Blog Tips

Introducing Free Weekly Blog Topics at For Bloggers By Bloggers

For many bloggers, coming up with blog topics can be hard. Keeping your blog fresh and interesting for readers old and new can see you hitting the blog topics wall, and often that leads to you just not blogging at all.

Which is why at For Bloggers by Bloggers, we’re launching a new weekly series every Saturday where we’ll provide you with 10 free blog topics to get your mind rejuvenated.

As well as offering you some blog topics ideas, we’ll also give a short paragraph on each topic to help you get off the starting blocks. Hopefully this will give you some more ideas, if the initial titles of the post topics themselves don’t.

We’ll break the blog topics into five categories, and mix and match this as the weeks go by to try and make sure we’re not missing too many niche blogs.

To give you an idea of what you’ll find, here are some of the blog topics from this week’s selection:

Business Blog Topics

The Trick to Making a Business Blog Personal. Many business blogs are exactly that ? all business. But they don?t need to be ? what tips can you share with other business bloggers to make their blog more personable? What should they write about? How have you mixed up your business blog?s voice?

Video Blog Topics

How to Syndicate Your Videos. Everyone knows about YouTube and maybe Viddler or Vimeo. But what other tools can video bloggers use to syndicate their posts? Is TubeMogul a good option? Help other bloggers decide what they should be using.

Real Estate Blog Topics

Five Little Known First-Time Buyer Mistakes. What mistakes do people new to the property market make? Can you give them some of the mistakes that realtors see but buyers very rarely do? Tips like these will build trust in your blog and business.

That should give you just a small idea what we’ll be covering each week. As I mentioned, though, we’ll be mixing up the topics every week. You’ll also find you can mix one blog topic up across different niches.

Check it out, and if you like what you see, feel free to subscribe to For Bloggers By Bloggers so you get each free blog topics post as soon as it’s published.

Cheers!

image: iStock

21 Non-Business Blogs You Could Read Today

While you might come here to read about social media; or marketing; or strategy; or statistics;? it’s always nice to step back and read blogs from outside the business and social media circle.

So, over on my Facebook page last night, I asked for recommendations of blogs that weren’t business, to see what inspired others when they read. And boy, did the recommendations fly in! So, without further ado, here are 21 non-business blogs you could add to your reader today, with added reasons from the folks that recommended them.

The Mad to Live. Recommended by Mark Harai, for its “fun, smart and inspiring” posts.

Enjoying the Small Things. Recommended by Amy Fandrei, who said, “One of the more down-to-earth but inspiring bloggers out there.”

The Sales Lion. Recommended by Mark Harai, for being “inspiring and entertaining.”

Murrmurrs. Recommended by Samantha Collier, because it is “absolutely, positively the funniest blog I have ever read.”

The Skool of Life. Recommended by Mark Harai (the guy’s on a roll!), it’s full of posts that “throw down inspiring words.”

Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. Recommended by Tressa Robbins, for “taking me out of my element and putting me in hers.”

When Parents Text. Recommended by Sue Anne Reed, for “comic relief.”

C Jane, Enjoy It. Another recommendation from Sue Anne Reed, for the simple fact of “enjoyability”.

Smitten Kitchen. Recommended by Patricia Grow because “the recipes are always great, her photography matches and she shares the cutest pictures of her baby.”

Life, For Instance. Recommended by Bryan Cromlish, this blog is full of “pretty inspirational posts.”

Post Secret. Recommended by Geoff Livingston, for “making my jaw drop every week.”

NYC Bloggers. Recommended by Elaine-Cosme Petersen for news on “entertainment, life, situations, shock treatment… whatever you’re in the mood for.”

The Middle Finger Project. Recommended by Ingrid Abboud for its “powerful and inspiring stories.”

Redhead Writing. Another recommendation by Ingrid Abboud, this blog is “funny as hell” (and also full of awesome cuss words)!

Xbox 360 Fanboy. Recommended by Brandon Forder, because he’s “a video game nerd and proud of it.”

Blog-Blond. Recommended by Chris Benedict Valencia, for its ability to “be funny and relieve stressful days.”

Flight to Success. Recommended by Karla Antelli, for “inspiration.”

The Bold Soul. Recommended by Janis La Couvee for, amongst many reasons, having a “zest for life and inspiring me.”

Some Words, Written by Me. Recommended by Eileen Marable for being “good, thoughtful fun.”

Delco Forever. Also recommended by Eileen Marable, for offering “great thoughts by smart people.”

The Bloggess. Recommended by Jennifer Linnell Fong, because it “makes me snort out loud with laughter regularly” (and is another blog that uses cussing perfectly).

So there you have it. If you’re needing new blogs to read, or just want to mix up your business needs with some cool, funny and inspirational reading, there are some great starting points for you here.

My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to reply (and some couldn’t make it here, since there were no URL’s to grab) – it’s readers like you that help bloggers like the ones you recommended get a new audience. And that’s always a good thing.

How about you – what non-business blogs would you recommend, and why?

Leave your recommendations in the comments (with links), and let’s see some new names we may not have known about.

Note – because of the anti-spam filter that I use, comments with several links may not appear immediately. Don’t worry – I’ll approve them as soon as I can, so no need to post a duplicate, just in case you thought yours hadn’t gone through!

image: -Rejik

Why a Blog Disclaimer Is Just as Important as a Disclosure Message

Last week, I spoke with Joe Hackman about blogger ethics and transparency (you can listen to the podcast here), and one of the things we chatted about was the topic of disclosure.

My belief – and something we instill into any clients that have a blogger or social media outreach program in place – is that you need to offer full disclosure whenever necessary.

Professional relationships, sponsorships, financial or physical gifts, etc – basically, if you or someone you represent benefits from your blog post, you need to disclose that relationship.

Yet just as important as disclosure – and, perhaps even more so, depending on the circumstances – is the topic of disclaimers, and when you need to have that on your blog (or other social interactions).

What You Advise Isn’t Always What You Know

A good example of the need for a disclaimer is over at a post by Julien Smith, entitled How to Lose 20+ lbs in January 2011. In the post, Julien talks about? a diet regime that’s worked for him and some friends he’s helped lose weight (Chris Brogan is one of these friends that Julien is helping to lose weight).

As part of the diet, Julien recommends some of the following:

Cut out sugar and flour from your diet.
Intermittent fasting (in the post, Julien advises that he’s been fasting for 16 hours a day for the last three weeks).
Read books and educate yourself on fitness and health.

It’s advice that’s clearly worked for Julien, and is (probably) working for his friends. And that’s great. Yet the post also has some issues, and ones that should have been addressed in it.

The Problem with One Size Fits All

While it’s great that the diet and its tough-looking regime work for Julien, the post implies that the same advice will work for everyone. The first words to the post are, “This is probably the only diet post you will ever need.”

Further in, the post also makes the request to, “tweet this out and subscribe to the blog below with your email address.” This is to ensure that people who “need this kind of information, but… don?t know where to get it” can get the latest health tips direct from Julien (at least that’s what I take from that request).

It’s these words, along with the premise of a health post that doesn’t segregate its audience, that need a disclaimer (at the time of writing this post, there isn’t one) – because Julien is not a nutritionist or a physician. Julien’s reply to one of his commenters that questions his diet is a little bit worrying: “A degree does not make anyone right, nor does a lack of one make one wrong.”

Except in medical science, where a degree would be pretty important to show you know what you’re doing when dealing with someone’s life, no? And this is where a disclaimer is needed (and not just Julien’s post, but any like it).

Liability versus Responsibility

Say someone follows Julien’s advice. And say they have a reaction; or become ill; or collapse through hunger while fasting. Say they feel faint at the wheel of a car, and cause a crash.

“But I thought I’d be okay – I was following the advice of a blogger who the diet worked for.”

Okay, that’s maybe a little blase, but you get the drift. At no point in the post does Julien mention he’s not a dietician. Nor does he advise you to consult your own dietician or physician first. Nor that women have different needs than men, and children are different again. Age is also bypassed.

If there had been a disclaimer in the post advising this, then it’s making sure that you take precautions when starting the regime in question.

Because there isn’t one, Julien could potentially be liable for a lawsuit, particularly if someone has a serious reaction or something else, based on following the post’s advice. And it’s something many bloggers fail to take into account when writing.

I don’t know Julien, but he seems a good guy and not one to offer false advice randomly.

Yet – like any blogger – he has a responsibility to not only his blog’s community, but the fly-by first time visitor as well. Yes, we need to take personal responsibility too, and that can’t be discounted. But often we get into a relationship of trust with the blogs we read (especially one written by the co-author of Trust Agents), so we trust their words.

The problem is, the law doesn’t always take blind trust into the equation where liability is concerned…

image: whatnot

Setting Your Stall from Your First Blog Post

As I start to wind down for the year – and, I guess, with the ubiquitous year-end blog post to come – I looked back at my very first post on this blog to see where I started.

(Note – I’ve been blogging on and off for about 12 years but this is the one that I’ve made my own, so to speak).

The reason for looking back was simple enough – I’m a firm believer that your first post should set out your stall on what you hope to accomplish, and what you’ll be talking about. After all, you’re looking to (hopefully) attract an audience and build a community (in whatever shape that may be) – so it’s not a bad idea to start as you mean to go on.

Looking back at my first (short) post, I think I’ve blogged in the way I set out – talking about emerging/social media and its effect on people, business and communities. So as far as stall-setting and follow-up goes, I think I passed my test.

Which made me curious about the main social networks and how they fared when it came to setting their stall out on their first (public) blog posts. So I did some digging, and here’s what I found.

Twitter

Probably my favourite social network, the Twitter blog’s first public post was back on August 03 2006. Posted by co-founder Biz Stone, the post was about Biz feeling an earthquake and how it was his friends tweeting about it that confirmed he wasn’t imagining things. So, almost 5 years ago and Twitter was already being used to break news and report on natural events – I think it’s safe to say it’s continued to live up to its early promise.

Facebook

Fast becoming my second favourite network, thanks to a certain Facebook Group and some great banter and interactions on various Pages, Facebook’s first blog post was also in 2006, on Tuesday August 15. This inaugural post talked about the launch of the Facebook Development Platform, enabling developers to build apps for the platform. With apps being a huge part of the Facebook experience, again, like Twitter, this first post seems to have been a perfect primer.

Although LinkedIn is the oldest of the main social networks, its blog started after Twitter and Facebook’s, with the first public post happening on April 24 2007. Written by the ever-present Mario Sundar, it was a simple enough post that promised to help users find their way around LinkedIn, and asked for feedback to be constantly shared. A normal enough post, but nothing that showed what LinkedIn’s potential might be.

YouTube

Before Twitter and Facebook decided to start blogging, YouTube was already posting regularly, with its first one being written way back on July 07 2005. It spoke of wanting to make YouTube “the digital video repository for the Internet”. Additionally the post shared tips on browsing and linking videos – something that’s a key part of today’s experience on the channel. As a lesson in setting your stall out from the start, YouTube’s first blog post is perfect.

Slideshare

One of the perceived newer networks, Slideshare has actually been active for a while, and its first blog post appeared back on September 25 2006. It was a pretty vague post – unless you were an alpha tester of the new platform, for which the post thanked you for feedback about the software. There was nothing that suggested Slideshare would become one of the best resources for information, presentations, ideas and statistics on the web. It’s also kind of funny to see the URL for the post still keep the standard WordPress one for first posts – “Hello World”, indeed.

Flickr

The oldest post of the ones I looked at, Flickr’s blog first posted on February 04 2004 – and there was absolutely nothing that indicated what was to come. Instead, the Flickr post welcomed GNE players – a nice touch from the company, who created the Game Never Ending (GNE) that made way for Flickr. Like Slideshare, it too asked for comments and feedback as it advised of graphical overhauls in the coming days and weeks.

So there you have it – six of the better-known social networks, and how they started (at least from a blogging point-of-view).

I think it’s fair to say that YouTube and Facebook offered the clearest take on direction, while Twitter showed the real-time potential of its service. LinkedIn kind of tried, while Slideshare and Flickr simply added to the buzz that was building around the platforms.

As for MySpace? I tried finding their official blog, but got lost on their “wonderful new layout” and landed on a bunch of different developer blogs instead. And with no archives readily available to get to the first blog, I wasn’t going to start digging for the first one. Confusing and not user-friendly – kind of like MySpace, then…

How about you – what does your first blog post say, and how have you fared in building on its promise?