Photo by Madeira

A funny thing happened tonight. As I sat here contemplating my next move within the blogosphere, I suddenly found my light. My light to follow to lead me to success. To lead me to great things. To lead me to what I want in life.

But before that light appeared, as I sat here contemplating my next move, I realised within myself there was actually no move for me to make. At least not until I knew where I was going. I realised, very suddenly as though a light had been shone inside, that I didn’t know where I was going. I was lost on a road, with a map in front of me, but no idea where to turn. A map can only lead you where you want to be if you know where that place is.

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Photo by The U.S. Army

July 1998. I was 10 years old. It was a hot Summer day, and the whole town was out at the annual charity gala. People were on the fairground rides. Others were eating ice cream. And even more were watching the display of acrobats, gymnasts and pampered pooches in the main arena. Me? I was watching with intent as person after person fell over the edge of the 100 foot drop and flew down the zip line, only to be quickly stopped at the bottom by two British Army soldiers.

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Photo by Gadget Virtuoso

As our blogs progress, we often hit a plateau where we become comfortable. Traffic graphs start to flatten, and our blog posts become a consistent 600 words of mediocre text.

While getting in to a cycle and a routine of blogging is a very powerful and positive thing, it can also mean we forget to step outside our writing comfort zone. We find ourselves in a zone where our articles become nothing but words, and forget to add excitement, flare, creativity and zest.

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Photo by Julio Kohl

There’s not many blogging niche’s that are free from overcrowding. Everywhere you look in the blogosphere, somebody, somewhere (plus 99 others) are blogging about every, and indeed any, topic.

So in an industry that often resembles the scenes of ‘Rua 25 de Março’ (seen in the photo above), how do we stand out from the crowd? How do we draw attention to ourselves? How do we build a relationship with a reader who, undoubtedly, is reading 25 other blogs in the same niche as us? These were the questions I asked myself as I was preparing to launch Blogging Zest 10 days ago. Below are my answers.

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I was chatting with Darren from ProBlogger on Twitter a few days ago, and after noticing that posts on his ProBlogger blog and also his Twitip blog were posted at similar times of the day (1-2pm GMT/8-9am EST), I asked him what his motivation was behind posting at this time.

The nature of Twitter meant his response was short and sweet, but it boils down to him determining that to be the best time of the day to post to his blogs. The UK is arriving back to the office just after lunch, the US and Canada is just waking up and arriving in their offices, and Australia is settling down during the late evening. In a sense, the top three sources of traffic for (most) blogs are awake and more often than not, at their computers.

This short conversation with Darren got me wondering whether there were any trends as to what time of day bloggers publish articles, and actually whether many bloggers put any thought in to the time they write, or whether they just publish as and when they finish writing. That’s what this weeks poll is about. Please feel free to add your vote below.

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