The Everyday Blogger

How To Pick The Right Topic For Your Blog

The big question when starting a new blog is always, "What should I blog about?"

Your blog topic is most important because it's something you should care about deeply as you will be writing about that topic all the time, it gives your audience something to learn from and relate with, and your topic will determine what kinds of brands you can work with for advertising or sponsorship.

In this post, I'll share the typical advice on how to pick a blog topic and then my advice. The two are related yest different in approach.

It's a Sign: How Drinking Water Launched Me on Twitter

I moved to Arizona on Wednesday leaving San Francisco. Until I find a permanent home, I'm staying at a suites type of place in Scottsdale with kitchen and free wifi. I was feeling homesick already when I landed at the airport, but when I drove up to my hotel and saw this Drinkwater street sign, I felt welcomed.

Part of me is really tempted to high jack the sign. {insert devilish grin}

Who knew a glass of water would make a difference

You see, one of the things that catapulted me on Twitter @skinnyjeans was a daily hydration nudge where I reminded everyone to drink a glass of water. I quickly became known as that "drink water lady."

I always tell people to never underestimate the effectiveness of a tweet. In your mind, something may seem insignificant or mundane, but to someone else (or thousands others) that tweet could mean something.

I started the hydration nudge back in 2007 when I was working on dropping the last 10 pounds, and I did it simply to remind myself to drink water. There was no strategic thinking or brainstorming like, "Oh, this water thing is really going to take off."

I believe the water hydration nudge resonated with people because:

• Everyone is always saying to themselves, "Oh, I should drink more water." I remind them.

• It's an effortless action item that takes seconds to do. I only focus on one glass because that's easily doable. Saying "go drink 8 glasses" is too much and decreases the odds of someone actually taking action.

I also attach a benefit to remind people of what they can gain by drinking that one glass. My hydration nudges are my most often retweeted tweets.

• The hydration nudge is tied into my brand of healthy living.

How to become a tweeter known for something

The best way to be known for a type of tweet is to pick something that you do all the time or that resonates with you because your positive energy will naturally exude and people will pick up on it. Also, make it simple or something that is easily doable.

As well, write the tweet in a way that lists 1. A simple action and 2. a benefit that people can gain by doing the action. Who knows perhaps you can become the next "back up your data" or "go stretch" tweeter.

10 Habits of a Savvy Twitterer

This post has moved to Stephanie's main blog Noshtopia.com here.

When Moving On Literally Means Moving

  

Note: Picture is a stretch of highway in Wyoming during a fun road trip this summer.

Besides death and taxes, change is a guaranteed. Nothing stays static because change happens whether we like it or not. Can you hear Yoda, "Change is so. Be it must."

Life with all its change will consist of beginnings and endings and cycle like a Ferris wheel. I guess that’s part of the fun and hell of the ride.

Recently, I've come to an ending in my life, a pretty significant and much needed one actually, and have decided this time around that moving on literally means moving...somewhere else this is not in California.

Where am I moving to you ask?

Business Perspective: How I Decided To Retire A Popular Blog

In June, I retired my blog Back in Skinny Jeans which was a popular and high traffic blog by an individual in the healthy living niche. In the blog's goodbye post, "When It's Time to Let Go of the Skinny Jeans," I shared the emotional and mental reasons behind my decision to retire the blog.

Today, I'd like to share some of the business reasons behind my decision because I think it's a good reminder that when you make money from your blogging you are not only a blogger but a business owner as well. From my observations, the bloggers who operate understanding this fact are the ones who end up making more money, growing their brands, and landing opportunities that extend into bigger media.

As well, it is a balancing act being a content creator, a more right-brain activity, and a business owner, a more left-brain activity all in the same body. As many of you know, it's not easy to be 2-in-1 like that. Most of us tend to favor or be much better at one activity over the other.

To give you a better picture of the business side of Back in Skinny Jeans, here are some key stats over the blog's life, 3 years and 8 months:

In Easy Speak: What Does the # Hashtag Symbol Mean on Twitter?

One of the most frequently asked questions about a tweet is, "What does this # symbol (aka the hashtag) in front of a word mean like #cupcakes or #BSG?"

The geeky explanation is, "Hashtags in Twitter are a community-driven convention for adding metadata to your tweets. They were originally developed to create groups on Twitter for tracking a topic." {source Read Write Web}

Ok, where's the No Sweat explanation

Not to worry. I too like you can get that deer in headlights look at the sight of words like "metadata." Metaphorically, I like to describe the hashtag # in front of a descriptive word as a way to help to organize and find tweets on specific topics much like how file folders and sticky notes in book pages work.

Because I'm a visual creature, here I have illustrated basically how the hashtag works conceptually on Twitter...

3 Ways to Make Your Tweets Easier For Others To Retweet

One of the best ways to increase your odds of getting your tweets retweeted is to make those tweets easy for others to retweet.

Quite often, original tweets have to be manipulated in order to make them retweetable. Here's 3 ways to make your tweets easier for others to retweet:

1. When composing your tweet, remember that your retweet sig will be added onto the front end when someone retweets your tweet. This means that the original tweet you write will actually be less than 140 characters as you factor in your retweet sig. The "retweet sig(nature)" consists of the letters RT, a space, your @name, and a space before the first word of the tweet.

Here is an example of a tweet written by @SusanCosmos that I really liked and wanted to retweet.

I retweeted or RT (to use Twitter abbreviated lingo) Susan's tweet and here's what the retweet looks like...

Adding a "Retweet This" Button to Your Blog

Now that Twitter is proving itself to be a hotbed of traffic for bloggers, getting a post retweeted is a big score in terms of getting viral exposure for your blog.

Many bloggers, yours truly included, are using the Tweetmeme "Retweet this" button on their blogs to make it super easy for their readers to retweet a post. Tweetmeme offers two visual choices of buttons:

 

Here is where you get the Tweetmeme code for each button option.

Blogger and Wordpress

If you use the Blogger or Wordpress platforms for blogging, here's further explanation on how to integrate the Tweetmeme "Retweet This" button into your template:

• Integrating the button into a Wordpress template
• Using the Wordpress Plugin
• Integrating the button into Blogger

TypePad and other blog platforms

If you use TypePad or any other blog platform that Tweetmeme does not currently have integration options for, or you use Blogger and Wordpress but get deer in headlights when thinking about integrating anything into a template, you can simply cut & paste, the "Retweet this" code for the button style you like into each post.

For example, I use TypePad for Everyday Tweet. I go into the "Edit HTML" tab of my post, and insert the Tweetmeme code at the very bottom of the post. Yes, for now, I have to cut & paste for every post. Hopefully soon, Tweetmeme will have an integration option for TypePad.

Make your blog title retweet friendly

Now that getting retweeted is a factor in your blogging efforts, it's even more impotant to create a blog title for each post that is retweet friendly. In this post: "3 Ways To Make Tweets Easier For Others To Retweet" #3 is specifically about writing blog titles for use with the Tweetmeme button.

What is a Retweet and How Do I Retweet?

A Retweet in Twitter is when you see a tweet you like written by someone else, and you want to share that tweet with your Followers.

For example, I saw this tweet from @Foodimentary about a marinara sauce factoid that I thought my audience would enjoy, and here's how I retweeted Foodimentary's tweet:

1. Highlight and copy the Foodimentary tweet
2. Hit the Reply arrow on the side of the box

When you hit the reply button, your Twitter stream will open up straight to your home box along with Foodimentary's name with the @ symbol attached.

What the @ symbol does is let Foodimentary see in their @replies box that you did a retweet of their tweet. This is nice because people like to see where there stuff has been mentioned. Helps you build goodwill with others.

3. Paste the Foodimentary tweet

4. Add the letters RT which stand for Retweet in front of the @name. It is important to add the letters RT because it gives credit to the original source of the tweet, and communicates to your audience, "Hey guys, here's something cool I saw and wanted to share." It also tells Twitter that your tweet is Retweet and not a continuation of a conversation.

It is also important to make sure there is a space between the letters RT and the @Foodimentary name. If the RT and @ are butted up next to each other, the @Foodimentary name cannot become a live link again to let Foodimentary that you retweeted them.

 

5. Hit the Update button, and now the Retweet will show up in your Twitter stream, and in Foodimentary's @replies stream.

A common faux pas newbies make is simply copying someone else's tweet, going back to their home page, pasting the tweet in their home box, and then hitting the update button with no addition of the RT or the person's @Twitter name.

This makes the tweet appear like you are the original source/creator of the tweet which is not the case. It appears that you are plagiarizing someone else's tweet which is not a way to build goodwill.

It's always a good rule of thumb to be generous with praise and to give credit to other people's work again helping you build goodwill with others and in the Twitter community as a whole.

What is a Tweet and What Does it Mean?

I find it amusing how the meaning of a word can change over time and in context when something new and hot comes along. Remember when a post was a piece of lumber in the ground? Now it's a noun/verb referring to an article or something you do on a blog or social site.

The word tweet was more commonly referred to a chirping bird sound, but now, tweet is also a noun/verb depending on context in reference to a 140 character text you create on Twitter, a service which I affectionately describe as a Swiss army knife of texting awesomeness. Here's why I describe Twitter that way.

Here's examples of the word tweet in use:

• Tweet as a noun: "Did you see that tweet from Demi Moore (aka @mrskutcher) about the celebrity she's be most excited about meeting?"

• Tweet as a verb: "That is hilarious! I will tweet about the dog chewing mom's snuggie."