ProBlogger Summer Challenge Weekly Wrap-Up

New to SITS? Welcome!! Go read this to get started.

The first week of our Summer Challenge is coming to a close.  We thought we’d use today to highlight the wonderful collaboration and ideas we’ve seen in blogland over the last several days.  It’s the daily participation from our community that makes this event so successful!

Day One: We talked about the importance of the elevator pitch as a way to articulate your blog’s purpose to your audience. Caroline from Smarty Pants Mama and Jennifer from Momma Made It Look Easy both wrote great posts that incorporated the use of the perfect elevator pitch for their blog.

Day Two: We shared list posts that we’d written, and learned that writing list posts is a great way to provide your readers with information that is easy to read.  We saw TONS of examples of great list posts in Day Two’s forum, but Kim’s list of 14 coffee recipes over at Money And Risk, and Cheryl’s list of the 12 most common symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome at Little Bit Quirky are just a couple of our favorites.

Day Three: We discussed how promoting individual blog posts on a variety of social media sites (other than simply Facebook and Twitter) can increase readership.  As follow-up to this, Shayna from Life Forward broke down the in’s and out’s of the social networking site, Digg, for us.

Day Four: We studied successful blogs in our niche and thought about what we could do to improve our own blogs by using other sites as inspiration.  Cameron from Ingenue Mom analyzed Dear Baby, a blog in her niche, and discovered ways she could take her own blog to the next level.

Day Five: We vowed to pay special attention to readers by being responsive (via comments, email, reciprocal blog visits, etc…) and by making personal connections.

Day Six is today!  Don’t miss out on a great list of 27 must-read tips and tutorials about blogging over on BlogFrog.

Finally, we wanted to share some very exciting news with our community:
This coming Thursday, July 29 from 4:00-5:00 pm MST, we will be hosting a live UStream chat with Darren Rowse! Pay close attention to the SITS Girls Twitter and Facebook accounts in the upcoming week as we will be passing along all details there.

Before signing off, we wanted to take a moment to highlight our Summer Challenge community leads and share a little about their blogs.  Without these amazing women, there is no way we’d be able to accomplish as much as we have!

Lynda is an amateur writer and photographer living in Fort Worth, TX with her husband and two young sons. In 2010 she is participating in Project 365 while chronicling her adventures learning photography and photo-editing. Her website, Daily Window, is a personal photographic scrapbook which also features a variety of photography tips along with easy to follow editing tutorials.

Rachael is a wife and mother of two boys from Bellingham, WA. Between juggling loads of laundry, a 4 year old, and a 10 week old, she tries to focus on her biggest passions: reading and writing. Rachael has done some freelance writing online, but she mainly writes at Scientific Nature of the Whammy, a blog focused on nurturing the spirit through writing and community and exploring the moments that make life a joy.

Jen Havice is a forty one year old recovering people pleaser and sometime domestic goddess who works part time, rides horses, and rants about the state of the world on her blog. Due to a strange lack of interest in her early Italian Renaissance art history education from employers, Jen has put her writing talents and literary aspirations on the front burner. She enjoys picking apart the absurdities of everyday life on her blog, When Pigs Fly.

Erin is a sometimes clueless, stay-at-home-mom of two boys (3 years and 8 months) who routinely destroy her world. She follows her bliss by inspiring women to live with passion, joy, and purpose on her super groovy blog NirvanaMamma.com.

Kathy, aka Mama Kat, jokingly refers to herself as an attention craving poodle on her blog, Mama’s Losin’ It. This blog is a wonderful mix of humor and heart from a woman who owns and operates her own daycare business. A former English teacher, Kathy is also the creative mind behind Writer’s Workshop,  a weekly meme in which her readers select and write a post based on a variety of prompts that Kathy provides, and then link to her blog in order to increase their web traffic.

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It’s Saturday, y’all, and you know what that means.  Time to share your favorite post from the week!  To mix things up a bit, head over to our Facebook fan page and add a link to the post you’re most proud of this week or maybe even a post that you just enjoyed reading.

Tickets for Austin and St. George, Utah, our final Bloggy Boot Camp stops for the year, are on sale now! Don’t wait to buy yours. We’d love to meet you in person!

And, as always, when you see this:

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