Blogs I Wanna Be When I Grow Up

Last year I had a bit of luck and got a few hits on a couple of Popular Posts, well, for me anyway. These posts kept my daily visitors at around 1,000 and often over a 1,000 a day. I know, you scoff at my measly 1,000 hits a day. Muhahah! I get that before breakfast! You say with justifiable contempt. Or maybe you’re one of those bloggers whose hits all come from you checking your stats every hour. I was there in the beginning as well. But now that I have a couple of years under my belt and…

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Blogging and Free Stuff

Seth Godin talks about freebies for bloggers in his book Meatball Sundae. He says that an office chair manufacturer send him an email saying they would like to send him a chair and ask that he review it-and give them a link to their website. He says its a six hundred dollar chair, but that doing a paid review for an office chair would not fit in with his overall business plans. It isn’t scalable and it would just drive his regular readers away. He goes on to say that the people making the chairs should look for blogs that…

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A Week Without Blogging

Ok, maybe not quite a week, but pretty close to it. And I have been writing, just not blogging. My work moves me around and there are times when-shockingly-I don’t have the internet close at hand. Yes it is possible to use a dial up connection, but just thinking of that slow death was enough to make me just step back and think about my life as a blogger. I had hopes of becoming a professional blogger and making a living from my random thoughts and silly observations. But I have not quite figured out how to do that yet.…

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Follow This Blog with Blogger Followers

Blogger has always been my blog platform of choice, though the serious bloggers all say to get your own domain if you want to hit the big time. Maybe one of these days, but not just yet. The good people at Blogger keep rolling out new widgets and doodads and I stop by from time to time to take a look at them. Followers allows you to keep tabs on blogs you like and lets others keep tabs on what is going on at your blog. Clicking on the Icon does not take you directly to the blogger’s blog, but…

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New Header-A Work in Progress

Just when I have few days off and think I can fiddle around, I have to go to work the next couple of days and leave the new header as it is. I don’t think it’s too terrible, but it could use a little tweaking. Well, it will have to wait. I really just wanted to see if I could whip something up. Maybe a couple more elements, a little darkening here and there. I like the whole abstract feel of it, I wasn’t really going for anything all that concrete, so maybe it is good the way it is.…

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Ten Ways To Get Blog Post Ideas

Starting a blog usually mean having something to say. So it is a bit surprising how quickly those blog ideas become hard to find. So here’s a short list of places to find blog post ideas, blog post topics, blog post subjects, or whatever else you might want to call the body of a blog post. 1. Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, and MSN A-List-what are people searching the Internet for? The idea here is to go and see what the current hot topic is and then whip out a quick post about it. Landing on the Blog section of Google…

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How Did You Find Me?

There are a few people who blog and and make a living at it-John Chow, Dosh Dosh, Pro Blogger, a number of geeky tech blogs that I never go anywhere near and likely a few hundred other good people that I don’t read. Other people, well, I am not sure what their reasons for blogging are. I started If You Write It with the goal of making $300 a day, and have come as close to that goal as making four or five dollars a day. I had A Plan, but found it to be too much like, oh, what…

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Julie/Julia- Single Minded Devotion

Julie/Julia is the story of a blogger telling the tale of cooking her way through Julia Child’s Masting The Art of French Cooking. Which is why the book was written, right? So someone could work their way through it and become a French Chef on the other end. But the odds are good that no one ever did cook all the recipes in MtAoFC, or any other cookbook for that matter. So several years ago, when blogs were an unknown element and a governmental secretary decided to start The Julie/Julia Project, it make news-real news, not just bloggy news. This…

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Blogging for Fun, Blogging for Money

When I first started blogging it was just for fun, my first blog was more or less a message board for me and about five other like minded people to bounce ideas off of each other. If we had other readers, we didn’t have tracking software to watch them come and go. On that older blog I got comments from my little group on every single post and we had interactions and conversations. It was fun and I never thought about selling anything-never thought about pagerank, Alexa, or another of the other countless ways that bloggers use to keep score…

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Blogvertise-the lure of easy money

Having found a few articles about blogging for dollars, I ran across Blogvertise, which says it will pay you to blog about stuff. Cool, I like blogging and I like getting paid. Seems I am not the only one. A cursory check of Google lead me to Blogger Jobs and then Blogvertise. I find it pretty interesting that there are all these blogs that want people to post on them.Now I have been writing one thing or another for the better part of my life. When not writing, I am reading about writing. But I have never made the small…

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