Blog Village - A True COMMUNITY Of Bloggers

Blog Village - A True

COMMUNITY Of Bloggers
A For Your Success Interview by Kilroy_60

Recently I conducted an interview with Rosemary, aka Dirty Butter, the Administrator of Blog Village. My experience as part of Blog Village has been very positive. It was originally another "traffic builder" I signed on for. It quickly became apparent that Blog Village is anything but. It is, I have found, a true community.

For Your Success: How did Blog Village come about?

Rosemary: About a year and a half ago I looked at my first blog, and I'll have to say it was not a pleasant experience. It just so happened that first blog was full of profanity and the pictures were child porn, as far as I was concerned. It's a wonder I ever looked at another one! But I had read some articles suggesting that blogs were a good way to promote an online business, so I decided to educate myself in this new medium. At first all I did was join some traffic exchanges and surf a lot, reading what appealed to me, and ignoring what didn't.

Finally, I took the plunge, and started the two blogs that are connected to our business, Yesterday's Memories and Plush Memories Lost Toys Search Service. Both have evolved somewhat from what I originally envisioned them as being about, but I guess that happens to a lot of blogs over time.

Look for these banners while you visit the Blog Village Top List:








As I became more and more comfortable in the blogging community, I also became more and more disgusted by the large number of blogs that bombarded me with skin I did not want to see and words I did not want pushed at me, whether I wanted to read them or not. That's when the idea for BLOG VILLAGE began to form in my mind. I put those thoughts into action, with the kind encouragement of one of the monitors of Blog Advance, on May 26, 2006.

For Your Success: What was your vision of what Blog Village would be?

Rosemary: What I envisioned for BLOG VILLAGE was a TopList with a community feeling to it, where the Villagers would consider the list to be an extended Blog Roll. I hoped that members would support each other's blogging efforts by reading and commenting on each other's blogs and voting for the blogs they liked each day. I was interested in opening up the Village to blogs of all types, as long as they met the basic criteria set out on the Blog Village News blog I started as a companion to the TopList. Basically, our Villagers do not post any pictures of a sexually suggestive nature anywhere on their blogs. They also do not use profanity or offensive language in any large print on their blogs. That is why we offer BLOG VILLAGE as a Family Friendly TopList. Even if an adult is viewing a blog on our list with children in the room, the children are not going to pass by the monitor and see something they shouldn’t be seeing.

For Your Success: How have you gone about accomplishing that?

Rosemary: By wording the criteria in this way, my goal was not to censor the content of anyone's blog. Rather, I wanted to avoid having possibly offensive language "shoved in the reader's face" when they opened someone's blog. Many of our Villagers do not use any objectionable language in their blogs at all. Others use it within their posts, so it becomes the reader's decision as to whether they want to return to that blog or not. Although I am a Christian, and profess my faith openly on my own blogs, emails, and websites, I was very determined to seek out a variety of quality blogs, whether Christian or not.

For Your Success: What challenges have you faced and how have you handled them?

Rosemary: When I first started the TopList I invited blogging friends I already had a relationship with to join, and I asked them to refer their blogging friends, as well. Then I went on an intensive 3 month search for blogs to invite. I scoured the Traffic Exchanges, read through, and commented on, hundreds of blogs, and sent out invitations. I looked at the Blog Rolls of blogs I thought would be good Villagers, and I read through and commented on the blogs I found there that I liked. I advertised the new BLOG VILLAGE TopList on all the forums I belonged to. It was a lot of hard work, but I wanted this list to be a success, and that meant putting time into developing it. I believed if I could get over 100 blogs of top quality to join, others would see the voting link banners and begin to ask for membership. That has been the case, as I very rarely invite new members now. Almost all of the newer members requested to join.

As you can see, this has been a time intensive undertaking. That has been one of my biggest challenges with BLOG VILLAGE. Even though I knew there would be a lot of work involved initially, I never anticipated how much time it would continue to take to keep it running smoothly. I'm always glad to help fellow Villagers, but I have been surprised by the number of members who needed help getting the voting banner on their blog correctly. That has been time spent that I had not anticipated. A TopList won't work if the members don't have a prominent voting link, or preferably a banner, on their blogs. I've had the unpleasant task of repeatedly warning, and finally deleting a large number of blogs, where the owners never did add the voting link. Not only is that time consuming, and means checking all the blogs monthly to see if the link is still there, but a few bloggers have become indignant at being deleted. That's very stressful to me, as I am not comfortable with confrontation. There have also been a very small number of blogs that I have removed from membership, because I felt that subsequent posts or pictures did not fit with my criteria for the Village. When it all boils down to it, it's my TopList, and my decision is final in all matters concerning it, and some folks just didn’t like that.

For Your Success: How would you characterize the state of things? What future plans and goals do you have?

Rosemary: As of this writing, we have 245 Active Members on our TopList, which I consider to be fantastic growth in a little over 6 months. I would hope that the list continues to grow, but certainly more slowly. As far as goals for the future, we have recently started featuring Villagers on the Blog Village News blog. This task has been taken on by one of our most active Villagers, Janey Loree, who has 3 blogs on the TopList and is an active commenter on a lot of the blogs. The interviews help to fulfill one of my goals, which is to help our members improve their SEO, by providing quality links to their blogs. I'm also hoping that these interviews will foster the feeling of community that I want this list to have. Right now, I would say there are maybe 25 or so Villagers who read and comment on each other's blogs regularly. That is way too low a number for me to be happy with it. So improving that number is my biggest priority for 2007.

A Note from The Publisher: For Your Success will soon be listed with Blog Village.