I thought I’d take a break from writing about ecommerce and marketing and focus on some amazing folks who are blogging and sharing ideas.

Each of these bloggers have a unique blogging style that produces an inspirational feeling to their audience. They are dedicated to their readers and prove they listen by responding to questions and concerns each week. They impress me again and again with their topics and insight, and how much they share of their personal life. I’ll continue to look forward to reading their posts every week!

Chris Guillebeau is a world traveler and has set an impressive goal to set foot in every country in the world by the time he is 35. Right now the count is 125 countries, not too shabby! Chris’ blog is built upon of his world travels as well as offering advice and insight to being a freelancer. I interviewed Chris earlier this year and how he’s used social media to communicate his blog and business - Check out his blog and you’ll be inspired to live a life that’s unconventional!

Erica Douglass is now “retired” after selling her web hosting business at the age of 26. Erica composes blog posts each week about business advice, her challenges having Celiac disease, as well as her goals for new businesses that she’s launching this year. She’s very candid about how she’s achieving her goals and shares the steps and secrets of how she works her way to making $10,000 from her writing.

A very inspirational person, I always find that after reading some of Erica’s posts, that I can take her ideas and apply them to my business. I really enjoy how she communicates with her readers and maintains that she’s an every day type of person that can be successful and so can you. Most of it is hard work, persistence, and a winning attitude.

Snack Girl is Lisa Cain, a snacker who has a Ph.D., a published author and a mother of 2. She’s fascinated with snack food and is great at debunking what we might find as “healthy” at first, but if you read the fine print, looks are deceiving!

Every week Lisa either shares a snack that she feels is a healthy alternative to a fatty snack, shares her own challenges with weight, or shares her reader successes with weight loss and how they accomplished it. What impresses me is after reading Snack Girl for a few months is that I’m evaluate my snacking and readinb labels much more than before. Snack Girl is great about reminding us how many teaspoons of sugar are in a Slushie versus fruit juice and how that can affect us over a period of time. I notice that I’m making better decisions when I purchase drinks or snacks and have been influenced to even bake more of my own snacks, so I know what ingredients are being added!

Do you have a favorite blogger you read weekly or monthly? Who would you like to share?

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Being a native Portlander, David Strom knows his way around PDX. Over the last year, he’s become an important online source for Portland events and festivals.  Starting off slowly and building an audience, Dave started a blog called “Dave Knows: Portland‘ and has developed a great formula of providing the right content and keeping people coming back for more. Learn how he got started and where he’s headed with “Dave Knows: Portland“.

What inspired you to start your blog?

In Portland during the summer there’s something going on every weekend
- street fairs, beer fests, cultural festivals, etc. These are the
kinds of things that interest me. A few years ago I found myself
keeping track of upcoming events and coordinating my friends’
weekends, via email. Basic information about these kinds of events,
date and time maybe, could be culled from newspapers and other
websites, but other than for the bigger beer fests, it was really hard
to find information about them. I’ve noticed that if it doesn’t have a
corporate sponsor, most mainstream media will relegate an event to
some obscure, usually reader submitted, “community happenings”
section, or not mention it at all.

One day in Spring 2007, I was hanging out with friends when someone
asked “Hey, when’s the Polish Festival?” Another friend, a long time
recipient of my weekend coordinating emails, immediately answered
“Dave knows!” That was the Eureka moment. I was working in web
development at the time, and knew setting up a blog was fairly simple.
I already had the basic infrastructure for the blog already, in the
form of bookmarked webpages and my email archive. In addition to my
interest in festivals, street fairs, and beer, I have an insatiable
curiosity about Portland, pinball, soccer, accordion music, poutine,
and other esoteric things that, by mainstream media standards, are too
obscure for them to waste much time on. I knew there was a niche in
Portland for these sorts of things.

What’s been the best/most effective way to promote it?

Definitely, the best and most effective way to promote the blog has
been to understand and embrace blog culture. I always credit and link
to other bloggers’ work if it in anyway influences my post (something
traditional journalists are loathe to do – they don’t want to miss the
appearance of having a scoop!). It’s the polite thing to do, it builds
up camaraderie in the blogging community, and frankly, it helps us all
get better google rankings.

I’ve experimented with reddit and stumbleupon, and some other local
and topical aggregators, but self promotion is usually discouraged on
these sorts of sites, and ultimately I’m happier with steady, somewhat
predictable, growth than occasional weird spikes in traffic.

Right now the blog has some bus ads running (a fabulous birthday gift
from my awesome girlfriend!
http://portland.daveknows.org/2009/12/18/dave-knows-on-the-back-of-the-bus/),
but it’s hard to identify visitors to the blog who visit because
they’ve seen a bus ad. Traffic has been up the past few months; I
like to think some of that is due to the ads.

How has your experience been being a blogger in the Twitter community,
what have you learned?

Twitter has proven to be a great boon to my blog. It’s not entirely
frowned upon to self promote – if you’re measured about it.
Ultimately people can just stop following you if your Twitter habits
irritate them. But of course, you don’t want to irritate them. When
I have a new post I announce it on Twitter, but that’s about the only
self promotion I do. Lots of the folks I follow on Twitter have blogs
or other creative projects, so I get updates on those in real time,
and I can retweet the things that interest me; similar to blogging,
there’s a Twitter ethic of retweeting with credit.

What’s the future of Dave Knows Portland, where do you want to be in a year?

The blog has opened some doors for me that I would never had expected.
I’ve been a guest on Portland Sucks and Savor
Portland. I’ve been asked for interviews [by
you!]. It’s been somewhat disconcerting for me, as an introvert, to
find that in some circles my alter ego, “Dave Knows”, is a
“personality”, and considered a source of “news”.

My girlfriend and I are constantly brainstorming for ways to maybe
possibly someday make a living from our blogs (Heather blogs at
http://mile73.com and we share the blogging duties at
http://portlandpoutine.com), and we have a few long term ideas I’m not
at liberty to discuss I just started offering advertising space
on my blog (http://portland.daveknows.org/advertise/), but so far the
blog barely makes about $1/day from Google Adsense. Over the next
year the staples of my blog will remain events, beer, and soccer news.
But my blog posts on fellow Portlanders’ creative projects have been
fun to work on, and are well received. I plan to do a lot more posts
like them in the future.

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I first discovered Chris Guillebeau at a social media training earlier this year – I checked out his blog and really liked his messages. Very inspiring and against the grain, they grab your heart strings and give you hope to leap from the normal way of thinking and challenge yourself. His website has lots of goodies such as “279 Days to Overnight Success“. I was lucky enough to chat with him about his application of social media to share and explain his ideas.

What’s your business?

I help people live unconventional lives.

When did you start using social media and why?

I started right when I started my site, The Art of Non-Conformity. It seemed like a good idea to jump on the train.

Has social media changed your business?

I wouldn’t say it’s changed the business; I’d say it is the business. I write for free, but enough people are interested in my premium things that I can make a living. It’s all due to this thing we call the social web.

What are you looking forward to social media changing in the future?

Not sure on that… I’m pretty happy with the current status.

Have a social media story you’d like to share?
Air New Zealand sent me to the Cook Islands because of people who recommended me on Twitter. About half of my media coverage comes out of social web contacts. I meet people all over the world whenever I travel now, but I feel like I already know them because we’ve connected online first.

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In 2006, I began folding cranes for world peace. Learning to fold origami cranes is challenging so I put an ad on LiveJournal. A nice lady offered to teach me in exchange for coffee and a scone and so we spent an hour folding cranes until I got the hang of it. I continued to fold cranes while watching TV or chilling out and found it meditative and was able to fold about 30-40 in about an hour. I getting close to around 500 and wasn’t sure if I continue in my quest, I began feeling burned out. I was telling a friend about my project earlier in February about how I wanted to finish and send 1,000 cranes to the Japanese Hiroshima Peace Park and she said, why not ask for help.

At the time, I was learning how to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with friends and colleagues and saw this project as a great way to use social media. I also had a blog that I could use as a vehicle to explain my project and start asking people to send me their address and I would send them 10 origami crane papers to make 10 cranes. I believed if I got 50 folks to make 10 cranes, I could reach my goal.

In addition, I set up a Facebook group, explaining my project, linking it to my blog, and sending it out to my friends, letting me know what I’m doing and that I would have a meet up where I would teach people to make cranes. I was amazed who signed up to my group. In less than a month, I had around 80 folks that were members. Some were really excited and shared their experience at different memorials in Seattle and Japan and how powerful the symbol of the crane can be.

Through Facebook, I set up 2 events where members of the group were given a notification that there was an event where they could come and learn to make cranes. The turn outs were awesome, the first one was 14 people and the 2nd was 15 people. Using Facebook as a tool to bring people together for a great cause is powerful.

In addition to using Facebook and my blog, I also made little announcements on Twitter. I just used my profile that’s mainly for my business, but let everyone know how many cranes there (status updates) as well as let folks know about the meet ups and link the tweets to my blog or to the Facebook group.

Not all of the folks in the group were Facebook friends, at least 1/4 were people that I didn’t know and during the meetups, folks I didn’t know very well came to support it.

I was able to reach my goal of 1,000 cranes on August 2009 and have sent the package to the Peace Memorial Park. I trully believe that the social media tools we have now really improve our lives and bring us closer together. It’s very moving and powerful. I challenge you to spread a positive message through email, Facebook, your blog, or Twitter over the next week. I bet you’ll be amazed at the results. I sure was!

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RSS stands for (Rich Site Summary) which is a simple way to deliver web content. News websites, blogs, and other oline publications usually have their content available for RSS.

Why would you want to use RSS?

RSS turns out to be this great time-saver. You can subscribe to all these different news feeds and put them all in one place. The most popular reader is Google reader, my favorite. It’s easier to get your ow reader, just go to http://www.google.com/reader/ and follow the directions.

Now, instead of having to go to all these different news websites and blogs, you can have them all in one place. I know a lot of folks who will save all the updates from their reader and read them one day of the week or a few minutes a day.

Try it out and see if it doesn’t make your life a little easier.

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