As I mentioned earlier in the week, I recently had a blast recording a podcast with Brent Schlenker of the Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development blog on the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge. During the interview, I shared with Brent the whole process we went through for the Challenge and what we learned in the 31 Days. Then Brent taught me a new word--"blearning"--a contraction of "blended... Read more →

Yesterday's post on the 31 lessons I learned in the last 31 days of building a better blog led me to a bonus lesson--the power of reflection. As a trainer, I often find that engaging people in particular tasks is relatively easy. Getting them to reflect on what they've learned in the process is more difficult. Yet it is only through the reflection that you really get the most from... Read more →

This week I'm exploring the results of my 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project. On Tuesday I looked at the impact of the activities on my stats and yesterday I explored how they dramatically improved my sense of community. In this post I'm going to share what I learned in the past month. 31 Lessons From My 31 Days of Building a Better Blog In no particular order.... Read more →

This week I'm blogging on the results of my 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project. Today I want to talk about how the exercises improved community for me, a key reason for going through the last month of activities. How Should I Measure Community? So the big question is, how do you measure an increase in community? Certainly an increase in comments would indicate that people are engaging... Read more →

This week I'm focusing on the results of my 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project. Today I want to start with a look at the hard reality of the numbers. Google Analytics Stats One of the tasks in the 31 Day project was to dig more deeply into my site using Google Analytics. I had it installed, but had not had a chance to really look at what... Read more →

Visit Building a Better Blog Over the past few days, the Building a Better Blog challenge participants have been emailing about the end of the challenge and the fact that we were going to really miss this community of bloggers we'd begun. We also discovered that many of us wanted to continue with challenging ourselves on a regular basis to improve our blogs and to have a forum where we... Read more →

For those of you playing along with our 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project, you'll know that chocolate was involved as an incentive to keep us going through the month. Well, the votes are in and Al Upton's class of 8 and 9-year old miniLegends have won the awards for both the best bloggers and the best commenters. You can read more about the miniLegends and the Chocolate... Read more →

It's the last day of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project and I don't know why I thought that Darren might go easy on us. I should know better after the last month. Today's task is to run a SWOT analysis to look at the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for my blog. As Sue said when she saw this, "bugger it." In preparing to write this,... Read more →

Almost . . to . . . the . . . finish . . . line. . . of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project Day 28--Write Your Blog's Mission Statement I knew this one was coming. The Day 28 assignment was to write a mission statement for my blog. As in most things, mission is good. It gives you your sense of purpose, so having a... Read more →

A blogger's mission statement should answer one not so simple question--Why do I blog? In coming up with my own mission I found that answering that question opens up a world of issues--like, what niche am I in? Am I focused enough? Why do readers come here? Do I give people what they want? Am I writing just for me? It also makes me wonder, if my blog disappeared, would... Read more →