Stefanie from Random Encounters of We has been chosen for a Blog about your Blog author interview. I have asked her a series of questions about some personal things, blogging and blog about your blog. I hope you enjoy the interview.

When was your blog created?

Random Encounters of We was created November 11, 2006. My husband found an article by Steve Pavlina and that kind of inspired the whole beginning.

Why did you choose your blog topic?

My blog doesn’t really have a topic. It is about the random dealings of my life. It has a little something for everyone: money making tips, humor, sponsored posts, news articles. We (my husband and I) did some research about what kind of blogs do the best and such when we were deciding on a topic and title. We decided we really didn’t know too much about anything and so what other choice did we have than to make it random. It’s really eclectic.

I guess the best topic is no topic!

Did you think you were going to be instantly successful?

No, I hoped, but my realistic side knew I wouldn’t be immediately successful. I knew from our research that blogs with a specific niche did the best, but we didn’t have a specific topic so we jumped in and hoped for the best. I think I would say that we have had little successes.

What do you enjoy most about blogging?

I enjoy providing interesting or helpful content to the reader. I try to write articles about things that have really helped me. I try to convey my sincerity with the things that I post so my readers know that I’m not leading them astray or claiming false things. I also like to add some humor when I can find it.

Where do you see your website in one year?

Along with Random Encounters of We we have some other blogs. We self titled the collection our “random world.” We have Random Games and Random Super Heroes. In a year we hope to have a few more blogs added to our random world. We want Random Encounters to evolve along with our knowledge of blogging.

I can see a little random ring of blogs forming.

Do you have any new upcoming projects or ideas you want to announce?

Random Encounters of We just received a face lift actually. We were sick of having a standard blogger template and so my husband has been learning a few tricks on how to personalize it and make it our own. That was the major project that we just completed. I’m sure he has something else up his sleeve for improvement.

I was so stuck until I contacted Lee about BAYB template. Once you find your own template and features you can then finally emerge as your own blog.

What is the best feature on your blog?

Since we are new to blogging and programming we have kept our blog malleable. I love how it evolves with the new things that we learn. It is constantly growing along with us which helps to keep it fresh (in my opinion).

When will you feel like an accomplished blogger, or do you already? If so, why?

I’m proud of what we have completed so far with the blogs but I wouldn’t say I feel accomplished. We have a few personal goals that we set in the beginning and perhaps when we reach those goals I’ll feel more accomplished. I feel like there is so much to learn and I have been blogging for such a short period of time that I am definitely still a novice.

Share some of those goals with us.

What do you rely most on to get traffic to your blog or website?

Link Referral brings in a TON of traffic to our site. It is a great program and doesn’t require much maintenance. The most important thing we do to bring in traffic is write quality or interesting content and then get it on either digg or reddit. When we manage to get some articles on those sites our stats really soar. Plus being apart of Blog About Your Blog helps since this site is huge and growing every day!

Thanks for the plug! We also use Link Referral, but unless you spend time on it daily, it doesn’t pay off as much.

And the final series of questions, a little bit about Blog About Your Blog

How did you find us?

I found Matt in blogger forum. He had a post about wanting to make a community blog and wondered if anyone would be interested or thought it was a good idea. I commented that I thought it was a great idea and would love to be apart of it. I hold a little pride in that I was one of the first to join Blog about your Blog. It’s like I can say “I knew you before you were famous!”

I am taking everyone to the top with me when we make it! I have daydreams about being able to cut everyone a fat check.

What do you like most about BAYB?

I love the community feel. Even though I don’t really know anyone on this blog in person I feel like I have some friends here. I loyally check a lot of the other authors blogs. I also love how huge this community is getting to be. Not only with register authors, but on MyBlogLog the stats are always crazy high. It’s incredible.

I like that the most about us, with one post, you will at least attract the fellow authors of the blog, let alone our readers. I have set personal goals for MyBlogLog and have spent a nice amount of time trying to get more people to join our community. We are on our way to the top 50.

And for the hardest question of all…

What do you like the least?

I feel like the articles on BAYB are of really good quality and content and I don’t feel up to par, so I don’t contribute as much as I would like.

Any contribution is a good contribution. What is great about us is like your blog, there is no topic. You and your husband have tons to offer and I hope you blog with us more.

Who have you chosen to be the next one interviewed?

I have chosen Ed the Editor from The Pisstakers. I wrote an article once and he found it and included it on his blog and that really perked my spirits and made me feel like I was doing some good. He then reviewed our blog. He is a fun guy and I think he would make for a funny and interesting interviewee.

I hope I am up to par about asking Ed some questions. I already have a few extra submitted to ask, if anyone else has some questions for Ed please feel free to submit them. We’d love some more original and unique questions. Are you ready Ed?

My girlfriend submitted our son’s pictures in a few contests, and he was chosen as cutest kid of the day. He will be featured on the front page of parents.com for the rest of today. Here is a screenshot of the picture. Isn’t he precious?

We’ve all been there, your blog is languishing in the depths of Technorati Despair, and nobody is reading what you have written. You fancy encouraging a spike of activity around the blogosphere, so what you do is post a few comments on your favourite blogs.

Comments are the best form of getting comments, I mean, at the very least you’ll get at least one clickthrough, at best you’ll get your comment referenced in a later post (such as one of my comments on Mike’s Money Making Mission). There a good way of building traffic between blogs, as often blogs have similar readerships.

Just one word of advice, don’t be shameless with your self promotion, and offer something to the post, other than just your blog.

One such incident a few years back was considered the birth of targetted adverts. Uber-blogger Tom Coates blogged about his father when he got a comment. It seemed heartfelt, but on further research the comment was from a splog, you can catch up more with this story here. Tom Coates was a fairly big fish in the small blogging pool, and it got brought up on the BBC website too, so much so that the reputable company behind the comment had to issue a formal apology regarding the whole situation.

All of us here would love more readers, of course! We’re all bloggers here, and we all actively participate in the blogosphere. We are all understanding, and want to make a useful contribution to the blogosphere, and to other people’s posts. Just don’t shamelessly promote your blog. If you do, you’ll get far less readers than you may hope for.

With that being said, I’m sure you’d all love my fantastic personal blog: The Gospel According To Rhys 😉

It’s hard to believe that in May 2006 when my hubby first suggested I try blogging I pooh-poohed the idea, saying what would I have to blog about! Yeeesh! I said the same thing about websites in 1997 and I have five of those!

Well it’s now February 2007 and I am a blogging addict or blogging fool perhaps .. lol!

May I proudly introduce you to:

Pastyme with Good Companye

Welcome to the blog of amateur historians Matthew James Didier and Sue Darroch. Partners in life and in crime, we endeavor to entertain you with snippets from our combined historical research. Past time with good company indeed, as we shall introduce you to Kings and Knaves, Queens and Mistresses, Cons and Heroes, from our collective past……from events well known to those perhaps all but forgotten, we will do our best to bring you interesting historical factoids from around the globe. It is our belief that through understanding our past we will all gain a better perspective on our future.

and

My Life In The Urban Zoo

Coming to you live from the dreaded Didier-Darroch compound somewhere in the currently frozen bowels of the city of Toronto, Canada our blog about life in the Urban Zoo our “pet name” if you will for the compound. This blog will relate far too much information on life in the city in general, raising kids, frightful teenagers, and even more frightful adult children, aging parents, our numerous pets, dogs, cats, birds, and other assorted critters.

I hope that these two new offerings will be enjoyed by our readers as well! Please do leave a comment on them and let me know what you think.

If you’d like to exchange links with either of them please do let me know.

Cheers!
Sue

I am not talking Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Quite simply, take time off from the exciting sexy side of blogging, and check that every “boring” part of your blog is uptodate. By that I mean, we have loads of info pages like About Us,About the Site, and Testimonials, the all-important SiteMap, Privacy… and on checking through, they weren’t quite current or accurate.

These pages don’t attract people to the site per se, but after a quick tweak, at least now we know that the info is correct for the visitors who stumble into the dark corners. And importantly, all nifty features that have crept into the blog mix over the past few months are now properly documented.

Do the policies stated in the small print, reflect your current thinking?

Another bonus of going into neglected corners of the site is to see what was going through your mind at launch time. Initially, I was looking for help with video reviews. But as time has passed, ideas have evolved and now for instance, we want to attract contributions from witty writers on any topic covered in the Pisstakers. If I hadn’t edited the relevant page today, who would have known about my slight change of tack and maybe another 6 months would have passed with little or no interest in contributing to the Pisstakers! (Maybe nothing will change, but at least I tried.)

In summary, I blog because it is good fun. I also like living in our house, but both need to be checked over, cleaned and tidied from time to time.

I have stayed away from reading the “celebrity bloggers” as I call them. I never thought they had much to offer me. I just read John Chow’s blog for the first time yesterday.

I had heard of him plenty, and seen tons of links from other bloggers referring to posts he had written or whatever the case may be. I really just took it as them kissing up, hoping for him to visit their blog, or something of the sort. Anyways, he’s already essentially rich (in blogging standards) it’s not like he needs another reader right?

Surfing through blogs I found a Google Adsense ad, from Chow stating he could basically help you monetize your blog. Okay, fine you have me intrigued, I’ll bite. *click*

From there I read in awe. He wrote that he had made 3,440$ from his blog in the month of January. Maybe I have never visited due to jealousy! Not only that, but he plans to make more money this month. Of course he does, but the funny thing is I don’t doubt that at all.

My current goal in life is to at least make some money online, maybe part-time job money. Something to show for with the time I’ve spent blogging and trying to further this blog and others. If John Chow’s blog doesn’t prove that can happen, it can be used as a guide to further your monetary success.

When the internet was essentially young and people were excited about receiving these new electronic mail messages someone out there recognized a brand new arena to spread the word about their product or service. You could reach a thousand people in a couple of seconds for next to nothing in cost. This was going to revolutionize the junk mail industry. Why pay people to pound the pavement doing mail drops when with a touch of the enter key you could cover hundreds of households more quickly than any kid on his bike could!

Marketing managers must have been salivating at the potential. That was of course until internet users adopted the term Spam from Monty Python and declared in unison that unwelcome emails were exactly that. Unwelcome.

Spam marketing emails are considered one of the biggest annoyances about the internet age and can really tarnish a businesses reputation if they actively pursue it. In a lot of countries it is now illegal and can damage more than just your reputation. The surge in spam has also resulted in a new industry of spam filters being produced that stop the unwanted emails before they even reach your inbox. I shudder to think how many of them get stopped at the gate that I don’t even see.

So with all the spam stopping software and the ill will it creates with the recipients why is it that people continue to spam?

The majority of spam that I do receive now days is barely above gibberish. There is rarely a sales pitch involved and often the keywords are misspelt to avoid automatic deletion. On the very rare odd occasion that I’ve decided to investigate who it was sending me this rubbish I’ve clicked on the link only to discover that the sender had already been reported and shut down.

So now you have an unwelcome email that barely makes sense, angers the person who receives it, is often caught before it reaches a real person and doesn’t generally actually link to a product. Surely it isn’t worth it?

An annoying advertising campaign can often result in the product or company being forever etched into the subconscious. In Australia several years ago a jewelery chain ran a campaign that amounted to the spokesperson repeating the words gold gold silver silver chain chain sale sale over and over during the advertisement. Now if you try chanting that over and over and it quickly gets stuck in your mind. Anyone from Australia who saw that ad can tell you which company it was and no I’m not giving them a free plug because they ran an annoying ad several years ago thank you very much.

So is it that the spammers think that by repeating the words viagra over and over again that we will become more brand aware of the drug? Granted I’ve mentioned it here but surely the hoopla that resulted when it first was released embedded viagra into the group consciousness forever! It is said that any publicity is good publicity but surely being associated with such a hated medium is not a good thing in the long run?

Obviously there is the more malicious spam that tries to trick you into giving your bank account or paypal details over to them. It is obvious what their intent is but I have to wonder what the arrest rate is on these scams and how many people still fall into the trap.

When you do send spam I would have to imagine that it does more damage than good to your public image. Recently I was infected with an online casino adware (software that forces your browser to open advertisements). Certainly they don’t think that I’m going to give my credit card details over to an organization that used nefarious ways to make me aware that they exist?

Perhaps I’m over estimating the general intelligence of your average internet user.

Lee is a freelance New Media Consultant who also writes for Quit Your Day Job, Crypt Hunter, Pop Culture Heroines (chief editor), ComicsPedia, Dr Fong’s House of Mysteries and Blog About Your Blog. He’s a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks.