Back in February, John Chow wrote about 10 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid. He's dead right on 9 of them (not sure about #10 ;) ), and it's definitely worth both a read now and a bookmark for reading at least once a week from now on. I know I will.
If you're active on the web for very long, you will screw up. It's inevitable. How you handle it can make you or break you, though. To show you what I mean, let's look at three different examples: one from last year in which a company dealt swiftly and expertly with a problem of their own making and two from this year where just the opposite was the case. I think the end results will be more than enough to convince you to be very proactive the next time you screw up. Keep reading »
A huge thanks goes out to Staska.Net who pointed me to Ronald's fix for the new "feature" in WordPress 2.1 that cuts off your RSS feeds at the <!-- more --> tag. I had to use that tag in order to format my homepage the way I wanted to, so I had just resigned myself to having to publish only a partial feed. Not anymore! Now I can have the best of both worlds, ... Keep reading »
Last week I ran across the Blog Posting Mantra. It was amazing. All these things I had come to realize on my own were right there in black and white. If only I had seen them sooner :D The author was Mike Sansone who blogs at ConverStations. As I began to read his site, I realized that he really knew what he was talking about, and he has a great writing style that makes the information so easy to grasp. So I was excited when he agreed to spend some time talking with me so that I could learn more about him and how ConverStations came to be. Keep reading »
We all know that search engines can bring us free traffic, so last week we covered the basics of how to SEO a blog. That's where you should start if you haven't already. The next step, though, is to start ranking well for terms that you already rank for somewhere in the results. Pages in the top 3 results can get ten times as much traffic (or more) than ... Keep reading »
My fling with Paris Hilton has me ranking #6 in Google right now for my fling. Gotta go explain that one to the wife before she wonders what's going on.
I'm a genius. Literally. Intelligence-wise, I'm in the top 1% of people worldwide. And along with that superior intellect comes the uncanny ability to tell when someone is faking it, when they're not being genuine. It doesn't even have to be in person. I can read your blog post and tell whether or not you know what you're talking about. Sometimes it's obvious, but other times I just know, despite the fact that I can't put my finger on exactly why. That's pretty arrogant isn't it? But that's apparently the way I think, judging by some of the things I've tried to pass off in my life. Whether it's tests, essays, term papers, research projects -- you name it, I've tried to fake my way through it. In more recent history, it's been blog posts. I can go back over the past year and find several posts where I wrote hundreds of words on the very shakiest foundations of knowledge, or where I tried to hide my true intentions for writing. Did I really believe that I was one of the elite few who could tell when people were faking it? It seems so ludicrous now that I'm aware of it. Keep reading »
Well not long after Spivot redoes their site to do a much better job of respecting the rights of bloggers, myLot comes along and shows us just how bad Spivot could have been. Check out one of the latest posts from Emergiblog on myLot (nofollow applied to that link). Not only do you have a scary layout of giant ad/excerpt/giant ad/tags/giant ad, but the "view full article" link opens the post in a myLot frame, not in ... Keep reading »
Lisa Sugar had an inkling that her online celebrity gossip blog PopSugar was on the right track when Banana Republic called in July 2006 and offered to buy up all the ads for a week -- six months before she had even hired an ad seller. -- "The Sweet Spot," Forbes, April 23, 2007 How would you like that? A huge advertiser calling you up out of the blue to offer you money. Judging by the size of ProBlogger's readerbase, I imagine most of us would consider it a dream come true. Care to venture a guess as to how many visitors she was seeing at that point, though? Keep reading »
In my first post about the 90-Day Challenge, I forgot to mention that one of the things that made me want to give you motivation for blogging consistently for 90 days was Al Carlton's answers in this Bloggers Face-Off. I was stunned that someone who had only been blogging for 18 months could have 30,000 page views every day and more than 20,000 feed subscribers. Think about that: 20,000 subscribers. Unreal. Then I read that he writes 10 to 15 posts a day, has 5 writers on staff and blogs 5 hours/day sometimes. That's the first time the light bulb really went on for me: unless your content is ground-breaking, miss-at-your-own-peril kind of stuff, you've got to be consistent. And even if your content is that vital, you'll still lose a ton of people if you don't blog regularly. Keep reading »
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