It's Really Only a Purple World

Today's post is going to be a little different. Recently, the good folks at BlogEnergizer.com have offered to write any blog an exclusive interview so I said yes and here's the interview with team leader, Lynette
Chandler. I hope you find lots of good information in it as I have and don't forget to vote for me because the interview with the most votes will win some cool prizes.

http://blogenergizer.com/teip-vote/

The purpose of this exercise was for yours truly to come up with five good questions related to blogging that would of interest to my readers.  It was harder then you think!  These are the questions I thought of as well as Lynette's answers. 



At what point should a blog switch from Blogger or Wordpress to their own domain?


From the very beginning. But let me back track a little. If it is for a personal blog where you have no plans of ever monetizing or making a business from, it isn't has important. On the same token, I've also seen some people's personal blogs take off and it becomes a business even though they never intended it to be.


I'm a strong supporter of having your own domain regardless of your plans for it. Mostly for control. A good example is a personal journal my husband and I started in 1999. At that time, we didn't have blogging tools, blogs haven't even been 'invented' yet. We used a free site, on their sub-domain.

Over the years, the site enjoyed top spot on search engines on and off. We don't get major traffic but it is enough to earn us a little money. Although we have purchased a domain name for it, it was too late. We can redirect the traffic but if we had it on our own domain all that time, the site would be much more valuable since the domain would be matured and we wouldn't have to do all this extra work. Less work later is always a good thing.



How do I write a product review for a product that I did not like?


With any review whether you like a product or not you should be up front and honest about it. If you don't like it, say why. Is there anything about it that you do like and why?

I like to tell people both sides if there is still value in the product. Because what doesn't work for me could be exactly what someone else is looking for. But if the product or service is really useless or an outright scam that you can substantiate, you owe it to your readers to say so.


I'd stay away from strong words or writing when I'm angry and plain ranting without reasonable attempt to resolve the situation.



There seem to so many different types of widgets that collect statistics; which ones are the most important ones for marketing purposes?


It depends what kind of statistics you are collecting. Is it to find out who is clicking on what or what kind of traffic and where they come from? If it is traffic stats. I only use two.

Google Analytics and AWstats that comes with most web hosting accounts. I like to check Google Analytics for more in depth information like tracking how many out of the visitors are converted into list subscribers, where people go after reading a post. Where do the leave from and so on.



What the heck is a PR rating anyway? What is the real difference between a PR 2, A PR3, and a PR4? How can I improve my PR ranking? What types of posts are detrimental to that ranking? What types of posts are helpful?


We're getting into the realm of SEO. Since this is outside the scope of our expertise, I'm going to leave it to the people who know more. The following resource is a good place to start.

Google PageRank guide for searchers and webmasters


How important is utilizing things like Diggs and Stumbleon really to the overall marketing of my blog? What are the essential networks to belong to? Which ones are not worth the trouble?


Personally, I don't make this top priority as average ROI pretty low in my experience. My top priority is to write posts that people want to read and are relevant to my audience. When you do that and pepper your posts with call to actions, inviting people to share/Digg or Stumble if they liked it, you'll find these develop naturally.

Doesn't mean you can't do it. A post that manages to do well on Digg or StumbleUpon can bring a ton of traffic in a short time. But I also don't think it is realistic to expect every single post that you make to hit those charts in a big way.

Once in a while you could make an effort into crafting a message that people will naturally want to share like lists, crazy funny photo or a controversial opinion then go all out to promote it and put a prominent invitation to bookmark the post, it could pay off. But things like that take more time and effort that I'm prepared to give so not a regular to do in my books.

And there you go. I bet you're probably curious now what BlogEnergizer is all about right and who is writing this. My name is Lynette Chandler and I am the team leader at BlogEnergizer. We are a unique site/service created to connect bloggers and businesses to find opportunities to work together. Every week, our free members receive an email notification of fun, interesting, useful, helpful or money saving resources they can blog about or share with their blog readers. These include free ebooks, book review copies (when we find them), special deals, downloadable music or software (often free), people who are seeking guest bloggers, people who want to be guest bloggers and so on. Our premium members also enjoy everything our free members get but an additional 90 blogging prompts every single month so they will not run out things to write about and whenever they have good stuff to share, we help them get the word out.

Yes, I know it is a lot and sometimes it is hard to really get what we do until you join so here's an invite to come join us. Basic membership is totally free and there are no obligations whatever. Here's where you go to sign up http://blogenergizer.com/

Finally, if you enjoyed this interview, won't you spare us a minute of your time to vote for it? http://blogenergizer.com/teip-vote  I'm sure Wendy will appreciate it!!!!!  ( Yes, she really really will!!)