Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, a book by Susannah Gardner

Hi I’m Tris and I’ll be your guest blogger this week while somebody gets a well deserved vacation.  So like most things in life, there’s a good story behind this guest blogging stint so here it goes...

 

It’s all Paul’s fault.

 

It started like this.  Paul asked me to be a part of the nascent Professional Bloggers Association late last year.  Cool.  He was also working with Susie on some little book she wrote so he invited her as well.  At the same time there was a Business Blogging conference in Seattle.  I had pretty much decided not to go, but for lots of reasons, personal and professional--including Susie IMing me “Paul says you should go to Seattle...” I decided almost at the last minute to go.

 

I rode down to Seattle with Susie, her husband Travis, Jon Husband, and Fred Fabro in Fred’s car.  It was, undoubtedly, a great conference.  One of the offshoots was Susie and I both started getting more attention on our blogs.  We both were making Scoble’s link blog pretty regularly and were wondering how to keep the traffic up.  Well the answer was obvious and easy--keep writing and write often.  So this lead to a little contest where Susie and I had to post to our blogs with two posts a day during the week and one over the weekend.  First one to miss had to blog on the other’s blog for a week, two posts a day.  You can see where this is leading can’t you?  Yeah, I blinked first.  But I’m not bitter.  It was a great exercise in writing.  Sure a tad stressful at times (oh jeez it’s 11:30 and I have to write one more post!), but overall great.  And like many things in life there are unintended, but very positive things that come out of seemingly insignificant events.  This is one of them.  All bloggers know that if they don’t keep publishing on a regular basis their audience starts to dwindle.  But, um, we’re real people.  We get sick, we get busy, and yes, take vacations (I don’t remember when I last took one, but that’s besides the point).  So when Susie and Travis were going on vacation, Susie called in the bet.  So here I am.  And this is great.  Susie knows that while she’s away she’s going to get at least two posts a day (when I get on a blogging tear...), I get to write for another audience, and help a friend at the same time!

 

It’s all good.  We both win.

 

So that’s the story.  Sure there’s a lot more to it, like Susie is really cool.  She’s an American ex-pat living in Canada too.  She married a Canadian, as I did.  But, those are stories for another day.

 

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