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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Photo by Carf

Over the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve been fortunate to be able to write guest posts for several high profile blogs, including in front of an audience of 45,000 at John Chow Dot Com, and most recently on Darren Rowse’s Twitip.

I’ve previously spoken about guest blogging, specifically how to secure guest post slots and how to make the most of guest posts, so I won’t go in to those two things too much in this article. Today, I want to help you to identify and ask the right questions when deciding which blogs to write guest posts for, and how to ensure the audience reading your guest post clicks through to your own blog.

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