I’d like to thank everybody that supported Blog Of The Day. It was an experience that taught me a lot and I aim to apply what I have learned in my blogging in the future. I should also add that there were some great blogs that I couldn’t include in the awards, simply because there were not enough days !

Finally, two things: first, I started out with the intention of making occasional awards for Commendable Comments … but I just didn’t have the time to read all the comments for all of the posts on all of the blogs I looked at. Sorry folks.

Secondly, I will continue The rog-blog.com Blog Awards in some format in the future. I haven’t dcided quite how, but it won’t be daily. More likely weekly or monthly. Watch this space for more news !

So here it is: a review of the winners followed by the revelation of the winner, The Blog Of Blogs. My congratulations to the winner !

But first, I have been asked about how you can enter for this award. Well, there is no formal application process – for the most part, I will be going from the list of blogs set up for the “widlink” widget that we were told about when we started. Students of Alex that have not done so yet should get Garry Parkes to add their name and blog URL to that list by posting in the relevant thread in the “Welcome” topic of the forum. Of course, interesting posts from our forum are likely to send me to people’s blogs too. Generally speaking, I will find you but don’t let that stop you from drawing attention to yourself with a comment on my blog !

Before I get to the awards, one last point which is a plea for help. As you can probably tell, I am relatively new to blogging and I am just loving it. I am also a dyed in the wool techy and although I make no particular claims to be a Wordpress expert, I have managed to find out most of what I needed to know, either on my own or with the aid of Google

But, I am still having some problems with embedding images in my posts. If you look at yesterday’s post from the front page of the blog, the Blog Of The Day badge seems to show OK. If you click on the blog entry’s name, or access it through the permalink, then it doesn’t show ! The HTML source in each case looks the same to me. I won’t go in to this any further here, but may do so in a separate post. In the meantime, if there are any real Wordpress gurus out there that can put me straight, I would love to hear from you !

One other thing, the award on any particular day is not necessarily going to be for a post that was put up on that day. So some of the awards will be for stuff which I came across before Alex’s competition started, or for things that have taken place over an extended period.

OK, enough with the preliminaries. Here we go …

Friday 31st August 2009

Today’s winner is, without his knowing it, partly responsible for the idea of my Blog Of The Day awards. He has a regular Friday post on his blog called Something For The Weekend and I was totally gob-smacked to find that I got a mention in his first special “SFTW” for fellow-students of Alex Jeffreys. A regular feature like this is a great way of making people want to come back to visit your site again and again, as well as providing encouragement to your fellow students.

Aside from that, I just love the look of this blog ! When I look at this it, I realise that I have got a lot to learn about the look and feel of blogs. The use of images and excerpts is great and the whole thing looks clean and sleek.

His post for Friday is a detailed analysis of his traffic for the previous month, followed by an outline of his plans for Alex’s competition. As I write this, I see that this post has already attracted 18 comments, so whatever he’s doing, it seems to be working !

So, the winner for Friday 31st August is David Walker for www.davidwalker.tv

Congratulations David !

Saturday 1st August 2009

As I have been looking at various blogs in my research, it’s occurred to me that there could well be separate categories for certain achievements. If I went down that path, then Saturday’s badge winner would be a leading contender for the Dogged Persistence Until The Problem Was Solved award.

The background to this award is from a post on the forum for Alex Jeffreys’ Marketing With Alex 2.0 students. Or two, in fact, because I raised the same issue myself. I won’t go into the technical details because it’s been done much better in the entry on the winning blog.

But the background is interesting. The question underlying the post was how you treat your customers as distinct from your prospects. For me, it seems common sense that those that become your customer have automatically self-selected themselves as your best prospects for future sales. And as such, they really deserve special treatment. The question then becomes, how do you give them that special treatment ?

One way is to put them on a separate email list on your auto-responder. That way, you can strengthen the relationship that you’ve already established with them. You can do things like give them freebies or maybe access to Members Only areas of your web site. You can also prime the pump for new launches, maybe offering them incentives for product launches that you have coming up.

So, for a thorough investigation of this important problem, and for a detailed explanation of how to solve it with AWeber, the winner for Saturday 1st August 2009 goes to Gil Dotan (aka spidersilver) for www.gilscorner.com.

Congratulations Gil.

Sunday 2nd August 2009

Today’s winner would also be a strong contender in the hypothetical Grace Under Pressure category, if there was such a thing. Not only has she overcome the loss of her initial blog installation, working diligently to restore it, she has also produced a detailed how-to document that describes exactly what you need to do should you be unfortunate enough to end up in the same boat.

These things on their own would probably be enough to win Blog Of The Day. But there is even more …

Strictly speaking, the clincher is not really on her blog. It’s hidden in a link on one of its other pages, but these are my awards and I feel free to bend the rules if I want to !

So, I strongly suggest that you visit this page on shirleycheung.com, follow the link on it and enjoy what you see. Then congratulate Shirley Cheung, not only on what you see there, but also on her winning the rog-blog.com Blog Of The Day award for Sunday 2nd August.

Well that’s it ! I have created a separate page with the rog-blog.com Blog Of the Day Roll of Honour, and the winners names will be posted there day by day

A massive post to bring us all up to speed ! Congratulations if you’ve made it this far Please let me know what you think of my selections. If you have any nominations of your own, please leave a comment.

PS: Award winners, I will be in touch later today with your “badge” !