I’ve been busy this week working on a new design for my site. This weekend, being a holiday, I will get it up live on the site - probably on Sunday.

I’ll be writing at HerProBlog.COM soon too! The site was going to be launched this week but was postponed until the 15th.

It went fairly well with the fitness interviews I did for the blog. Next, with my new design and tag line I’m going to start looking for guest bloggers and also interview other women bloggers.

I’ve got a list of some good ideas for regular blog posts too - but I feel like I’d rather have more visitors before I write them. Still can’t seem to get many more subscribers or visitors. I need to come up with some more ideas to get more people to the blog.

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?

I did finally get around to reading all the posts about Twitter I had been collecting, and a few more. I even installed Twirl yesterday. But I have to say - I still don’t totally get it. I guess I mostly can’t figure out what I would say with it that anyone would care to hear.

I’ll keep watching on Twirl and maybe I’ll get the hang of it after a while. I’m thinking I may stop following some people though - its nothing personal - just more than I can keep up with.

One of the posts I read suggested having multiple accounts - I wish I had thought of that before. That could be helpful. I know different people from different contexts and some of them just would not be interested in things that people from other contexts would be.

Here are the posts I read:

5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence

Building Your Twitter Presence Part 2 - Pre-Prepared Tweets

Building Your Twitter Presence Part 3 - TweetBaiting

How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers

9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers

Twitter: A Desktop Client Goes A Long Way

How to Get More Twitter Followers: Some Methods That Work

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

I still haven’t had the time to read about how to really use Twitter effectively - but I’m getting more involved with FriendFeed. I started a room there for Women Bloggers . It is a sort of sub group of the AB Blogging Pack for women and also for other women bloggers who are serious about blogging and want to network with other women bloggers.” - please join!

No, I didn’t have time to follow up on any of the Twitter stuff I’ve been planning. It took me a good part of the day to write my post for tomorrow. Which I think I did pretty well with. The posts I write for the rest of the week won’t take as long though.

I just read an article Chris Garrett wrote for Blog Herald too: Are You a Solitary Blogger?

I’m definitely introverted. He says:

“The lesson, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if nobody notices.”

Yes, I’m learning that.

I’m trying to do stuff to make myself better known - but I need to write faster still to have the time. I’ve been offered a couple opportunities to guest blog too - but I haven’t found the time yet!

I didn’t do any work today! I spent the day outside gardening!

I still haven’t had time to read the twitter articles I’ve been collecting - but what I have done is join Chris Garrett’s Authority Blogger Forum. I wish I had known about it sooner!

It kind of reminds me of a WebmasterWorld for blogging. I think I will learn a lot there and meet lots of other bloggers.