Negativity is poisonous. So is positivity. Choose wisely with which you’re going to poison your audience.

Here’s my brain dump so far. This might not look like a completed blog post, but we’ll see if this kind of format works.

• Our posting frequency sets our readers’ expectation for future posts. Some people might leave if you post too frequently. Some people might leave if we post too rarely, thinking our blog has gone to the graveyard of ideas.
• Then again, early on we might or might not have too many readers, so it will depend. If you are a relatively unknown blogger with a new blog, worrying about readers’ expectation is a good practice but might not be the main issue yet. It will be a different story if your blog is new but you’re already famous (like Fortuitous).
• If we post frequently early on, the more we provide many interesting contents for new visitors. I don’t think there’s more compelling reason for reader to subscribe to our blog other than when they find good contents over and over again.
• However, posting frequently might result in our own disappointment seeing that our ideas are met with little pageviews/comments/traffic/interests in general (our blog is new, after all!). Note that, once you hold firmly to your ideas and you have lots of confidence with them, you will be able to ward off those stupid thoughts that “my ideas aren’t good enough for others”.
• If we post slowly early on, what would be the downside? I believe that a blog grows by the usefulness of every post, e.g: it’s not the quantity that matters anymore, but quality. If you can be sure to bring excellent post every time, why not keep it slow and steady so you have more time to prepare your next great blog post?
• Also remember that the universe we’re living in is so much bigger than our blogs. We have other things to care about, families, children, friends, our other dreams. So, there’s completely no reason to hate slow posting schedule if you need to take the time to manage other things as well. Your blog is yours, not the other way.

Do you have any other ideas you’d like to add here?

Success, I should say, is a rather simple process. Too often we forget about simple things in the midst of the never-ending stream of information. However, beneath the simplicity there lies great strength and knowledge. So, without further ado, here’s my Three Plain Steps to Successful Blogging.

Step 1: Have No Problem Believing in Your Dream.

Step 2: Put Yourself in a State as if You’ve Reached Your Dream, and Act Accordingly.

Step 3: Carry on.

That is all.

The third step to successful blogging is to carry on.

It’s that simple. Whether you fail, whether you succeed, you should carry on. Perseverance is key. That’s what separate the successful bloggers and the others.

It will take time, so just don’t stop.

There is no fourth step.

I previously wrote about the first step to successful blogging here.

The second step to successful blogging is that you must put yourself in a state as if you have reached your dream, and then act accordingly.

If you are already a successful blogger, how are you going to schedule your posts? What would you write? How would you entertain, teach, and congratulate your audience?

If it’s hard for you to imagine yourself to be the successful person you aim to be, then step two is not for you, yet. Learn to imagine and dream more and more, and try to believe it.

Do you realize how many blogs are available out there? I have lost track of the statistics, but I’m sure tens of thousands blogs are created every day. New voices, new ideas, new conversations.

I am worried that the blogosphere is turning into a graveyard of ideas.

The reasoning, simply, is that there are lots and lots of unrecognized voices out there. Brilliant ideas, interesting reads, all drowned within the noise of so many cats blog (i.e: blogs that just tell about what the blogger’s cat just ate, and such).

Some, hopefully, are indexed properly in search engines, waiting to be picked up by someone with the correct keyword. The rest, I believe, remain in the dark. This brings me into thinking that if you cared about your idea, it’s really important to be responsible about it. By responsible I mean that you must do your best to let people know about it, let conversations grow around it, let it stand the test of time under the scrutiny of your audiences.

Leaving your precious ideas in the hands of fate or (ahem) search engine indexes might not be the best plan to have.

If your idea is important to you, then there’s no other way but to learn how to let the rest of the world know. No, simply writing it in your blog is not equal to letting the rest of the world know. Brilliant idea tend to illuminate itself by default, but without proper marketing skill we had better prepare a new tombstone celebrating its tragic death.

It’s a huge world out there, the blogosphere. Most of them burial grounds. I hope your (and my) blog is out there doing crazy things to keep it alive and thus, negating the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the graveyard of ideas.

Actually, this is a general rule for pretty much everything you wanted to be successful in. Applies perfectly to blogging, of course:

The first step to be successful is that you must have no problem believing in your dream.

That is all. Have a nice day, my kind readers.

I am sure there are lots of things we can learn from our it-felt-warm-when-I-fall-in-love heart. But did you know that we can also learn a lot from our dude-I-pump-blood-everyday heart?

Here’s the story. I’m not that good in Biology, so I’ll keep it short.

We all know the amazing task about our heart. It must distribute blood to every other places inside our body, about 60 times a second or double that if you’re in the middle of an embarassing situation (like misspelling ‘embarrassing’). Blood, of course, carries oxygen and other important stuff that our cells need. To put it simply, we can’t live without a heart.

And, what does that have to do with blogging?

You see, sometimes blogging is like being a heart. One of the most important advice in blogging is that we are better off writing for our audience. We pump blood to them, distributing valuable materials and hope that someday it may touch someone’s soul.

But here’s the little secret of our heart:

Before it pumps blood to other parts of our body, it pumps blood to itself first.

This little secret is crucial. Just like any other part of our body, our heart needs blood as well. And so, with it being a very important organ, its survivability is of higher priority.

Now back to blogging. I firmly believe the value of writing for our audience. I strive for it. What worries me is that I might get trapped in that way of thinking, I ended up neglecting myself.

Learning from the story above, I’d say this:

Before we bring value to our audience, we must make sure that our writing enriches ourselves first.

Remember the heart.

Is the number of comments on a post indicative of the post’s popularity and success? Is it the traffic that comes to that post? Is it the number of trackbacks? Is it the fact that the post got dug by Digg or linked to from a popular traffic-driving site? Is who linked to your post part of your determination of a blog post’s success?

Those are from Lorelle’s Blog Challenge this week. And needless to say, each of those factors is a very valid success measurement of a blog post.

Well, but I have a problem here.

My blog is not well-known. I have small-to-nothing traffic.

In other words, if I were to use those factors to see whether my post is successful or not, then damn, I’m screwed up.

I’m not one to let myself get depressed of course, so here’s my own success measurement:

My post is successful when it manages to convey what I truly want to say from my heart.

With this, I can proudly say that I do have a bunch of successful posts. Yes, some (even most) of them aren’t that good in terms of bringing traffic or trackback or whatnot, but I’m happy reading them myself since they sound honest and true.

As per the worldly statistics and such, I think it’s more of a question on how I judge the success of my traffic-and-link building strategy.

And that, my friends, would be the question for another day.

Continuing The Worry-Free Blogging quest, now is the time to find blogs to read. As a reminder, here’s the two steps idea for Worry-Free Blogging:

1. Focus on creating valuable content.
2. Join the conversation.

Finding blogs to read is part of plan #2 on the list above. Let’s not delve further on plan #1 because we can easily find many articles written on this topic by people smarter than I am. For starters, here are some illuminating posts from Lorelle, Copyblogger, and Stephen Downes. Jakob Nielsen also had a good article that forces us to think whether we should create blog posts or articles.

Now that the first plan is covered (by others, fortunately), I can resume thinking about plan #2.

Here’s my proposed requirements in finding the blogs to read:

1. Interesting.
2. Relevant.

Interesting blogs stand out so well that finding them is very easy. In the realms of Plain Blogging, ease is king. So, if the blog sparks interest, they’re the candidates. Relevancy would act as the final test. Those irrelevant blogs, no matter how funny, will need to go. Be ruthless.

Now, once the blogs are found, here’s how to pick the conversation:

1. Relevant.
2. Interesting.

Yes, in that order. Remember that even the best of blogs might start an interesting, yet irrelevant conversation from time to time. This is why relevancy should come first. Interesting yet irrelevant conversation = hours of procrastinating. In reality, relevant topic is blessed with its own latent interesting factor, so it won’t be that hard to follow.

The Alternative Method

Okay, to be honest, I’m not following that rule I made above. The reason is simple, it’s too theoretical! I do believe that I’ve made it short enough for others to use, and I would suggest to others to try it. However, I’m using my own, one-question method to pick the blogs I’d love to read. That particular question is:

Will I Wget this?

See, I’m a bookworm. I love reading. And whenever I came across a really, really great blog, the first desire that crossed my mind is to save a complete mirror of the site into my disk, so I can read everything they have to offer offline. Which is what the Wget software does.

Many blogs have relevant and interesting contents, but only those that did it over and over again will make me answer “Yes!” to my own question. Those will be the one I’ll read and follow.

The Results for Me

After applying the above method, here are my list of blogs to Wget read.

• Blog Herald.
• Lorelle on WordPress.
• Problogger.
• Copyblogger.
• Daily Blog Tips.

Okay, so this ended up just like everyone else’s list. I’m not worried, though, it’s the wisdom of the crowd. I am sure there are non A-list bloggers out there that I should be looking for.

This might call for another post, I think. Or do you know any other blogs you’d like to suggest?