Archive for the ‘Blogging Sense’ Category
by Jonathan Bailey on October 19th, 2011
Pretty much no blogger gets to work forever without competition. Blogging is such a crowded space that pretty much everyone has at least one other site out there that could be seen as a competitor or alternative, even if it isn’t always a direct one.
Whether you’re blogging for business, for passion or for fun, this can be a pretty heavy thought. After all, whether it’s dollars or eyeballs, you don’t want another site taking anything away from you, especially after you’ve worked so hard.
But competition online isn’t anything like competition in the bricks and mortar world. In the real world, every dollar you spend at restaurant A is one you don’t spend at restaurants B-Z. You only have so much money and can only eat so many meals. Furthermore, there’s only a certain number of people in a your region, meaning only so many people who CAN visit any of the restaurants in it.
On the Web, there’s no such limitation as there’s no cost in visiting most websites, people can literally come from anywhere and one’s time available for reading sites on a particular topic is limited only by their interest in it.
While competition on the Web is something you have to address, it isn’t something you have to fear. So what should you do when your blog faces some stiff competition? The answer is, most likely, to greet them with a hug rather than a clinched fist. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: blogging, business, Competition, competitors, niche, niche blogging
by James Dunaway on October 17th, 2011
Does it seem as though every time you turn around, someone else is telling you a story about how they made a ton of money online? What’s frustrating about this is that although you can make a living with online revenue, it’s hard to tell which story to believe and which ones are simply gimmicks. In fact, you can go on nearly any writing site and find people who will tell you how to get rich online but then go into the forums and find those same individuals asking for help and advice because they’re new to the online world.
Before you believe everything you read and follow in the footsteps of someone you don’t know and who really has not earned any credibility, you need to be aware of the truth regarding three popular myths. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips
Tags: earning, money, myths, online, Revenue
by Jonathan Bailey on October 12th, 2011
Blog branding is hard work. If you started blogging because you wanted to write, you’re probably not the world’s best designer and, though building a site is pretty fun, it’s a task that gets in the way getting new content online.
The problem is that blog branding is extremely important for your site. Not only is it one of the best ways to reduce your bounce rate, but it’s what gets your content taken seriously and lets your writing speak for itself.
As we’ve talked about before, you can’t ignore blog design and blog branding, no matter how much you want to. To make matters worse, contrary to what promotional material for various CMSes say, you can’t just download an attractive theme and go.
Unfortunately, if we’re playing the odds alone, chances are that your blog branding sucks right now. While it’s not your fault, you can rest assured many of your visitors will blame you for it and hold it against you and your content.
The good news is that if you avoid a few simple mistakes, you can go a long way to building a good blogging brand and giving your site the chance it deserves to thrive. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: Advertising, blogging, branding, design blog branding, site design, web branding, web design
by James Dunaway on September 22nd, 2011
A website or blog needs to have a content strategy that would cover the bases and help it succeed. You have heard that content is king, but remember that throughout history, we all have seen bad kings alongside great ones.
What kind of content should you have on your site to make sure you succeed? Â Here are four: Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips, General
Tags: content, Strategy, success, web site
by James Dunaway on September 21st, 2011
Google has trained us, as searchers to believe that the top results are the best fit, most relevant and the most likely place to find the answer to our question. So the top of the search results is right where every site wants to be because, that is where the traffic is.
Google may decide which site is most relevant for a particular search term but it is the searcher who decides if that site is what they are looking for and Google can monitor this through a sites bounce rate. If the majority of a sites traffic bounces away with in seconds of landing on that page Google will monitor this and may decide to recommend another site over yours. Read More
Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging Sense
Tags: bounce rate, Internet, online, web site
by Jonathan Bailey on September 15th, 2011
Fundamentally, every blog post is a bit like throwing a spark onto kindling. Your goal is to spark a fire, to start something that will interest others, grow well beyond your blog and perhaps take on a life of your own.
One of the key components of that fire is the conversation that starts up around your post and your site. That’s where the community around your work starts, it’s one of the key motivations for sharing your work and it’s an important tool in growing your site and your presence online.
However, nurturing this conversation is much more than offering a comment box and a Tweet button on your site, It involves an active effort on your part to stoke the flames and keep the interest alive.
While it might be annoying, especially for bloggers who just want to write and not think about these types of issues, ignoring the social aspect of blogging often leads to one’s site stagnating due to lack of interest and no ability to give potential readers what they want.
So how do you encourage this conversation and, more importantly, not miss it or kill it? To understand that we need to first take a look at how dialog happens on the Web and how this can work both for and against you. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
by Jonathan Bailey on August 31st, 2011
It might seem like a good problem to have. Most bloggers toil in anonymity or near-anonymity, struggling to get their sites read and find more exposure for their works.
However, those few who do “make it” often don’t fare much better. Those who achieve even a small amount of fame online often find that being known can be just as bad, if not worse, as being an unknown.
Even someone, such as myself, who achieves a tiny amount of fame in a very small niche quickly learns that any notoriety comes with a slew of responsibility and, at times, headaches.
So, before you set on the path of trying to become a famous or semi-famous blogger, you may want to take a moment and look at some of the drawbacks and problems that come with it.
Fortunately though, most of those problems can be easily mitigated, but one has to be ready for them in order to stop them from ruining everything they’ve worked on. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: celebrity, fame, insults, libel, slander, trolls
by Jonathan Bailey on April 27th, 2011
If there is one thing that the recent outages at Amazon Cloud and even the PlayStation Network can show us, it’s that even the best, most reliable companies can have serious problems with their hosting infrstructure and can go down.
Unfortunately, as a blogger, you’re just a passenger on someone else’s ship on the Web. Whether it’s a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress.com, or you have your own server, most likely, some other company is providing the hosting and the access to you. But as reliable as they might have been in the past or as great as they are now, there’s always a possibility that things could change.
Simply put, hardware breaks, companies get sold and people change jobs. What was great service and support one day could be catastrophic downtime tomorrow and it’s important to be prepared for that possibility at all times. Sadly, this has nothing to do with avoiding unlimited hosting or using a bad host as even the best, most honest hosts can have a problem.
Instead, this is an issue about being prepared for the inevitable, that something will go wrong eventually, and that you don’t want to be the one who goes down with the ship. It’s a grim situation to prepare for, but one that every blogger has to.
After all, just a few moments of preparation can, literally, save you many hours or even days of headache down the road.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: amazon, amazon cloud, Backups, domains, downtime, Hosting, outage, psn
by Jonathan Bailey on February 16th, 2011
Trust is easily the most valuable and most fragile of all the commodities a blogger has to have to be successful.
However, making complete strangers trust you and count on you is no simple task, especially when they will most likely never meet you. It can require years of tireless, consistent work, the ability to repeatedly prove that you are capable of delivering on what you promise and constantly striving to build a reputation for high quality work.
But for all of the work required to build trust, it can be lost in the blink of an eye. One breach of that trust, no matter how small, can set you back months, even years in terms of trust and some incidents can even overshadow your entire history, becoming damaging “buts” to an otherwise stellar reputation.
Learning how to build and keep trust is critical for every blogger. If your readers are going to let you in as part of their lives, no matter how small of a part that is, they need to know what role you’re going to fulfill and that you will do it well. Trust is often what separates the one-off or casual reader from the avid fan, trust is how you build inbound links and trust is how you grow your site.
Fortunately, building and managing trust is easier than many make it out to be, but it isn’t quite as simple as just doing quality work either. To build and keep trust, there are steps you have to take to ensure that others are receptive to your work and will notice your efforts, thus ensuring that your hard work doesn’t go to waste.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips, Blogging: How To
Tags: blogging, Blogging Pitfalls, mistakes, reputation, theme, trust
by Jonathan Bailey on October 27th, 2010
If you blog long enough, it is bound to happen to you, even if you aren’t aware. Someone will take your content and republish it on their site, sometimes with a link, sometimes without, sometimes the full work, sometimes just a snippet. There are a million ways your content can appear on other sites, some ways legitimately and other ways less so, but they are all interesting lessons in how your readers interact with your work and, in some cases, problems you have to address.
Because, while most content reuse is fairly harmless. Some uses, especially by plagiarists and spammers, can have a negative impact on your site. This makes it important to know both how to track your content, what your rights are regarding your work, when is a good idea to step in and, most importantly, what you can do if you find that you need to.
Unfortunately, the issues are far more complex than what we can discuss in a single column, but we can definitely give a good overview of the situation and what you can expect.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Resources, Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips, Blogging: How To, WordPress Tips
Tags: Blogging Pitfalls
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