Lessons from The Daily Post bloggers

Hi folks. Remember me? I’m the guy who used to pummel you with ideas for blogging every day. I’m back with a report on the awesome things I’ve watched happen here since I left.

Two years ago this blog began as an experiment (see The Daily Post’s first ever post). I started with some coworkers at WordPress.com. We wanted a way to share what we knew about blogging, while learning at the same time, and the daily post competition was a simple way to start. As things rolled along Sara, Daryl, and Erica joined in with posts about photography and writing. And by the time I left the company in May 2012 it was clear there was something valuable here, but we all knew something was missing.

Roundup of great advice on blogging

In the last weeks we’ve had some excellent posts on WordPress.com’s news blog with solid blogging advice. I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any of them:

1. How to get more comments
2. How to get more page views (based on research by Stanford University)
3. How to turn you blog into a book
4. How to get more traffic

What other advice are you looking for that goes beyond using specific features and tools?

We can share what we know right here on DailyPost – just leave a comment and ask away.

The future of DailyPost in 2012: details coming soon

Hi folks. The gang here at DailyPost has been talking for weeks about how to improve things for 2012. We’re almost ready for a few announcements, but we’ll need a few more days. I can promise we’ll be continuing to provide inspiration and advice, but with a few new wrinkles and ideas. Stay tuned.

Clearly I can’t count – what can’t you do?

Topic #347:

As the number above points out, my skills at counting leave much to be desired. As there are 365 days in a year, I’m 8 topics short for offering you a topic a day for the entire year How lame – I’m hanging my head in shame right now (Before you tell me it should be 9, remember there’s one more for tomorrow).

But this does offer us a good topic for the day: what ordinary skill are you bad at? Maybe its tying your shoelaces, or parallel parking cars, but we all have something very simple that we just don’t do very well. Write about yours.

How do you define your identity?

Topic #346:

How do you define your own identity?

We are all born into cultures, families and communities with certain values we naturally inherit. But in order to figure out who we are, we have to revisit those inherited values, and decide for ourselves what to believe, or what to value. Simply believing something because our parents or teachers did assumes they were right, and if they made the same assumption about their parent’s and teachers, when exactly did someone sit down and consider the alternatives?

How can a person define their own identity? Is it good to do this? Why or why not?

Are you good to people you don’t know?

Topic #345:

Are you good to people you don’t know? How, when and why (or why not)?

One detail of the story of the good Samaritan many don’t know is that Samaritans were unpopular among the followers of Jesus, and a story of an unpopular tribe doing something good for a stranger would have been shocking at the time.