How Darren Rowse Has Forever Changed My Life in 10 Days

I am in my 10th Day of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog program by Problogger Darren Rowse along with a bunch of ladies over in the SITS community. I have been working on it through my food blog, Searching for Sustenance, but have aspirations of bringing everything I learn there to this blog as well. The hostess of our group, Shelley, of the I'm Still Standing blog has challenged us to put to use what we have learned in one little post. I know I can't capture it all, so I will limit myself to one lesson per day... !0 Days, 10 Lessons, 10 (Blogging) Life Changers...

1. I will never ride the elevator with a stranger the same way again. I will constantly be thinking of how I can pitch them my idea and whether or not I can sell them on coming to my blog. I think every time I am in the elevator for the rest of my life, I will be rewriting a pitch!

2. I now think of the line, "The list is life," from Schindler's List in a completely different way. The list post is the life-line of my blog!

3. I am horribly and irrevocably addicted to StumbleUpon. I got on SU to help promote my own blog, but I really spend every day promoting the heck out of everyone and everything else. It keeps me up late at night stifling giggles like I am in Church in order to keep me from waking my husband. (My SU profile is NRivera9 if you would like to see how much stumbling I have done in such a short amount of time!).

4. I understand that I have a niche. Every blog has a niche. Whether we want to think so or not, the outside world is putting us into little categories, so pick one already and hope you see what the world does. Once you find your right niche, you will find your people.

5. I have come to the final conclusion that e-mail is still king. As wide as this web is and although it may seem that everyone loves the anonymity afforded them by mere screen to screen contact everyone seems to like the extra personal connection of an e-mail.

6. THERE IS NO WAY TO READ EVERYTHING ON DAY 6 ON DAY 6. If you are planning on someday doing 31DBBB, start reading now. Don't skip Day 6 (I did that my first go around), there is some incredibly invaluable information in there. (I am pretty sure I "stumbled" every post I read!)

7. I don't remember what Whitney Houston was singing about in the "Greatest Love of All" song, but I'll tell you one thing - I now know that linky-love is the greatest love of all of the Internet. If you write the right link post, aimed at the right audience, promoted the right way, you will see a traffic spike like NO OTHER. My link post Changing the Way We Eat: 1 Link At A Time written for day 7 was (and continues to be) INSANE.

8. I try to remember everything, because I understand my readers won't. It's not their fault - they might have only showed up last Tuesday, so I have to link back to the stuff I wrote last month, last week, last year. I am an interlinking fool now and it has been working!

9. I am Forum friendly and find myself commenting on articles in really big publications now leaving my name and website. I am pretty shy in real life, but out in the Internet I'm all up in everyone's business all of the time - offering advice, giving my opinions, and asking big questions. Whoa. Who am I?

10. Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are no longer the only alerts in my life. I have tons of columns opened up on my TweetDeck, I get daily e-mails on all types of subjects and I just keep geting inundated with more and more information. How did I ever struggle for a topic to write on?

That's it... for now. I've got 21 more days of this! I think my brain might implode!!