As you guys know one of my largest blogs is called Daily Writing Tips. It was launched some months after DBT, with the goal of helping people improve their writing skills, and it has over 33,000 subscribers already.

Lately we have been adding a lot of great content there, and I recommend that you check it out if you are trying to write better. Here are some examples of articles you’ll find on the blog:

• The Writing Process
• 34 Writing Tips That Will Make You a Better Writer
• Creative Writing 101
• Comparative or Superlative?
• 30 Religious Terms You Should Know

Today we are also re-opening the Daily Writing Tips Forum officially. If you like to discuss about grammar, spelling, vocabulary and writing in general you should definitely join it.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Brown Banks . If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Blogs are a great way to brand your business and create a buzz about personal and professional agendas.

But, let’s face it; the R.O.I. (return on investment) can be a bit low in the beginning.

In my many years as a professional writer and relationship columnist, I’ve started several, gotten frustrated, lost the momentum, and decided to move on to bigger and better things. Then I would visit other sites, love the energy, read the success stories of how Blogs were turned to book deals, and well, have since reconsidered.

After all, it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. Right?

Here’s the problem: because I enjoyed a pretty good “following” as a relationship columnist and feature writer, I expected to have as much traffic on my site as Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway during rush hour! Wrong.

I would devote hours to choosing a hot topic, penning my thoughts, finding the perfect graphics, and see 0 “comments” posted for all my efforts.

This happened for several consecutive months. I started to call it quits, but much like a romantic relationship, I felt I was too far in to throw in the towel.

There would be nothing to show for my sweat equity.

So the strategist in me decided to work smarter, not harder this time.

I started visiting other sites with a mission. I wanted to know what was out there, how it compared to my online journal, and essentially what worked and what didn’t as a reader.

Here’s what I discovered and you will too. Even Blogs that have huge followings rarely have a lot of comments posted. Readers either don’t take the time to post their thoughts, don’t know how to register their comments, or don’t recognize the importance of their input.

In fact, the only way I knew folks were even reading my work is that my friends would call me on the phone or send Emails to tell me how much they enjoyed my posts. Go figure.

So, the next time you suffer from a bout of the “nobody’s reading my Blog blues” here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Recognize that success doesn’t come overnight. Blogging, even more so than any other form of writing, requires a lot of time and patience before it begins to bloom and take off.

2. Know that numbers can sometimes be deceiving. Have you ever gone on a diet? Most folks who have can tell you that the scale sometimes will show the same weight even though you’ve lost inches and your clothes are baggier. Pay less attention to the numbers and more attention to the needs of your readers.

3. Write with the right purpose. Rather than penning your way to popularity, use your adventures or misadventures in Blogging to become a better story teller, or to write tighter, or to develop ideas for editorial pieces. No writing done well is ever truly wasted!

4. Don’t get bogged in the Blog. Work on other projects that provide immediate gratification. Write a poem, do research, say hi to your Facebook friends. Like all areas in life, balance is important.

Follow these four tips and even if you don’t “win friends and influence people” your blogging blues might make you a hit song writer or the next American Idol!

You just never know where space travels can take you.

About the Author: Jennifer Brown Banks is a veteran freelance writer, columnist, and editor. You can read more from here on her blog: Pen and Prosper.

This is a guest post by Ciprian Ginghina. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The word on the street, or perhaps I should say ‘information superhighway’, is that certain text style options make website content and blogs ‘pop’ and are thereby more appealing to readers. The use of short sentences within short paragraphs decorated with bullet point lists and sub-headers apparently hold our attention in a vise grip, bewitched by the format. Blogging gurus peddle these presentation options as if they are some magical beguiling cloak for crap writing.

Yup, advertisers have discovered writing. The same people that compose commercial content for the Thigh Master*, penis enlargement cream and the Snuggie* have suddenly realized that rather than hire professional writers (y’know, people that read and write extensively and thereby have actual vocabularies and legitimate skills in idea communication), they can instead employ any old Duncan to throw together a few mismatched words, inject them into their online formatting template, and boom! Instant captivation.

(Oops, that middle sentence in the last paragraph was far too long! But you read it? Why? How did that happen? There were no bullet points, nor even a sub-header in bold!)

One thing a writer requires is faith in his or her readers’ smarts. You shouldn’t treat them like idiots, because:

• They aren’t
• A high proportion of them are actually more intelligent than you are
• You have to respect that, or they can tell
• Oh Christ, I’m using bullet points

The use of such style tricks is akin to using flashing lights as a distraction in a zombie movie. If you instead want to attract survivors to your fortified mall/pub/apartment (especially physically attractive ones that can read) it’s best to write a legible banner and illuminate it with a single lamp.

Yup, I used an extended zombie movie metaphor. Nope, it’s not in the manual. And guess what? You read that bit, too.

I’m sure, by now, you’ve guessed my point. Writing can be compelling by itself if you’re willing to spend a little time making it so. You don’t need to follow style guidelines from some self-appointed expert. Sure, Search Engine Optimization is a desirable focus; you want people to read your stuff, and SEO is a method to elevate your Google/Yahoo/etc. page rankings. Thankfully, search engine Spiders, the software that secretly explores your web content for relevancy, are getting wise to the ways of the keyword stuffers. As technology advances, so does the ability of the Spiders to avoid being fooled by the black hat brigade. They are starting to develop methods of recognizing quality writing for what it is, rather than a bunch of filler packed around keywords.

And thank goodness for that. Maybe one day I won’t ever again have to waste valuable minutes of my life wading through pointlessly decorated drivel. (Incidentally, is no one else a little perturbed that a machine can recognize talent when it examines a block of text? There’s another blog, right there…).

Note from Daniel: I don’t agree completely with the main point of this article, but I felt that having a different opinion was worth it, if nothing else to spark a discussion.

Ciprian Ginghina is a full time web developer. He has over five years of experience in web development. He specializes in LAMP platform and JQuery framework. He is also passionate about online marketing. His blog is an effort to share his insights on online marketing, blogging, personal development and personal finance.

If you started applying the trick I mentioned on this post, I am sure you are already receiving more guest post submissions.

As your blog grows, however, you might start getting more submissions than you can handle. I receive 3-4 submissions per week, and I have seem blogs out there getting over 10 submissions weekly! The problem with this is that you might start messing things up.

For example, I used to accept some submissions and then I would forget to actually publish them. Sometimes I liked the guest post but would forget to reply to the author stating that and so on.

What I learned, therefore, is that you need a basic system to manage the guest post submissions. Here is the one I developed for this blog:

1. I fixed the frequency of guest posts that I would publish on the blog: 1 per week.
2. I fixed the day of the week when guest posts should be published: Wednesday.
3. I developed the habit of replying to submissions as soon as possible, either accepting or denying them.
4. If I accepted a guest post, I tell the blogger the exact date when I can publish it. If he agrees, I then immediately upload the post to WordPress and use the “Schedule” feature to automatically publish it on the right day.
5. As new submissions keep coming I just keep adding the accepted ones to the queue.

This system made it much easier to manage the submission. At one point I had over 10 posts queued, but adding new ones was easy.

You can still mess things up if you don’t keep up with the right dates, but it is certainly better than having no system at all.

That is what I use though, and I am sure there are other methods and tricks out there. Do you have any of them to share? How do you manage guest post submissions on your blog?

This is a guest post by Mark Pack. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

The least popular posts on my blog are the most important.

Sounds like I’ve made a mistake in typing that sentence, doesn’t it? But when it comes to reaching an audience, he top 10 posts in any month on my blog typically only account for between a quarter and third of the total traffic.

In other words, it’s not the most popular posts that make or break reaching a good sized audience – it’s the collective effort of the least popular. In my experience, many blogs have a similar pattern. It’s an application of Chris Anderson’s long tail idea. It also raises two questions. If this isn’t the pattern on your blog, are you missing out on something? And if it is the pattern, how can you make the most of it?

If your pattern is different, it’s worth asking yourself whether there is a good reason for that. A blog that regularly picks up large influxes of traffic from external sources, such as Digg, could expect the most popular posts to be a much higher proportion overall. But do think carefully about whether or not there really is a good reason for you not having a long tail effect. If you do, please do share your experience in the comments. If you don’t, then there is an opportunity for you to grasp.

Whether it’s creating your long tail, or improving on one that you already have, there are some similar steps to think through.

First, you need a steady supply of good content on your site. It’s not just that search engines like sites with a solid record of quality content, it’s also that your (potential) audience is not all made up of identikit people. More content does not just please search engines, it means you are more likely to have a post that suits what one of
your audience is looking for.

Moreover, it’s quite common for people who are interested in the same information to be interested in it at different times. The bigger the archive of content you build up, the more likely it is that what interested you at some point in time is what someone in your audience is interested in right now.

Second, keep your old content updated. Many posts will happily stand the test of time, but where events or your knowledge have moved on, go back and update your posts.

Third, cross-link between posts. If people are still interested in your older content, it makes sense to make it easier for them to find it. Software solutions such as the “Yet Another Related Posts” plugin for WordPress are a handy way of generating automated links to similar content at the bottom of your posts. Tags and categories are another way of getting links through to other posts.

However, you usually get much better click-through rates from links in the body of the post than you get from a list of other content below or to the side of the post. So work in references and links to your older posts as you write new ones.

Fourth, keep an eye on your blog statistics. Amongst the long tail there may be some surprisingly popular posts. That gives you a clue as to what topics may be good to return to or write about more often than you were planning to.

In my own case, for example, I have found that my occasional historical posts often pick up a low but steady trickle of traffic. When I look back over a period of several months, posts that seemed to get very little traffic at the time of publishing suddenly look much more successful. In my case, this traffic does not appear to be from
the core audiences I would like my blog to reach, so it has not resulted in me significantly upping the historical content. However, your experience may well be different.

Got any other suggestions? Do share them in the comments below.

Mark Pack is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications, a London-based integrated communications specialist firm. He’s on Twitter as @markpack