most cases all over the place. Instead, sharing knowledge and collaborating with your peers needs to be encouraged and promoted as an ad-hoc activity for those spare or idle moments in between much more complicated activities. And since lots of people keep on asking me how to get engaged in such a way where they could share their knowledge with little effort but still getting the most out of the experience I just advise them to check out the following weblog post from 43folders: Harnessing your interstitial time.

Harnessing your interstitial time is probably one of the best reads I have come across in months as it clearly puts together a very strong and clear message as to what Knowledge Management and collaboration is all about. It is not about writing long essays or books or updating websites with some large content or when creating lengthy weblog posts that would take ages for people to digest. It is more about spending some time on those idle moments, where nothing seems to be happening while we wait for things to take place, when we can take the most advantage for knowledge sharing and collaboration. That is when the inspiration and the motivation would come up to share some knowledge with your colleagues. The key thing from Harnessing your interstitial time is that it brings forward a message that anybody can do apply successfully Knowledge Management principles about sharing knowledge and collaborating with others who may need to know or be aware of what is happening.

And as you can read from the weblog post there are tons of ideas for short activities to get engage with in order to share knowledge with others. Sometimes a simple phone call, or an e-mail, or an IM / VoIP conversation with others would be more than enough to get the ball rolling and start sharing for the benefit of the group. And this is what 43folders has put together very nicely. A good listing of impressive tips with which nobody can say there is any longer an excuse to share knowledge with your peers, since we are all having lots of idle moments during the course of the day, and yet we do not get anything done during those time lapses. Well, maybe we should do something now, maybe we should start taking much more seriously Knowledge Management and encourage folks that the benefits of knowledge sharing and collaboration are much more rewarding than working in your own silo without looking any further. And on top of that you can do it in a much shorter time than you thought. Or not ? Thus are you harnessing your interstitial time well enough or are you thinking that those idle moments are still unproductive and you are just as fine with that? I guess you decide but let me tell you how easy it is just to make things work and share that knowledge with others. You just need to dive in for a few minutes and off you go. You have done your work and have made it work for others. Knowledge Management in its purest form: sharing knowledge whenever you want with whoever you want in the time span you decide it is best for everyone and without having any restrictions on the nature of the amount of time spent.

I tell you, folks, if you are looking for an inspirational weblog post to help improve the productivity of your colleagues by helping them share their knowledge and expertise I doubt there is a simpler, yet so much more effective, way of achieving this than 43Folder’s Harnessing your interstitial time.