It is the time of the year where I re-evaluate what I am doing on my At Home with Kim Vallee blog. Remember that I told you that you should review what you are doing 3 to 4 times a year. I am thinking about what I will do next to improve the content. Like I said at PodCamp 2009, having a great looking blog is important but what will really insure that readers will come back is superior content that served the needs of your readers.

I go back to the basics and review everything with the current state of the blogosphere. I look at:

• How I can stand out from the crowd in my niche?
• What the competition is doing?
• What is missing in my niche, what angle is not covered by others?
• How I can make my content better and more useful for my readers?
• What else can I do to grow my traffic?

Books as a Souvenir

This morning, Mitch Joel tweeted about a talk that Seth Godin gave last year about how he used New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books. Seth Godin is in the idea business, not the book business. Seth gave away partial content before he published his books. He made the point that his books are, for many readers, a souvenir of their experience surrounding the book. It is more powerful to spread ideas first and encourage people to talk about them. Then, the books become a by-product that fans want to own.

Watching this Seth Godin’s presentation triggered new ways I could do things to further develop my brand. I invite you to watch him since you could probably transpose many concepts into your own industry.

MORE:
+ Seth Godin
+ Seth Godin’s presentation
+ via Mitch Joel on Twitter

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I had a great time at the second edition of PodCamp Montreal. I am happy with all the sessions I went to. The exchanges provide great food for thought both from the presenters and the participants. People discussed several ways to stay authentic and transparent in CT Moore’s talk about transparency and personal brand. It was fun that it used Donald Drape as a reference character.

My two own sessions went well. I believe that you should review your blog 3 to 4 times a year and make adjustments. Preparing my Top Tips for Better Blogging session gave me the opportunity to review what I am doing. To answer Julien Smith’s question: doing it helps them and me.

I am also thrilled that our “Top Blogueur” panel was about design bloggers. Social media unconferences are not only for the earlier adopters of social media. Everyone is welcome. But people outside the social media crowd seem hesitant to participate and even more to submit a presentation. Having speakers that are not part of the usual circle is showing that things are changing. If you speak French, you can watch the panel here.

Video of Top Tips for Better Blogging

The sessions were recorded on live streaming, which is not always reliable. A little bit more than half of my presentation was recorded. Since it is the first half, you will not be lost.

PHOTO CREDITS:
+ Eva Blue and Jerome Paradis

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I will be a speaker at PodCamp Montreal that will happen this weekend. In fact, I will be in two sessions.

Top Tips for Better Blogging

First, I will share my Top Tips for Better Blogging at 10 am Saturday, September 19th in room DE-3230. The blog universe has evolved and we have to adapt to the new reality. Based on my experience running At Home with Kim Vallee, my talk will focus on what it takes to create great content. I will tell you what works today to grow your traffic and free ways to monitor the social conversations.

I designed this session for all levels of bloggers. I made it so that recent bloggers can learn and seasoned bloggers can brush up their knowledge. I guarantee that you will learn a few new tricks or that attending will put things in perspective to address to current trends and challenges of the blogosphere.

If you cannot make it, my presentation will be live streamed. See you at 10 am this Saturday.

Top Bloggeur Panel

Right after lunch Saturday, I will be a panelist with the talented Éric Bolduc, Gabrielle Chalifoux and Cindy Laverdière. The talk will be in the language of Moliere (French). Michelle Sullivan will be the host of our Montreal-based design panel.

I am thrilled that lifestyle, fashion and art bloggers are represented at PodCamp Montreal. I said many times that design bloggers should mingle more often with geeks. We will exchange on our approach to blogging, the importance of networking, our strategy to build trust and awareness, plus our views on monetarizing our blog.

Panel ‘Top blogueur’ will start at 13:30 in room DE-3240 Saturday, September 19th. If you live out of town or are unable to go, our panel presentation will be live streamed.

It costs nothing to attend PodCamp Montreal.  You simply need to register online first. Check out the schedule to discover the other awesome presenters; it’s should be great! If you wish to tweet about PodCamp Montreal, the official hashtag is #pcmtl.

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In an interview he gave to Read Write Web, Jeremiah Owyang told something that makes a lot of sense. He answered a problem I had lately. I struggled to find time to read my RSS feeds. Sadly, I knew about the problem but never took the time to review a typical day schedule to see where I went wrong. I told myself that it must be because I write more posts or pass to much time on Twitter although I had the feeling the problem did not lie there.

Owyang told Read Write Web:  “I started my blog as a practitioner at Hitachi. I budget time every morning to read and blog. I do that before I check my personal email or work email. I believe you have to pay yourself first. When you open your email you pay someone else, because it’s usually people reaching out to ask you for something. Taking the time to read blogs, synthesize and add value, that builds your community. That’s paying yourself first.”

When I started blogging and for a long time, I read my RSS feeds first thing in the morning. I then write a post, as it is crucial to have one post out before lunch. I pay myself first. Over the last 6 months, I felt an obligation to open emails first. I received many emails. Most are pitches. I told myself many times that I should revert to my old habit since it helped me grow readership but for some reasons, I felt compel to serve other people first. Not anymore. Thank you Jeremiah for your insight.

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One thing that is difficult for many bloggers is to define their niche. As the competition on the blogosphere becomes fiercer, you need to position your blog in order to stand out. People needs to quick get what your blog is about and how it is different from the pack.

Whether you talk about one topic or many topics in your blog, you need to find one direction that summarizes what your blog is about.

Give Room to Your Niche to Evolve

If you are starting out, think about how to categorize your blogs in directories. Take my At Home blog. It is a design blog for women well positioned as a stylish living blog. It started in 2007 as a blog about entertaining at home with style. In time, I found out that it is the stylish living aspect that my readers are attached to.

Think about directories

In a real conversation, people would easily describe the scope of At Home. But I have a hard time selecting a category for it in Web directories. Lifestyle blogs are not exactly what I am since I do not cover cultural events or musics. I am not only about food or home decor. I also touch family life without being about kids and parenting. Women magazines are rarely there and when they are, it is often filled by feminist blogs or women issues blogs.

There is also another impact. I consider myself a design blog. But when they are blog awards on specific topics (interior design, food, etc), I realized that people would not instinctively think about my blog. I am not complaining. I am happy with my positioning. I just point it out so you could fully grasp the extent of your decision.

Examine Your Content

Ask yourself that question: Are you mainly

• a creator of new content – ex: a crafter,
• a collector  – blog is about what you like,
• a curator  – like I am
• a news publisher – being the source of all the news about a specific topic
• a problem solver
• one that inspires people to act or create
• a commentator, someone who shares his/her perspectives on issues and ideas, etc…

The content you produce may also influence how you define your niche. Lastly, you need to consider your competition since you need to differentiate yourself.

Remember that helps growth and maintain a readership:

1. Regularly write posts with original content
2. Concentrate on being useful for your readers
3. Be active in the social media community, not just in the blogosphere

For the last point, I refer you to an excellent post about how to get noticed by the right people written by my friend Lara McCulloch of Ready 2 Spark.

+ photo that I took when I went to the after-party of the Social Gaming Summit 2009 in San Francisco

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This is the follow-up interview realized by my friend Christian Aubry with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. In this second segment – a third is coming – Matt Mullenweg talked about how he started WordPress and how the open source community swelled the popularity of WordPress. It is a case where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Over and over at WordCamp Montreal last weekend, people talked about the fact that WordPress, WordPress MU and BuddyPress are platforms, an infrastructure of which you can build upon. The added values emerged from what you can do with it. WordPress is used to achieve different objectives, to suit an infinite number of markets and is applied in many creative ways. You benefit from not reinventing the wheel. Instead, you concentrate on how you can serve your community. In fact, this is the main reason why I migrated At Home to WordPress.

Matt also talked about the importance of helping each others. If you think about the unconference movement and about blogging, it is mostly people sharing their expertise for the good of others. At the end of the day, it makes a better world where we feel empowered. Be prepared to be inspired.

You see in the background, a group of partcipants at WordCamp Montreal. A third part of this interview is coming soon. If you are looking for a guy to hire for your video reportage, put Christian Aubry on your short list. He has many years of experience.

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I had a great time this weekend at WordCamp Montreal. The conversation with the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg was inspiring and calming. Matt was really zen while he answered questions from the crowd. In the after-talk, many people pointed out to me his soothing voice. Amongst other things, Matt shares the core value of his company. To give you an idea, check out this short interviewed realized by my friend Christian Aubry.

About Our Presentation

I like going to this type of conference because you always get back from them with some ideas. Several talks gave me food for thought. Plus there is the fact that being a speaker forced me to reflect on my blog design and features. Jerome Paradis and I talked about my migration from subText to Wordpress.

We devised the presentation to highlight the perspective of the blogger and the preoccupations of the developer. I am happy because people seemed to appreciate that duality. I made the envy of a few bloggers to have free access to such a talented developer. Without Jerome, I would have never been able to have made this transition as perfectly as he did.

Now that I migrated to WordPress, I can envision the future. What to do next? I started by increasing the width of the pictures on posts. A lot is more to come. And I think it will be exciting for you.

I cannot recall the name of the caterer but the food was excellent. It is the best food I ate in an inconference in Montreal. Thank you to the organizators and the participants for making it a success.

PHOTO CREDITS:
Except for the laptop image, all the images were taken by the extremely talented Eva Blue. I invite you to see her WordCamp Montreal 2009 photo set, you will not regret it.

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I put that story on hold after the long weekend. Plus, the summer vacations are at our door. I am writing this now because it is always after a vacation or a break that it is the hardest to get back to our blogging schedule.

People often ask me if I get the writer’s block. I don’t! I always have more stories than time on my hands. Many elements contribute to that fact. Let’s explore the ones that could be useful to you.

Frequency

The main reason in my mind is the fact that I write every day. The more you write, the easier it gets but most importantly, the more ideas pop up. But that does not mean that you have no chance to succeed if you do not write every day. There are other ways to achieve frequency.

You can write a few tweets about your topic every day, have a conversation with peers, post a few comments on related blogs. The idea is to concentrate on your blog topic for at least 15 to 20 minutes every day.

Do not waste any ideas

Develop a fast system to track potential story lines. I use the notes on my iPhone to do that. Audio notes will work too. Before my iPhone, I used the old fashioned way where I scribbled my thoughts on a pocket notebook that I carried around everywhere.

When you are hooked to your computer, create a draft post on Wordpress or Blogger for each future topic.  They will be there whenever you need it.

If you do that daily, it is enough to keep the creative flow active.

RSS Feeds

When I started blogging four years ago, I used to read my RSS feeds every morning before writing my first post. I bookmarked my favorite posts. Sometimes, I would write a post about the best of what you read that day. Most of the times, simply reading your RSS feeds puts your brain in the right set of mind and a story will emerge from nowhere.

Be sure to select a wide enough niche

The key to my inspiration is not only that I write about what I am passionate about. The fact that my topics (home design, entertaining and social media) are very dynamic universes helps a lot. There are always new ideas, new products, practical tips or solutions, sharing experiences to talk about.

If you have problems finding good stories all year long, ask yourself if the angle of your blog confines you. Analyze if it would be appropriate to add a new dimension to your talk.

With everyone having a busy life, people are also looking for curators. Examine how and if you can write useful short posts (75 words or less) a few times a week. Ask yourself what will be useful to your readers may be the only question you should answer to release the creative juice.

For a boost of creativity, watch the handmade video portraits of an inspiring etsy seller, birdhouseaccents.

PHOTO CREDITS:
+ Birdhouses created by Fred and Lynn of Birdhouseaccents on etsy

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I wish to discuss today the essential tools for bloggers. The two must-have tools to start blogging are a laptop computer and a digital camera. You need a laptop because it enables you to cover live events. If you are on a market for a laptop, read why I prefer the Mac to the PC for blogging. You need a digital camera because images sell a story.

How I Use My iPhone for Blogging?

Next to these two obvious choices, I put the iPhone. Switching from a Blackberry to the iPhone last year opened up new opportunities for me as a blogger. Since I run a design blog, it is crucial that I am able to read HTML emails while I am on the run and to right away being able to click on the links. The iPhone allows me to do it. Before that, looking at 90% of my emails on the BlackBerry was useless.

Being able to connect to the Web anytime anywhere is the big plus of the iPhone. I had an iPod Touch before but I lost too much time finding and setting Wi-Fi connections to be productive. Plus, the Wi-Fi connections cost money at many places. With the iPhone, I can read my RSS feeds, research stories online, mark unwelcome comments as spams or post a comment to another blog whenever I wait in line or I eat lunch at the food court. It makes me more productive.

An added value is when I visit a shop where I wish to take pictures inside the store. More than once, being able to show the store manager what my blog looks like has triggered a positive answer. Otherwise, I would need to return to the shop after the shop owners checked out my blog. Which bring me to why I upgraded my iPhone to the 3G S model? In a word: speed.

The iPhone 3G S cuts by more than half the amount of time it takes to access my image-intensive blog. A quick test shows that it took 55 to 60 seconds with the 3G model. It takes less than 25 seconds with the 3G S. The performance gains are noticeable with all the Web applications I used.

The Camera and Video Recording

Although you can tweet and post photos on Twitter or Facebook with any smart phone, it is easier with the iPhone  due to the iPhone applications. It works as well with the 3G and the 3G S models.

A cool feature on the iPhone 3G S is the ability to specify with a simple finger touch where to put the focus when I take a picture. You can also record small videos. When I am traveling, eating out or attending an event, I often post pictures from my iPhone on Twitter. This is the fast way to stay active on social media when your agenda is too busy.

For me, the benefits of the upgrade justify the investment to get the 32 GB iPhone 3G S. I was lucky to be eligible for the best price. Plus, I already sold my old iPhone, still in perfect condition, after my husband posted a status update on Facebook. Whether you have the old and the new model, having an iPhone will help you perform more efficiently the various tasks typical to a blogger life.

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I selected the Wordpress Related Posts plugin which assigns the related posts based on the higher number of matching Wordpress tags. If you are good at tagging properly your posts, you will see that that this method is quite effective. I typically detailed the content of my categories using tags.

Installation Tips

I am lucky to have a test version of my blog. So I tested the results first to make sure the look and feel were the way I want it. It took me less 2 minutes, including testing, to add a Related Posts section at the bottom on every post to On the Web with Kim Vallee. For my design blog, At Home, my programmer modified that same plugin to show thumbnails arranged in a row instead of a bullet list. I did not use the image option for my social media blog since not every post has a picture.

You simply search for Related Posts on Plugin Browser/Installer of your Wordpress interface. Selected the one developed by Denis. Pay attention to the developer name since there are more than one plugin called Wordpress Related Posts. Like you do for any plugin, install it and activate it. Then, configure the preferences (available via the Settings menu once the plugin is installed).

Related posts is one of many methods that you can use to create serendipity in your blog and increase the page views.

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I always say to new bloggers that they must try to take their own pictures. Nothing beats original content. Time constraints, money, logistics and talent do not always make it possible.

Most successful food bloggers excel at photography; it is part of their personal brand. Take for example La Tartine Gourmande. We are craving to have a look at her fabulous photos. Bea creates dreamy moments that inspire us and bring happiness to our day. Her writing complements the scenery depicted by her pictures. The whole makes it an awesome experience that encourages us to go back to her blog.

Lifestyle Pictures from Brands

Great pictures also contribute to the success of retailers and distributors. Many brands are known for their superb pictures. Making available inspiring shots also influences the amount of coverage a brand/retailer may get on the blogosphere.

I start any post for At Home with Kim Vallee by creating my photo collage. The photos provided to me or that I am able to find on the Web site of the retailers and the producers influence which products or storyline I will feature. In fact, many of my posts started by a fabulous picture that I spot on a brand Web site. It goes deeper that that since I moved to another story or put it on hold whenever I was unable to get good pictures for a subject.

As more and more brands pitched bloggers for product reviews, I suggest that brands make sure to have a wide selection of creatively styled pictures available. It is in the advantage for both sides that various pictures are shown; it avoids fatigue. As a reader, if I see the same picture over and over, I am less inclined to read the post because it seems like dejà vu.

Product close-up pictures are needed to understand what the product is all about. Make sure to display them on an inviting background. I believe that without including lifestyle pictures on their press package, brands are missing opportunities. If you wish bloggers to talk about your products, make it easy for them. We are busy people.

Having said that, I encourage bloggers to create their own styled pictures if they have the product on hand or if they are at an exhibit. Then, you can use the brand pictures, if needed, to extend your coverage.

+ La Tartine Gourmande
+ Hawaiian Dream Vacation Sweepstakes by Pottery Barn

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I prefer reading blogs through Google Reader. Still, they are people who prefer getting my posts through an email subscription. This is why I provide the option. With Google Feedburner is so simple to do and once you set up the service, it runs by itself.

Use it to Build Loyalty

The popularity of email subscriptions varies per blog. Between 15% to 25% of my subscribed readers (email + RSS feed) opt for the email subscription. Readers can opt to receive an email for every day where you published something.

Since it only takes a few minutes to set up the service on Feedburner and add the proper link to your blog, I advice all bloggers to add this feature. Instead of a link, you could add an email subcription form directly on your blog. The instructions are on Feedburner.

Immediate Access to a Backup

To make sure the system always works fine, I subscribed to my feed by email. This afternoon, I found an unanticipated advantage for me as a blogger. I wanted to delete a draft post. By mistake, I delete a published post. I was desperate since I have no clues about which post I deleted by error. I could have recovered the post via our backup but I was looking for a faster solution.  Simply opening on my inbox gave me all the information to reconstitute the post.

I verify that the post kept the previous URL. It is important to keep any links and trackbacks that refer to your original post (the deleted one). And to fully correct my mistake, I edited the publish date of the post to the original date and time. The information was on the email sent by Feedburner.

Because of my email subscription, my blog is back to  what it was before I made the wrong deletion. I made the corrections in less time that it took me to write this post.

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