I’m glad that I’m just starting with interviewing a few people as a test before I start interviewing more people on my blog. Lots of little details to think about. At first I thought - just write some questions, send them out and copy and paste them and I have a new post for the site. Its almost that easy, but I’m thinking I should maybe write an introductory paragraph about each blogger first. For some that will be easy, but not so much for others. Keeping track of who I contacted and who replied back to me all take time also. Still less time than writing a longer post myself, but still something to keep in mind.

I’m going to start interviewing people on my blog. I sent out some requests for interviews last night. I’d been reading different blog posts about interviewing people for a while. One of the ones Darren wrote had some good tips: How to Get and Conduct Interviews for Your Blog. I’ll go through that post here:

1) “Introduce Yourself” - I only wrote a very brief introduction in the emails I sent out. I didn’t want it long because I also wanted to get right to the point and not waste their time.

2) “Outline How and When the Interview Will be Used” - I gave them my url (such an obvious thing, but one that could be easily overlooked) and said I hoped to post the interviews in the next week or two. I couldn’t say for certain because I didn’t know how many people (if any) I’d hear back from or when.

3) “Give Incentive” - I didn’t give any kind of incentive because I have no idea what it would be. The PR on that blog is pretty high but I didn’t really want to mention that and I don’t know that it won’t go back down anyway.

4) “Don’t Overwhelm With Questions” - I asked 3 questions. Now, I’m asking the same questions to a few people all about a particular topic. I thought about asking each one additional question that was specific to their blog, but I didn’t (quite honestly that was too much work!).

Darren also suggest sending an introductory email first with no questions in it. I didn’t do it that way, I asked the questions right in the first email I sent.

5)”Give Different Options for Medium” - I didn’t do this either.

6) “Do some research First” - since I am asking each of them the same questions this was less relevant to me. I did spend some time on each of their blogs though and two of the people I knew fairly well already.

7) ” Don’t be Offended if ‘Rejected’” - I sent out 10 requests last night and have heard back from 6 already - so I’m not doing too bad, with 2 of those already sending in their answers. But I know I may not hear from all of them.

8 ) “Notify them When You Hit Publish” - this I will do when the times comes and I told them I would let them know then the interview gets posted.

So far this first experiment with interviewing people for my blog seems to be going pretty well. I figure I will learn from this and then I have plans for more interviews later on.

Its now been two months since I officially relaunched my blog at Ideas For Women. Actually, it was 2 months 2 days ago, but I was too busy to stop by here and write anything then.

For anyone recently joining in - this blog is where I am writing about what I want to accomplish with another blog of mine: http://www.ideasforwomen.com/news/. Ideally what I would like is to start a small blog network on that domain. But from reading Darren’s “A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks” the first thing I need to do is work on my traffic levels on the first blog.

So what have I accomplished in the past 2 months? Back on April 23rd I set some goals for where I want to be in six months (now 4 months). I would like to have 1000 Feedburner subscribers and around 5-10 comments on average per post in six months (I originally said 10-15 comments per post, but I think that sounds like a lot now.).

I now have a lot more subscribers than I had, but I still have a long way to go. I don’t know if I will make it to 1000 or not in 4 months. Not only did I add a really big subscribe button in an obvious place, but I also added the FeedButton and a subscribe by email link. I haven’t had many email subscribers yet, which leads me to one of the various things I’ve had on my mind lately.

I suspect most of my readers at this point are also bloggers. I’m basing this on the fact that most people commenting leave a link. I love that I have other bloggers reading my blog, but eventually I will need people without blogs reading here too. I guessing that non-bloggers are less likely to understand what subscribing to a blog means too. I should add something to my blog explaining it.

I’m getting quite a few more comments too, but it seems they come more often on posts where I’ve linked to other bloggers, rather than on posts where I’ve actually written something more substantial. I hope that changes too.

One cool thing though - I’m reviewing a book that was sent to me on Thursdays and the author of the book has stopped by and commented a couple of times! She says she likes how I am writing about her book!

I have a whole list of things planned to help build up my traffic levels. I am also working on a redesign for the site which I hope to start testing on the 4th of July weekend. I’m really excited about that! I even have a little tag line - although its kind of long and not real catchy it describes what I want the site to be.

Hopefully in another month my subscriber numbers will have picked some!

(I see the archives on this blog are not working now - I’ll have to see what that’s about)

I haven’t not been posting here because of a lack of things to write about - I’ve been overwhelmed with trying to get so many things done! I hadn’t posted in my butterfly gardening blog for a while either, and it doesn’t take long for that blog. I wrote some posts for it tonight though, finally.

And now I’m here. I’ve got several things I want to write about over the next days. Stuff I’ve been reading and learning about to apply to my blogs.

I think I get it now! Although I’m still a big shy when it comes to tweeting about my own posts.

I’ve been hanging out at Plurk too: me at plurk.

Here are some tweets that made me laugh last week:

eMom @commonsense4 A bunch of Twitterers got together and hung out - get this - offline. I know, very un-geeky of us!

rmsylte I had a dream last night that I was in the middle of Second Life. I’m not even registered for Second Life! Symptom of social media overload?

Busymom I have an idea to deal with Twitter downtime: what if we each made webpages and visited each other’s pages and commented? Nah, crazy talk.

bigbrightbulb @jtnt Maybe the Twitter dudes took Amazon down so the Internet would have someone else to bitch about?