Unless you’re completely new to the blogging scene, you’ve probably heard two things. One thing you’ll have heard is that content is king. The other is that you must offer your visitors real value if you want them to come back. These things are necessary to make money, but they’re not enough in themselves. A less talked about secret of earning big blog income is that great content and providing value will only get you so far. That may seem to contradict what you’ve heard, but it doesn’t. Please let me explain. Read More→

Take a look at your blog.  Take one cold, hard look.  Notice how it makes you feel.  How would you describe your blog- the caress of a woman on a warm Cuban night or a cold shot of vodka out in the wilderness?  This is actually a good thing to do, because your viewers’ emotional response to the look of your blog will decide if they stay and read the content.  You can have the best content in the world, but you will be putting your blog at a huge disadvantage if it doesn’t look the part.

People are visual creatures, especially on the internet.  They will often judge a website within a few seconds.  What happens in those few seconds?  Do they read everything on the page and take the time to evaluate what you are saying?  No, they only have a few seconds, so they can’t give your content much thought at all.  They glance across the page and judge how it looks.  Is it spammy?  Does it look amateur?  Presentation is everything in capturing your readers attention.  Some people think this means impressing your readers.  They install crazy graphics.  They make the page more complicated than it needs to be.  This is not so sexy for your blog.  This is the horny teenager of the blog world.  You are better than that. Read More→

I love picking the photo for my blog posts.  I use the process like dessert, I have to eat all my greens (write the copy) before I’m allowed the pleasure of linking to Flickr and searching for that perfect image to go with the post.

The images I use are licensed under Creative Commons, you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) but other than that you are allowed to copy or adapt the work to fit in with your blog. Read More→

Posting lots of delicious content is great, but what’s even better is when lots of people get to see your awesome content.  So how can you get more people coming to your website without paying anything?  Social bookmarking, my friend, social bookmarking.  Basically the internet is changing.  Before it was a robotic place and not too many people used it.  But now the internet is easier to use, more and more people are browsing.  These people have needs, and I’m not just talking about pornography- I’m talking about socializing.  Whatever way you look at it, people like to network with other folks, they like to make friends and influence people.  The new internet, or Web 2.0 as all the cool cheerleaders will tell you, is designed for exactly that. Read More→