• Home
• The service
  • Hosting
  • Personal brand pack
  • Wordpress publishing
  • Revolution Themes
  • flash media gallery
  • Order Now
  • Other Services
• Why BrandForge?
  • 10 reasons
  • client testimonials
• Contact us
• Support
  • Ethos
  • System status
  • Knowledge base
  • Getting Started
• FAQ
  • Acceptable Use Policy
  • Terms of Service

3 Simple Secrets to Reducing Your Blogging Stress

This is a guest post by Karl Staib. Thoughts, creativity, and writing should flow freely and without tension. As I was writing an article a few months ago I noticed the strain in my stomach, neck, and jaw. I was straining to get the thoughts out. As if tensing my muscles would actually help me focus or even create something helpful to my readers. My writing was strained because I was uptight through the process. The tension was creating pain and I knew that I needed to fix the way I wrote my blogs. I ignored it in the past because I thought it was normal, sprinting through my thoughts until I began to stumble, hoping that after the first push of energy was over I would have something concrete to work with. And even when I ended up with a minor headache it was okay because I accomplished the work I set out to do. This cycle couldn’t continue and I needed a system. 1. Outline, Outline, Outline Writing was usually a chase for me. I would chase after the perfect sentences. A lot of times I would only have a flicker of a thought and begin writing – no planning, just bulldozing ahead, hoping it would all come out into something readable. Now I write a small outline to make sure I know where I’m going with the topic. The outline has reduced my tension because I can see the larger picture. When I get stuck, I check my outline and find myself getting back on track with minimal stress. Read more

Zemanta - a blogger’s apprentice

I have always fancied my chances with tools and widgets which make blogging fun and easy. Bloggers who post regularly on professional blogs wish to concentrate more on the content for its freshness and readability, apart from being informative ofcourse. Based on my personal experience, we tend to spend more time in finding great images, links, tags, etc to support our post and make it more appealing. Had it not been great if your browser could understand what you are blogging about and suggested you pictures, articles, links and tags to make your posts more vibrant? Be glad! With the advent of this smart firefox-IE-wordpress addon, such an assistance is at your disposal. Think of some valuable suggestions in context with your article you’re writing on the blog’s editor. It would save you a lot of time that is generally spent looking out for related content over the internet. Look out: To see how Zemanta works with Wordpress, check out this cool screencast. Read more

April 2008 Most Popular Articles

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

• 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

Speed Posting - the Aftermath of Answering 19 Twitter Questions in a Weekend

This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger - Speed Posting. I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my Twitter followers in no more than 3 minutes per post. I then handed each post over to readers for them to continue to posts. The Results? Well I had a lot of fun, got some good feedback from those Twitter followers who asked the questions, and there were a lot of great comments left. Lastly - I wrote the following 19 posts. I hope you enjoyed them and will stop by those you feel you’ve got something to say on and add your thoughts. Read more

What Time of the Day is Best to Post to Your Blog

LeftTheBox asks “Hey Darren I know you post daily but do you try to post at a certain time each day?” I certainly do! I not only set myself minimum post numbers each day but I’ve taken it a little further and narrowed down some daily posting windows that I aim for. Really it comes down to a bit of research and experimentation to work out when the best time to post is (and I suspect it’ll vary from blog to blog depending upon where their audience is situation and even depending upon topic). For me I attempt to have a fresh post go up on my blog in the morning US time. Here at ProBlogger my audience is fairly global but the majority of readers are in the Americas so I attempt to have something fresh for them for when they get to work, check their feeds over a morning coffee etc. I then also attempt to post something for the end of the day (US time). Then on days that I post a 3rd post per day (it’s usually more of a ‘newsy’ post) I attempt to put that up about 8 hours after the 2nd one just so that posts are evenly spread through the day. Read more

9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog

HaraldJohnsen asks “As a quality control, what are the most important questions to ask before hitting ’submit’ / posting a blog post?” Great question Harald - I actually think that most of us as bloggers could improve many of our posts by pausing before hitting ’submit/publish’ and asking a few basic questions about the post. Here are a few questions that I ask myself:

• Does this post give something useful and unique to my readers?
• Will it enhance their lives in some way or is it ‘fluff’?
• Is the spelling correct?
• Does the post make sense grammatically?
• What could I cut out of the post to make it more concise?
• How could I make the post easier to ’scan’ for readers (headings, formatting, images etc)?
• Is the title engaging? Does it draw people into the post?
• Could I give this post a little more time before publishing to ‘mature’? Would coming back to it tomorrow help me to add depth to it?
• Have I written on this topic before and can I link to it?

I only had 3 minutes to write this post as part of my SpeedPosting sereis - so I’m interested to hear what questions you’d add to the list? Read more

Hiring Virtual Assistant to Help Administrate Your Blog

@jb108 asks - “how do you feel about VA’s, do you use any, how many, how much work and what type do you delegate to others.” I love the idea of VA’s (virtual assistants) and can see a lot of tasks that I could potentially have one do for me - however I’ve never really felt completely comfortable with the idea and don’t currently have budget set aside for one. I do have Lara help me with comment moderation and a little other admin work when I have a project going on that I need assistance with but apart from that I don’t personally delegate much work. Of course at b5media we have quite a sizable team of staff to do a lot of the administrative stuff to keep our blog network running (I think at last count there were 12 full time staff). Read more

How to be a Ruthless Blogger (and Become More Productive and Focussed)

Sometimes to grow your blog you need to be ruthless - otherwise you’ll become distracted, unproductive, lazy, unfocused and or lose your passion for blogging. Here’s 7 areas that I’ve found myself becoming more and more ruthless in in my blogging: Image by LLimllib

1. Declare war on comment spam

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

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

• Common site tags

  adobe ads adsense advertising advice announcements biz blogging books brand building branding code comment comments community creativity CSS design download ecommerce feeds free gallery google graphic design graphics icons images improve inspiration javascript marketing monetize monetizing online organize personal photoshop php plugins PR productivity promotion ranking resources review rss search seo social media social networking target techniques template themes time management tips tools traffic tutorial tutorials twitter video videos web web development website widgets wordpress writing

Copyright © 2007 www.brand-forge.com · powered by BrandForge · Log in