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.
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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 »
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. ... 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?
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Several weeks ago in "Don’t Look Now, but You’re Being Followed," I wrote that I had turned off "nofollow" on this blog. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see the original post for more details. I think it's important that you know the background behind it.)
Well now we're seeing more and more bloggers doing the same, and someone has even started a meme to spread the word. I was tagged by Stark ... Keep reading »
A month ago yesterday, I made a open attempt to start ranking for "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" as part of an example of how important <title>s are. Well this morning I discovered that that was an even better idea than I thought it was.
Not only am I now ranking fourth in Google (as of this writing), but 14 of the last 100 visitors to ... Keep reading »
Christine Kane has written a great piece about "18 Stupid Mistakes Bloggers Make in their First Year." It's an outstanding read and definitely worth a trip over there. I love it because she nails so many things. You can tell she's only been blogging a year because all those beginner mistakes are still so fresh in her mind.
She's also got a great-looking blog to boot. It's worth a trip just to see that.
