Apr 14 2009
Day 4: 31 Days Coffee Break - Green Mountain Coffee Breakfast Blend
Today’s Coffee
My last couple of coffee choices have been dark, bold coffees, because that tends to be my preference most of the time, but this morning’s coffee choice is Green Mountain Breakfast Blend, a New England style morning coffee. If you like Dunkin Donuts, you’ll LOVE this one. Breakfast Blend is one of Green Mountain’s Signature Blends and an all-time best-seller. It’s one of their lighter roast coffees, just dark enough to bring out the bright notes of the Central American coffees that make up the blend. Central American coffees are higher in acid, which gives them that characteristic snap. They’re blended with just a hint of Indonesian coffee to give the flavor a little bit of depth. It’s a great wake-me-up coffee, perfect for workday mornings and the ideal accompaniment to a Danish, donut or bowl of cereal. Kenneth Davids rated this one 89 out of 100 in an August 2008 review. It’s available from Green Mountain Coffee as whole bean, ground and Keurig K-cups.
We’re taking part in the ProBlogger 31DBBB over at Problogger.net. Here at CoffeeBreak, I’ve committed to posting a daily post where Today.com bloggers and friends can share their discoveries and observations as we make our way through the exercises. Each post includes a Mr. Linky widget so that everyone can add a link to their “homework” or another designated post on their blog. All of the links will be converted to permanent links at the end of the 31 days.
Today’s assignment is to find a successful blog in your niche and analyze it to see what they’re doing that makes them so successful. In going through the comments to the assignment over at Problogger, one of the things that cropped up consistently was the complaint “I can’t find any successful blogs in my niche”. For me, finding other successful coffee blogs was easy - I just typed “coffee blog” and “blog about coffee” into Google and voila!
Now, here’s the really silly thing. I’ve never done that before. It’s never even occurred to me. I search for coffee, I search for coffee news, I search for coffee reviews, I search for… well, you get the idea. There are a few coffee blogs that I follow regularly, but most of them are “industry” blogs. Some of them are “coffee review” blogs or “coffee maker review” blogs - blogs that are obviously designed for Google Adsense (or other advertising). That’s not what I ever wanted to be. Nor did I ever want to be a barista blog, or a blog for coffee snobs. I just want to write about coffee for regular folks like me, and while I’m at it, maybe nudge a few folks into thinking about where their coffee comes from and how important it is to the lives of a lot of people in other countries.
Did you have a hard time finding a blog in your niche? Did you find one? Did you learn anything important or helpful? How will it help you to make your blog better?
Leave your answers in a comment - and since there’s no “assignment” post again, use Mr. Linky to add a link to your favorite post on your blog so we can come read it.
Catch up with All the 31 Days Coffee Break Posts
It depends on how you define “in my niche”. Roleplaying blogs are pretty common; all I have to do is hit up the RPG Bloggers’ Network, and there I am. Writing blogs, same; I have to actually resort to google or a social network to find them, sure, but they aren’t exactly rare.
But finding people who do both at the same time, and do both well: that’s a lot trickier. So I’ve had a lot of trouble with Day 4.
I kinda got off-track after Day 4 - I still don’t know who/what is out there that does what I do… yes there are expat blogs and travel blogs, I don’t know where I fit in.
So here’s my most popular post, in terms of Stumble-Upon hits, at least
My exploration / explanation of common European Stereotypes 