Darren Rowse, this month, will each day provide homework for willing participants who want to spend 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. So why should I participant if I am not interested in fame or fortune. Well one of my goals is to help others so I should want to be a more effective blogger (lets be honest I need all the help I can get).

One little problem – time is an issue. Means for me it will be nights (or really early mornings), being smart on how I do my homework (may have to do several days homework on the same night (occasional checking up on how others have gone with their homework will definitely help here – I am sure in the rules that is not classed as cheating!!). Photo by Fort Photo.

Day 1 : Email a New Reader (1 Aug)

Darren’s Day 1 task is to choose a commenter that is new and emailing them to thank them for their comment. Reason why is he has found that when you do it the chances of the readers that you email coming back to your blog again increases significantly. Get them to come back to your blog once and you increase the chances of them coming back again… and again….

Michelle Martin’s The Bamboo Blog introduced me to the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Michelle for this assignment asked for help by:

• If you’re a new reader who’s never written or commented before, then come out of lurk mode and write a comment or drop me a line. I PROMISE I’ll email back.

• Even if you’re not a new reader, I’d like to hear from you on this topic. How do you feel when you receive an email when you comment on someone’s blog? Does it make you more likely to keep reading? Or does it not make a difference to you?

Part of my make-up worries about imposing on people – putting them out, offending them. I honestly had never thought of emailing a commenter unless I had already built a relationship with them.

But I did think it had merit so I decided to take her challenge and write my comment. Then waited patiently for her promised email. She did end up networking with some of her readers and also learnt something was wrong with her spam bot because I never received the email when I commented on her post 🙁 .

So please HELP me with my homework – comment on Michelle’s question about how you would feel about being email and I will EMAIL you back (cross fingers I have no problem with receiving comments on my blog).

Join us in the Blogging Challenge

As it is Day 3 of the blogging challenging, I do have a few days to catch up on….and if something is worth doing, then make time.

So you want to join me and Michelle in the 31 Days blogging challenge, which I have turned into nights, send me an email, suewater [at] gmail dot com, and I will set up a list on my sidebar so we can compared experiences as we learn. Snippet from Lynetter.