Life of a Website
May 22, 2008
Nice to see the design history of a site. Why don\\\'t more people do this?
WordPress + bbPress
May 22, 2008
A new community built on top of Wordpress and bbPress
Skribit Helps To Cure Writers Block
May 9, 2008
- to cure your writers block
- get important stats and reader insights through analytic reports
- Connect with readers by learning what they want
April 2008 Most Popular Articles
May 1, 2008
- Let’s Follow Each Other on Twitter, Shall We?: After reading about it virtually on every single website on the web, a couple of weeks ago I decided to give Twitter a try. I must say that, contrary to what many people claim to, I did not get addicted to it.
- Embracing the Status of Part-Time Blogger: 5 Practical Tips: I’m sure you read a lot about pro blogging and what it takes to earn a full-time income from your blog. This is a common topic among active bloggers and there are plenty of great articles that cover various aspects of the subject. With the huge amount of focus that is given to becoming a pro blogger, I think that becoming a successful and profitable part-time blogger is often overlooked. Earning a reasonable amount of money on a part-time basis is actually more desirable than most people realize.
- May 1st RSS Awareness Day: Get Involved: What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits.
- Killer Domains: My First eBook is Available Now: If you tried to find some good domain names lately you know how disappointing the experience can be. It feels like all the marketable domains are already gone. And the problem is that the success of your website starts with the domain name.
- 7 Reasons Why You Might Never Be Productive: 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.
- Open Discussion: What Do You Think of Internet Marketers? (aka the long sales page gurus): The same cannot be said about people that resort to the long sales pages, though. If you navigate around the web you will notice that there is a great deal of controversy around these practices.
- The Best Sources of Content for WordPress Users: If you’re looking for technical documentation or support, the codex and forums are usually the first place to look. However, I would like to share some blogs and websites that provide a good amount of WP-related content that I think you will appreciate. Whether you are a theme designer/developer or a blogger who is looking to get more out of WordPress, visit some of these sites and see for yourself.
- Website Traffic Series Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs: On the first part of this series we talked about how you can generate traffic to your website by getting it featured on Web Design and CSS galleries. On the second part we talked about Blog Carnivals. Today we will cover another basic yet effective strategy: leaving comments on other blogs.
- Make Sure Your WordPress is Not Hacked: Lately there there seems to be a hacking spree around old versions of WordPress. Most of the times the hacker will edit your theme files to insert spam links. One of my older and non-active blogs got that problem, and I had several friends complaining to me about it as well when chatting over IM.
Partner: MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About Read more
10 Essential Legal Points for Bloggers - Part 1
April 28, 2008
Speed Posting - the Aftermath of Answering 19 Twitter Questions in a Weekend
April 28, 2008
How to Grow Beyond Blogging
April 26, 2008
@itravin asks - “you’ve gone from blogging to b5 to become an author now, can you do a post on blogger growing beyond blogs”
You know it’s never really been my long term goal to write a book or even to start a blog network. In fact when I started blogging I didn’t even think it’d be more than a hobby! So I guess without going too deeply into the topic my advice would be to go into whatever you do with low expectations but with eyes wide open to the opportunities and possibilities that might present themselves to you.
b5media came about as an opportunity as a couple of other bloggers (Duncan and Jeremy at first) approached me to ask if I’d like to explore what working together might look like. None of us had any real idea on what would come out of the discussion but we all entered into it open to the possibilities.
The book was similar in that Chris and I started out to write an ebook together. This evolved into a ‘real’ book one day when a publisher at Wiley dropped me an email to see if I’d be interested in publishing something with them. It was out of the blue and unplanned but when I began to explore it it felt right.
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How Many Blogs Do You Write On? How Many Posts Per Day?
April 26, 2008
@SeanBannister asks “how many blogs do you write for and how many blog posts a day you make?”
These days I only write actively on two blogs - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. At one point I was writing each week on around 25 blogs - but a lot of them were pretty much just watching what other blogs wrote and attempting to aggregate that content. The blogs have little original thought on them and didn’t take off so I didn’t continue to put time into them. I do also work for b5media as the VP Training - but this is just a part time role as my two main blogs take up considerable time.
In terms of posts per day - these days I try to publish one post per day on DPS. These posts are written largely by bloggers that I’ve hired. I was writing all of the content for this blog until a few months ago so now my role is more ‘editor’ although I do average 1-2 posts still a week. On ProBlogger my post frequency varies from day to day but I do have a minimum post target of 2 posts per day. I don’t mind if this drops to 1 post on weekend days but on weekdays stick to it religiously. On top of that I add other ‘newsy’ posts so probably average 3-4 posts a day on ProBlogger.
OK - so that’s my answer - I’d love to hear how many blogs you write on and how many blog posts per day that you average writing? Read more
How to Choose a Niche Topic for Your Blog
April 26, 2008
@jonathanguinn asks: “I am new to internet marketing and am struggling to find my niche. Maybe some pointers about that would be helpful.”
There are many factors to consider when choosing a niche. I’ve written about many of them in this post - but for me a lot of it comes back to choosing something that you know about, that you feel you can say something useful and interesting on - ie what are YOU about?.
After that I’d take a good hard look at tools like Google Trends where you can track the popularity of different search terms over time to see if they’ve been trending up or down. Ideally you want to find a popular niche that’s growing so that you can position yourself for the future growth.
Other factors of course come into play including the number of other blogs and websites on a topic already (ie competition), whether the topic has monetization streams (if you’re doing it for money) etc - but you can read more aobut them in my post on choosing a niche for your blog.
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When Self Promotion Tips into Spam
April 26, 2008
@jimgoldstein asks: “one things I see bloggers struggle with is blog spam. When self promotion goes to far. “
I agree Jim. There are different kinds of spam - the main stuff we see is the auto-generated stuff that fills our inboxes and hits our comment filters but then there is a more subtle kind of spam - where bloggers overstep the mark on other people’s blogs by promoting themselves to a point where they put others off. I see this every day in the comments on my blogs where the comments left are five words long and only slightly on topic and then there’s a list of 2-3 links as a signature. The comments left are obviously a thinly veiled attempt at self promotion.
The problem with this approach of self promotion is that you can do more harm for yourself than good. If you comments are allowed on your blog the reaction from others who see it can actually hurt your brand. I write about this in 10 Way s to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs.
The key to growing your blog is to create value. Create useful and unique content on your own blog (don’t get caught up in the self promotion game in every 2nd post) and to do the same thing on other people’s blogs. The people’s blogs that I visit from comments on my blog (and others) are those who have something interesting and useful to say - not those who leave links on dull and spammy comments).
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