This article is a guest post from a blogger friend Mwangi of the Displaced African. He has been a great encouragement to me and he is full of wonderful ideas. Read and Enjoy

My name is Mwangi and I come to you from the blog known as the Displaced African. Technically speaking I have been blogging for a lot more than five months. Like all professional bloggers I have left a small trail of dead blogs. One was a blog where I left only entry: After watching the movie “the Corporation“, I left one blog post on a quickly created blogger account. I paraphrase:

“I Loved the Corporation! If you did too, say something!”

Of course there was no traffic and of course no one left any comments. Clearly I missed the memo that said that blogs do not automatically become communities because I have written one sentence on them, I have to provide value first. Fortunately I have grown as a blogger since and am enjoying a steadily growing readership, an Alexis Ranking that jumped about 20,000 points the day I wrote this and a commenting community that I just adore.

So today, I thought I would share with you three things that I have learned about this blogging thing from the school of trial and error 101.

1) If You Want Your Readers to Do Something, Ask Them….Nicely

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If this is not what you thought it is, I apologise. I am not about to share a secret from the manual, instead, I want to share something I discovered (which can be verified) during the week. If you already know about it, then, hop unto another post. Happy reading.

It has been a great week even though I started the week feeling down-casted because I was not getting the attention I wanted from the kings (site visitors). My first post for the week was just a thought that dropped into my head and my fingers started flirting with the keyboard, at the end, the post “Are You Willing to Sell Your Blog?” was added to my ramblings (I was actually addressing the king makers - my friends). The response was good and that kept me going for some days. I was quite busy after then even though I still fulfilled my daily quota.

By Thursday, I have started getting grumpy again because of some frustrations I was experiencing online while trying to please the kings (nothing good come easy). While in that mood, I poured out my heart in another post that is pure ramblings, “Are You Still My Friend?” (by now you must be wondering if I am a serious entrepreneur )I was not expecting anything good to come out of those two post, but looking back now, I can say that they produce better result than my other posts that were focused on the theme of my blog and were carefully written out.

So, what is the catch. Read more