gainfully unemployed » blog

Message to Those Who Hate Their Blogs

chris — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:28:50 +0000

Do you like your blog? Or do you hate your blog?

I think there are a lot of people out there who decide a few months in or even a year or so into a new blog, that they hate their blog.

I’m here to tell you that if you hate your blog, drop it like a bad habit. Forget about it. Start a new blog in a new niche. Don’t worry about any of the work you put into your blog, just move on. Life’s too short. It doesn’t mean that you failed, it just means that you are moving on to a new project.

People do this all the time. It’s called growing. It’s called learning.

You may even be able to sell your old blog. Check out flippa.com, the best place to sell blogs (and all other kinds of websites) online. Digital Point forums also has a way to sell your site, but I’m not that familiar with it.

Just don’t feel like you need to work on a blog that you can’t stand anymore. If you have a blog you can’t stand, tell me about it. Heck, I might want to buy it from you.

Top Earning Blogs Online

Great Content is the Best SEO

chris — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:22:17 +0000

SEO is a very important factor in developing a successful blog or online property. You want the structure of your home to be solid, strong, and well-designed.

The same goes for your website.

When people say that SEO is unimportant or a waste of time, they’re wrong. Making your site search engine friendly and easily navigable and findable is incredibly important.

But…

It’s not the most important thing.

Your content is the most important thing.

It’s easy to find yourself rushing through a blog post or an article so you can get to the promotion and link building part much faster. Successful bloggers know that their job isn’t done after they finish a post. It’s only the beginning–especially with a new blog.

An informative, well-written post can be pretty lonely without anyone to read it. And the truth is, people have a lot of options. There’s plenty to read out there, so you have to find readers and traffic for your site. You have to promote your work.

The single best thing you can do for the SEO of your site, other than making sure the structure is sound and it’s highly searchable, is to find high quality, relevant links.

And the best way to find these kinds of links is by writing amazing content that people–yes, here it comes–want to link to!

It’s a much better use of your time to focus on creating amazing content than fishing around the web trying to find people to trade links with. If what you publish on your site is great, then links will be no problem. And they’ll all be “one-way” links, not reciprocal!

So, when it comes to the actual content of your site, it will pay off to make it as useful, as informative, as amazing, as scandalous, as eye-catching, and as entertaining as you can.

If I were to give you one piece of advice for your blog or website, I would tell you to not waste your time doing what internet marketers call “link-building.” Spend your time writing articles for your site instead of worrying about building links from crappy sites in order to “move up the rankings” in Google. Make your site amazing and the best kind of links will magically occur naturally!

Great Content is the Best SEO.

(image: Ivan Petrov)

16 Impressive Free Premium WordPress Themes

chris — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:59:51 +0000

Many WordPress bloggers love to check out and try new WordPress themes. One of the coolest things about WordPress blogging is that there are quite a few designers and coders who make some very cool plugins and themes for anyone to use for free.

You can spend hours or even days looking for a high quality theme to use on your blog. One of the best places to look is on WordPress’s Featured Theme page, which you can access directly from your blog’s dashboard. There are usually several really good-looking and highly-usable themes there.

There are countless lists of themes as well on design and WordPress blogs. Here’s a list of some Free Premium Themes at Hongkiat.com. I’ve been a fan of “The Morning After” (it’s third on this list) for a while now, but haven’t had a chance to use it yet. A couple of these themes would be great for an online magazine format, or really for any other online business idea you may have.

Let me know what you think of this list? Also, let me know what your favorite theme is.

Update 11/25/09

I found another great list called the Best Free WordPress Themes of 2009. Doesn’t “free” just have such a nice ring to it? Some of the themes on this list, like “Bueno” by Woo Themes, are really nice looking. If you’re looking for a theme, check out this list.

Also, see this post for a list of great WordPress resources.

How to Build a Successful Amazon Store into Your Blog

chris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:36:01 +0000

If you have a blog, you’ve probably thought about some ways to monetize your site. One way that a lot of people earn some incremental income (or really good incomes) from their sites is with affiliate relationships with either eBay, Amazon, or other online marketplaces. Some affiliate with Buy.com as well.

Amazon has some very useful ways to help you promote their products from your blog and gives you a cut of each sale you make. It’s definitely not an easy thing to do and can take some work figuring out just what kind of product will actually sell.

The truth is that not every product that seems to make sense to put in front of your specific audience will actually be a product that sells. In an article at makeuseof.com, Dean Sherwin has some valuable advice on how to integrate an Amazon store into your site (click the link to read) that will help make sales for you.

Three good points that Dean makes are the following:

People are not going to buy a $2,000 laptop through your site. Just not going to happen–even though it would seem to make sense adding a link to this kind of product in an online review of it. If people can go down the street to Best Buy or Wal-Mart to buy something, that’s probably where they’re going to go.

That being said…

Visitors to your website will buy cheaper items (say around $10) a lot of the time. They will also purchase items off your site that can generally only be found online. In other words, if it’s only available online and there isn’t a physical store nearby “competing” with you, visitors may just buy from you.
Build a separate page for your store and link to it in your navigation with the word “Store.” Makes sense right?

If you already have an Amazon store or some products linked from your website or you’re looking for a way to (pretty darn easily) add a store to your site, check out this article.

How to Use Delicious to Write Blog Posts

chris — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:44:39 +0000

Sometimes the hardest thing about blogging is deciding what to write about. Either you have no idea what to write about, or on the contrary, are so consumed by the sheer amount of information freely available on the internet that you lose focus.

This happens to me quite often.

Using social bookmarking site Delicious is one way to avoid not having ideas ready for blog posts or feeling the pain of information overload.

Delicious is the best place to store and find links to websites and blogs online. Since anyone can see how many times a given link has been saved by the community, it’s easy to see which stories or sites are the most valuable and interesting.

If you’re looking for a story idea, having a look at the front page of Delicious will show you what people are saving, what’s fresh, and what’s trending. This may give you the little push you need to write an epic post. It’s an interesting site because you never really know what you’re going to find.

Well, maybe you do actually. You’re going to get a mix of links of interest to web designers, marketers, and tech folk, but there’s always a few wild cards like news stories and random cool links that have bubbled up to the surface.

Often, you will find an idea for a story right there on the front page. But even if you don’t, you can try the Delicious search function. Type in the category or genre of your blog and see what comes up. The top entries will be authoritative sites that you probably know (if yours pops up, congrats) and you can work your way down to find links and sites that may interest you and give you a fresh idea or a new take on something.

You can also break down your searches by selecting tags to help filter your search and you can search by “freshness.” In other words, you can look for bookmarks that have been saved over the past year to the present, 2 months to the present, or 4 hours to the present. This will allow you to find perennially popular links and the hot, trending ones.

Delicious gives you a good sense of the authority of an article or blog post because you can see how many other people have saved it. Sure, it’s not a perfect system, but items with fake authority (ie, 20 friends saved it) stick out like a sore thumb.

You can also easily save and tag items you find on Delicious for use as research for a future post. If you’re going to do a link post, like a “100 Ways to do Whatever,” this is a good place to do your research. Use a unique tag for the items you’re going to include in your list or use for research and you will be able to reference them at your leisure. Pay attention to tagging saved links and you’ll make your job easier.

Also consider following the bookmarks of people you respect or listen to online. This can give you a good inside perspective on what topics they are interested in.

Hopefully, after reading this post you can see that Delicious can be an idea generating powerhouse that can help you avoid blogger’s block.

I didn’t get hugged as a child. Show me the love.

Update (4/21/2012): Delicious sucks now.

The Amazon Shopping Experience: Why We Buy

chris — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:42:18 +0000

It’s clear that Amazon.com knows how to sell stuff. But how do they do it? There is an excellent analysis of the Amazon shopping experience at WebDesignerDepot (find link below), which is a great lesson for anyone interested in e-commerce or building a landing page.

A landing page does not have to be one of those static pages with endless words and red underlines and flashing things. It’s important to make your blog a good “landing page” since the average visitor makes several judgments about your site the second it loads. Understanding how people view websites is a great way to create more trust, retain more visitors, and it just helps you stay in line with “good form.”

Amazon.com clearly knows how to aim its website squarely at the needs of its customers, which is the most important thing for a business selling anything. Even if you are a blogger who sells nothing, you’re still buying something: your visitors time. A good knowledge of user experience will help you with this too.

See the Amazon shopping analysis article.

Finding an Affordable Web Host for Your Blog or Website

chris — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:02:19 +0000

One of the tough things when you are getting started with a blog or website is to figure out the whole independent hosting thing. When I first moved on from the free blogger.com platform, I really had no idea where to turn. That was before I found AN Hosting, which is the where I host this website you’re reading right now.

Every web host company said they had the best customer service and the least downtime, but for every shining review written by a user of the service, I would find one miserable one to cancel it out. This is sort of true for any product I guess, and it really depends on the person in a case by case basis how they’re experience will be.

Some of the most popular web hosts are Dreamhost, BlueHost, and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (which looks interesting, albeit a little complicated maybe). I think if you surfed around looking for reviews you would find a lot of pros and cons for any service out there. I would definitely do some research, talk to other webmasters, look for a good price, then dive in.

Here are a couple of things you want in a web host:

1) If you want to host multiple sites, you need to make sure you can host more than one domain (and subdomains) with your account.

2) If you are going to use wordpress, drupal, or joomla to create a blog, make sure it is easy to set up. Look for an application called Delicioso, which facilitates one-click set-up of blogs.

3) Try to get a host that has pretty good customer service because in the beginning, you will probably be sending in a few emails when you inevitably get stuck.

The web host I work with is called AN Hosting (now part of Midphase). I have had no problems with this service. The technicians respond directly to my emails when I have an issue and are very prompt. It is very inexpensive. You will run your account from cPanel, which in case you don’t know is probably the most user-friendly way to manage a web host account.

When you sign up with AN Hosting, you get a free domain name–when I did I got the free domain for life; I’m not sure if it’s for life anymore, but I’ll look into it. For the domain I got, which is related to my name, since I got it free for life, that’s about an $800 savings.

With AN Hosting you get tons of bandwidth and hosting space–believe me, you won’t be able to use it all.

You get one-click installs of blog platforms on your domains. You also can host 20 domain names, so if you are looking to build more than one site, you can easily do so by purchasing a new domain name and easily installing it in minutes.

You also get great service from a very responsive support team. Some of the questions I asked early on were really dumb–but they always came through and helped me through the process or simply went in and fixed problems for me.

* Full disclosure: I have been happy with this hosting company and recently re-signed for another year of service. The link above is an affiliate link to their site. I would not refer you to the site if I did not have a good experience with them. I really just want to help you find a good web host to get started with your own WordPress blogs. AN Hosting is a good choice because it is easy to get started and is a great price for what you get. Trust me, you will not be able to use all the ample room they and features they give you unless you are building enormous sites. Even then you may not scratch the storage space you are allotted.

I originally signed up with AN when I read a really good and thorough review of the company written by a very respected WordPress blog developer Chris Pearson. Everything he said about the company turned out to be true. Visit AN Hosting.

*Update 4/24/09

I have now been with AN hosting for over two years and they continue to deliver great hosting and awesome customer service. I have never waited longer than two hours for the support team to get back to me with answers to my questions. Like I mentioned before in this post, sometimes they will just go in and fix the problem (after they ask me if it’s ok), which is pretty cool.

In my two years of hosting several sites with AN (including this site), I have experienced downtime ONE TIME. Even then, it was from 12 am to 3 am, not exactly prime website time. This is pretty incredible and one of the reasons I am sticking with this hosting company and why I tell my family and friends (not to mention my consulting clients) to work with them to host their personal websites.

Another company to look at is GoDaddy. See the latest GoDaddy Weekly Deal.