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Website Traffic Series Part 2: Blog Carnivals

On the first part of this series we covered how you can generate traffic to your website via Web Design and CSS galleries. On the this second part I want to cover one of the most basic traffic generation methods for bloggers: Blog Carnivals. Concept: A Blog Carnival is basically an event where bloggers that cover a particular topic will get together and post a collection of their articles. Usually you have one hosting blog and the participants. The participants send the links to their articles and posts, and the hosting blog will then publish all the links in a single post. There are all sorts of carnivals around the web: weekly, monthly, with fixed host, with variable host, standalone editions and so on. Read more

Who Cares How Many Subscribers You’ve Got?

The following guest post on measuring a blog’s success has been submitted by Mark Seall. A guide to systematically troubleshooting your blog’s performance by focusing on the measures that make a difference. Apparently it’s really easy to get zillions of subscribers to your blog - Just follow a few simple steps, work hard and write good stuff. I know this, because I read it every week on various pro-blogging sites which are keen to dispense the wisdom of their own success whilst making you feel inferior for having less than 20,000 RSS subscribers. Unfortunately for many of us, the promise of multiple thousands of subscribers is unrealistic no matter how hard we try - sometimes because we work in less popular niches, sometimes because we just don’t have the available time, and sometimes because we just don’t have that magic mix of talent and luck. Read more

How to Make Money Because of Your Blog - Book Deals

The New York Times has an article this week revealing that the advance of the book deal announced on the blog Stuff White People Like last week is worth $300,000. We’ve seen a number of bloggers sign book deals over the last year but this kind of money is beyond what I’ve seen before. Book deals are a perfect example of bloggers making money because of their blog (indirectly). Other bloggers who’ve released books based upon their blogs include (from among many): Read more

7 Reasons Why You Might Never Be Productive

This post was guest blogged by Alan Johnson, author of The Online Business Handbook. Are you disappointed with the fact that, no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to get things done in a productive manner? If so, then acting now is the way to go because you can rest assured that things will not exactly get better if you just stand there and wait for a miracle. As a blogger, being productive is definitely a must if you are serious about long-term success and living in denial is simply not an option. Where to start? Identifying the problem is always the first step and here are the 7 most common reasons why you might never be productive: Reason 1: You Hate What You’re Doing Read more

“KotaX”, a New XML Blogger Template

Live Demo | Download the Code

Buy me a coffee to write more Read more

Treating Your Blog as a Business: 8 Aspects to Consider

Last week I wrote a post Is There a Career in Blogging? that examined the possibility of earning a full-time income with a blog (or a network of blogs). One of the keys that were mentioned for running a profitable blog was to treat the blog as a business, not as a hobby. This is probably a pretty obvious statement for those of us that are looking to make money online, but what is really involved? How can you put this into practice? Here are some of the elements that I feel are critical for treating a blog as a legitimate business. 1. Goals Any traditional business will have goals that are set for a specific period of time, usually monthly, quarterly, and annually. Blogging should really be no different. If you hope to make a full-time income, or even a solid part-time income, you really should have specific goals of revenue that you need to produce. It seems obvious, but I think many of us don’t take goals as seriously as other types of businesses. In order for your goals to be effective, they should be time-sensitive (meaning they end at a particular date), measurable, and attainable, although not too easily attainable. I think many of the bloggers who actually do set goals get a little caught up in the excitement and set their goals a bit too high right off the bat. As a result, many of them get disappointed and discouraged and quickly assume that blogging is not the way for them to make money online. Read more

Why Bloggers Blog - [VIDEO MASHUP]

Last week I put out the call for video posts on the topic of ‘Why I Blog’. This is a ‘group project’ of sorts and my hope was to see bloggers experiment with producing videos all around the same topic. The result was 36 bloggers tackling the challenge and submitting their videos. The videos exceeded my expectations with a while range of bloggers participating. We have bloggers who have just started out along side bloggers who’ve made a successful business from blogging. We have bloggers from around the world (and even one video in Spanish), bloggers young and old, male and female, human and…. dog. Some are serious, some funny, some abstract…. Some of the videos are ‘talking head’ in style, others get a little creative (and at times bizarre) - but all take up the topic and run with it. As promised in my launch post - here they are. I hope you enjoy this mashup of voices. Thanks to each blogger who submitted a video - I hope I didn’t miss anyone! Read more

How to Come Up with Topics to Write About On Your Blog

In today’s video post I want to show you a technique that can help those of us struggling to come up with ideas to post about on our blogs to discover post ideas that are relevant to what our readers are looking for information on. In the few minutes that this video goes for I come up with 15 or so post ideas - you can too. The size of the video above might be a little small for you to pick up all of the detail in the screen cast so for a larger version see it also at Revver and YouTube. Also - once the screen cast part of the video starts you may need to turn up your volume slightly. The two tools mentioned in this post are 103bees and Sitemeter but you could glean the same information from virtually any web metrics tool. Read more

Building Findable Websites

Often times, the term SEO is mentioned in derogatory terms. With many of the poor techniques people use to garner site traffic, it's not hard to see why. However, Aaron Walter has recently finished a book entitled Building Findable Websites which casts a wide net on the concept of building a quality web site that goes well beyond just the mere topic of SEO. The concept of "findable websites" may be familiar if you recently read Aaron's article in A List Apart, entitled Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry. In the article, Mr. Walter talks of three very important things that a site needs to accomplish, helping people:

• find the web sites they seek,
• find the content on the site, and
• rediscover valuable content they've found.

The book covers plenty of topics including SEO, microformats, and integrating third-party APIs like Google Search. The supporting site also has plenty of supporting content including five additional chapters. Read more

Most Popular Articles March 2008

Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out to make sure you have not missed any.

• Hold Tight, It Will Only Get Easier: Most bloggers that get discouraged and decide to abandon their blogs tend to do so on the first three to six months. Sometimes the traffic is not growing as fast as they would like. Other times they are not happy with the money that they are making. Personally I think that quitting after such a short period is a mistake.
• Become a Blogging Wizard - 6 Lessons from Harry Potter: Humble beginnings, a long arduous struggle, and ultimate triumph… The story of a young wizard? Or the story of a beginning blogger? How about both? Here are six lessons from Harry Potter on how to become a blogging wizard.
• The Ultimate WordPress Contact Form Plugin: cforms II: Recently I was creating a small static website, and I needed to insert a custom contact form there. I use WordPress as a CMS even for static websites, so I tried a couple of contact form plugins. None of them was customizable enough, though, so I went to ask a couple of programmers if they were interested in creating a custom contact form for me.
• 50 Thoughful, Funny and Polemic Blogging Quotes: I love quotes, what can I say. Below you will find some that I gathered recently. Some of them are thoughtful, others funny, others yet polemic. All of them should be worth a reading though. If you have one to add, just let me know.
• 5 Steps to Write Effective Articles in Less Time: Do you sit in front of computer for a long time to create a single blog post or article? Does it take too much thinking for you to come up with an effective article? If your answer was ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you should continue to read the post. Whether you are a blogger or a freelance writer or an article marketer, you need to write effective articles quickly. If you are doing one of those as a full time job, you must really use your time properly and try to write more articles in less time. Here are few things you should do when you sit to write an article or blog post.
• Is It Just Me or Most Web 2.0 Domain Names Suck?: A couple of weeks ago I was browsing around TechCrunch when I came across some articles that were listing web startups that would be participating on a Demo event. The idea about getting startups grouped together to demonstrate what they products or services can do is pretty interesting, but that was not what caught my attention. Instead, I could not help but think about how bad some of these domain names were. Here are a few examples:
• 10 Signs That Your Blog Is On The Right Track: Starting a new blog or growing an existing one can certainly be frustrating, as it may seem like you are not on pace to achieve your goals. Like anything worthwhile, building a solid and effective blog will take some time and hard work. As Daniel wrote recently, it gets easier with time if you can stick with it.
• Do You Really Need to go to the University?: If you want to work on the Internet or to be an entrepreneur, I really don’t think you need to. I always tell my friends that if I had the mind that I have today (in terms of knowing what I want to do, and what knowledge and tools I need to do that) five years ago, I would not have enrolled myself in the university.

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