Okay, so first off, let me say that I’m a guy that likes to make lists and stuff that you can remember easily. Why? I’m just a typical guy, and while I may be majoring in engineering, quantum physics is just as challenging to you as it is to me. So, I like to learn and remember stuff in my own way. I’m sure you do. So, just like those 5W1H writing techniques, let me introduce to you, my 5 R’s to a successful blogging career.

Before I go on any further though, these R’s are just a five that I feel are important to a blogger. Obviously blogging is a bit arduous and requires a certain degree of expertise, and thus, I believe there are more to blogging that these five R’s. However, remember how I said I like to make all these funky lists to help me remember stuff? Well, this is just another one of them which I’m sure you’ll find easy to remember and recall during your blogging career.

Revelation
Before I go and explain this one, let me say that no, we’re not talking about The Holy Bible here. Revelation here indicates that you want to be different—a unique and a one of a kind blogger. As a blogger, to gain the maximum exposure, you want to voice something unique. If you don’t write something different and just replicate the other hundred blogs in your niche, there is NO REASON for a visitor to visit your blog.

So how can you be different? How can you be a revelation in the blogosphere? How can you take the blogosphere by a storm? There are actually quite a few ways in my opinion. One of them is developing current existing information with your personal color and research. However, this is a bit more challenging as you need to know the line between plagiarizing and not. You could also be the first to announce a new discovery or some release in the niche your blog is in. This is bound to bring some traffic to you and heighten your authority in the blogosphere, but again, this is a bit challenging. What I have found to be the easiest is just being yourself and supplying the information that is in demand. By supplying here, I’m talking about giving your personal take on a certain popular incident. Usually this works pretty well, as everyone has their own view on a topic.

Reputation
I’ve said quite a few times in my blog that a blog is, in a way, a resume. Well, since there are words that employers these days are even looking at potential employees’ Facebook profiles, I don’t see why a blog should be any different. Thus, a clean record and a good reputation within the blogosphere are important. So how do you create or maintain this reputation? It’s all about being diligent. Working hard in producing great posts, not forgetting to market your blog correctly, doing business legitimately, and always making new connections are just a few ways to get your reputation up. Remember, it’s a resume that you have here that you are composing.

Reciprocation
Blogging is often a two way relationship, thus the name of this section, reciprocation. The connection is either between you, the blogger, and a reader, or you the blogger, and another blogger. Without this relationship, I don’t think you can say that you are having the best blogging experience. If you were the only one who wrote and read the posts, isn’t that more like a secret diary online? To really experience the connections bloggers can make with others, you need blog as if you are talking to someone beside you, just that with blogs, you are doing it in words.

Also, I talk quite often about reciprocating, or replying, between bloggers. An essential part of a successful blogging experience and career is networking with other bloggers within your niche. To do this, take some initiative and make some connections going. Once you have established a decent relationship, maintain that relationship by commenting on that blogger’s posts, giving link love, and just thanking the other blogger for even small things like a casual comment. Social networking is crucial and through your first initiative and then a follow-up, a connection is created. This connection can only turn out to have positive outcomes in the future.

Rejuvenation/Revitalization
Blogging can be quite hard and taxing. I’m sure that even the likes of Darren Rowse from ProBlogger gets tired of blogging from time to time. It’s just inevitable and you’re bound to burn out sooner or later. Unfortunately, you are the only one who can fix that problem, but this is how I overcome it. It could work for you, but it also might not.

Anyways, what I do to revitalize myself is I look over some goals that I set at the early stages of the blog and try to revive the enthusiasm that I had when I was just starting out. Remembering all these goals and also remembering the times that I reached some of these goals just motivates me and gives me the energy that I need to keep blogging. Knowing the feeling of achieving something just makes me keep on wanting to go forward with blogging. Of course, this is all just me, but it could be you too, so try to remember those early days in your blogging career. If you’re just starting out, just often remind yourself how blogging is like a marathon and you should always keep your goal in mind and not be distracted by any outside factors that may discourage you or stop you from blogging.

Reflection
Throughout my years of blogging, I have learned quite a lot about blogging and just the general web. I have earned quite a bit of money, but have also lost just as much due to poor decisions. I have gained a lot of friends, partners, and contacts, but I have also fell apart with a few individuals, although I did make it up to them now. Now that I think about it, these experiences helped me quite a bit as I was able to grow as a blogger and grow as a responsible individual.

If you are quite an experienced blogger, try re-reading some of your old posts. I’m sure you agree with me that some of them are pretty bad. Maybe you solved those issues already, but most of the time, you probably didn’t. Grab these chances and see how you can change and grow as a blogger. Did you use a lot of informal language? Well, it’s an indication that you should be more careful on your word choice if you’re looking to be famous. Were you only focused on growing your blog and not contributing to others’ blogs? Again, it’s an opportunity for you to realize this and go on to make a few comments or even write guest posts on other blogs. I’ve found reflection as a great way to grow in anything. Of course, reflecting as a blogger helps in growing too.

Conclusion
Revelation. Reputation. Reciprocation. Rejuvenation/Revitalization. Reflection. These are definitely five aspects of blogging which I feel can play an important role in your success as a blogger. Yeah, the “5 R’s to a Successful Blogging Career” is just a fancy way of putting all this, but if it sticks in you this way, why not?

Obviously there are more than these five that you need to be aware of to be successful. In fact, there are so many that I never would be able to write up a one complete post just on it. I doubt anyone would be able to write a book on it. After all, success can be attained in so many ways.

However, if you have any tips beyond these five that you used or kept in mind to be somewhat successful in the blogosphere, please feel free to share your account via the comments. Remember, success is relative and thus, all comments are welcome. If a post per day is a success story to you, by all means share it with us. If making a nine figure is a success to hear, I’d love to hear that too. Cheers.

As a blogger, there are so many things that you have to do. Without realizing, you may be busily making your 10th twitter update of the day or just be reading and reading blog post after blog post. Then, all of a sudden, you realize that you really didn’t get a whole lot done for your own blog. You just wasted a whole lot of time, which in a way, is money.

Blogging is an enjoyable activity, but it can also be an exacting one. If you don’t manage your time well and be efficient, you can run out of things to blog about, make your blog go idle, or at worst, lose interest and throw your blog (and potential money) away. Efficiency is what can help you, as a blogger, keep your blog rolling with minimal effort, while producing quality articles. That’s what I’m going to be talking about today.

Begin by Setting a Goal
I fail to do this on a daily basis, but whenever I do remember, I try to set a goal for the day. It varies from day to day. To give a few examples, these goals range from planning on writing a few posts within a certain time frame to making a certain amount of comments in other bloggers’ blogs. Note that there is no pressure for you to achieve these goals. However, you should still make an effort to reach them. At first, this is one of the harder parts to becoming an efficient blogger. Once you catch the rhythm though, it’ll get easier and easier.

Make Notes Often
A good portion of blogging is writing about something. Finding these unique topics to write about can be quite demanding. Thus, instead of thinking about what to blog about while staring at your monitor, try to make a habit of making notes every time you see or hear about something interesting that you could blog about. In addition, when you do use one of your ideas, be sure to not throw away the other ideas. Keep them in a Word document or save them as drafts for future use. I personally have over 50 drafts just for BloggersWalk. Most of these drafts only have a title and a simple sentence so that when I open up one of my drafts later on, I can quickly remember the incident and develop the post.

Bookmark Aggressively Using Your Browser
If the above was making notes in your daily life, this one is making notes while you browse the web. Most browsers nowadays have a pretty good bookmarking feature where you can organize your bookmarks anyway you want. Whenever you see something awesome, bookmark it! Note that these bookmarks can be used for various things. They can be used in ways such as for research or to link to for further reference. However, keep in mind that bookmarks should not be used to steal ideas or to plagiarize in some sort of way. That’s not the point of bookmarking. As a blogger, you should bookmark to go back on good information.

Give Yourself Space and Time
To deliver quality content, you need to focus. At least for me, it is really hard to write up a decent post while listening to music and chatting on MSN. Maybe I’m just a really bad at multitasking. However, I honestly believe that even if you are a great multitasker, you will be able to work much better if you give yourself some space and time, and devote your whole self into writing the post. Don’t let other things distract you from working on your post, as you want to be efficient. You don’t want to be spending five hours writing two sentences.

Are you an efficient blogger? Personally, I’m not that efficient and have often caught myself wasting too much time on one blog that I don’t have enough time for my other blogs. Thus, I did a little bit of research to find some ways to be a bit more efficient. I’ve only implemented this “technique” for about a month or so, but have found it to be great, as I now have quite a bit of extra time in my hands.

If you are an efficient blogger and thinks that these tips are a joke, please do share with me your techniques on how you stay efficient. Maybe you don’t think it’s a joke, but have other routines to keep yourself efficient. Why don’t you share it with the rest of the community through a simple comment? I’d really appreciate it and I’m sure many others would too. Thanks!

I just wanted to say that I’m still here and I’m not taking another hiatus from BloggersWalk. I already explained it over at ahnternet, but my server was having some massive problems with four CPUs having a load of 25+. Actually I didn’t know about this error until today, and I thought that my Internet was the problem. However, I realized the loads today and moved to a better server with eight CPUs.

BloggersWalk should thus load a bit quicker for you guys and it definitely does for me. I was supposed to put up a post yesterday, but this is the main reason why I couldn’t. I won’t be a dork and skip this update. In the next 24 hours, that update that was due will go live. Just to give you all a sneak peak, it’ll be a post about being efficient as a blogger.

The reason behind the topic is that I realize many bloggers (including myself) are students, and as the summer wraps up, our schedules that we had over the summer will be very different than our schedules for the next few months. So, I decided to touch on the topic of being an efficient blogger, so that’s going to be coming up in the next few hours.

Yeah, that’s about it. Just thought I’d give a heads up and an update on a no update. On a side note, let’s congratulate CERN for their beam today. I watched it live and it was truly an awesome moment as I’m quite interested in that science, geeky stuff.

An integral part of the blogosphere is the comments. I honestly cannot imagine a blog without comments. It is what develops the original article, publicizes the commentators to the blogosphere, and bonds the bloggers even more. However, more recently, with so many contests related to comment making and so many plugins promoting commenting, I’ve noticed a drop in what I would consider quality comments.

As a still unknown blogger in the blogosphere, I have tried immensely to make thoughtful comments. Consequently, on a few occasions, I even got a personal email from the person running the blogger, thanking me for an excellent contribution. These are the moments when I really felt that my one comment was and always could be better than a post or a tutorial on my blogs.

So, how do you make quality comments that will dazzle the blogger and make other commentators look like they are spamming?

Develop the Original Post
These days, I see a lot of “Thanks for the information!” and “Wow, a great post!” type of comments flying around. Those comments are warming and motivating for the blogger, but wouldn’t a blogger absolutely love it if one of the commentators stood up and wrote a lengthy comment further developing the original post? If it was me, first, I’d be amazed at the commentator’s knowledge, and second, wish that this commentator made more comments to my posts.

Most of the bloggers encourage comments by leaving their blog posts slightly open. I’ve personally posted about how these incomplete posts (of course, not to the point that you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about) stimulate the commentators from posting. Bloggers want and like commentators who thank them, but they also like those who develop their posts. It’s not at all an offense for pointing out and developing an incomplete corner of the post. Bloggers love it!

Follow-up Your Comments
While comments are awesome, it is important to follow-up on comments too. One of my pet peeves is those who vanish after they make a certain claim or say that they are going to do something. A follow-up to such actions are necessary. With commenting, it is similar. You want to follow-up on the comments that are posted on your blog AND the comments to your comments that you posted on another blog.

This shows that you are both dedicated and professional with what you are doing. Even if you don’t have anything much to say to follow-up, in such a situation, you don’t need a beautiful, dazzling comment. A simple “I see your point” or a “Thanks for your input” ensures that professionalism that you want to maintain in the blogosphere.

Sound Encouraging and Euphemize
I’ve seen a few hater comments flying around recently and in my opinion, they really don’t do much. If you don’t have anything nice or worth saying, why say it? You might ask, “But Static, what if it is really bad!”

Euphemism. Indirectly point out what is wrong, but say it in a more mild way or an encouraging way. If you have been blogging for a while, you probably know that most bloggers will accept constructive criticism. Blogging is all about saying your opinion, so a constructive criticism is always healthy. I personally love it when my readers point out a mistake I made or have a different opinion than me. It just makes me a little bit better. Make sure that your comments sound nice and even if its real meaning may not be all that good, say it in a way that would help the blogger.

Conclusion
There are just three tips that can really make your comments look and sound better. However, there are really more. For example, learning to put a certain emotion into your comments is another way of bettering the overall quality of your comments. My personal view is that you should treat comments as another branch of your blog. As a blogger, you want to sound smart and professional. You may look like that on your blog, but if you make really bad and spammy comments on others’ blogs, you may be hurting your blog.

Do you have any tips regarding making good comments? Did you learn a tip or two from this post? I’d really love to hear your feedback! Feel free to make a comment with your thought on this!

If you manage websites or are any online guru, especially a blogger, you probably know that you don’t really have working days and weekends. You’re the boss so you’re really in control of everything. So, to the real question now.

As a blogger, how do you spend your weekend? Are your weekends the same as weekdays? Do you take more time off than usual? Below are just some of the things that I focus on especially on weekends, as I really like Saturdays and Sundays, although Friday nights are my favorite. Anyways…

Promoting MORE Than Usual
Well, firstly, I don’t make any posts on my blogs on the weekends, unless it’s a breaking news that I must post about. So, I use that extra few hours that I have from not having to craft my posts into the promotion of all my blogs. Unfortunately, this promotion does not have huge immediate results because I have to promote so many of my blogs. However, I have noticed that steady wins the race, as looking at the promotion I have done from a more distant perspective, it has really paid off.

Following Up
Again, with the extra free time I have on weekends, I make sure that I follow up on the comments, emails, and some blogs that I was not able to get to. My personal belief is that you never know when you’ll find a gem, so you need to constantly follow up, even if you may be a few thousand emails behind. Oh yeah, I’m staying true one one of the posts I made at ahnternet.

Reaching Out and Socializing
I put some extra effort into getting new contacts and strengthening my relationship with those who I already know. Whether it be through a casual email, a chat over MSN, or a match of StarCraft, I make sure that I stay in touch. It may seem pointless, considering time is money. However, I believe that some of these people can eventually help me in some sort of way.

Imagining the Next
I dedicate a lot of my weekend scheduling/planning my week. I do this both for my online and my offline life. Pertaining to this blog, I start on and draft a few posts which I can develop over the course of the week and publish on Tuesday and Friday. I also set myself some short term goals that can be achieved in the following week (thus, very realistic goals), such as making sure that I make at least 10 comments a day on other bloggers’ blogs.

This is just a snapshot of what the blogger behind BloggersWalk does on weekends for the success of this blog. Of course, everyone has their own routines.

As a blogger, how do you spend your weekends? Do you completely stay away from the computer? Do you have a special routine that you go through? Share it with the rest of the community! Also, commenting at BloggersWalk got a lot better, as we recently added the CommentLuv plugin to our dear blog!

Well, today’s a day when a post is due. However, I’ve decided to timestamp the post to tomorrow. Why? To first make an important announcement.

Now, I’ve made BloggersWalk an even more attractive place to make a comment at! Yes, I’ve finally installed the famous CommentLuv plugin that will surely get you guys some link juice. So, wait for tomorrow’s post and make sure that you make a comment in that one!

EDIT: I just noticed that while writing this, the time to September 3rd. Oh well, I guess technically, you guys can wait for another post today.

Well, on my other blog, ahnternet, I’m giving away three 125×125 advertisement spots for three lucky people. How do you get the spot? Easy. Just make a comment on this post over at ahnternet and you’re in for the lucky draw.

Why am I doing this? The blog is still pretty new and the ad spots are getting dusty, so I thought I’d give it away for free if I’m not going to be making any money off of them right now.

So, get with it!

Yesterday on ahnternet, I wrote a post about how an artist that I’ve been waiting for finally released her second album after nearly over a year of hiatus. The moment I got my album in my hand, it was one of the most happiest moments of this year! I’m serious!

Then yesterday, while listening to the album, I was also thinking about what would be a good post to put up on BloggersWalk today. Instantly I knew that this was the post that I had to make. Popular blogs already have hundreds and thousands of subscribers anxiously waiting for the next post. However, that is a bit different with beginning blogs and bloggers. So, I decided to see what type of posts could attract visitors when you’re just starting out. Note that even if you are a long time blogger, you could still use these to attract even more readers.

Write a Series Post
Series posts are great at attracting the crowd. One of the most famous examples in the blogosphere is WPDesigner’s series post on creating a WordPress theme from scratch. As a reader these series posts are like a TV show or an anime series. The desire to know what will be next can be quite huge. Even if you spaced your series posts every other day, there is a great chance that your readers will visit your blog everyday secretly hoping that the next series post is out a day earlier.