The influence of blogging is overall a very positive force in the media.-Garrett M. Graff If you write it and publish it, your an author. If you write it and blog it-are you wasting your time? The general rule of thumb for writing a novel is to put together a thousand words a day on your way to a hundred thousand word novel. Once you have the finished rough draft, which can take anywhere from a few months to a few years, you proof read for plot logic, tweak the tension here, relax the tension there, arrange it in a…
Category: blogging
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.…
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…
The Power of Lists for Bloggers
Top Lists grace the covers of most magazines and have to be a close second to Memes when it comes to blog topics. A good list can get you a lot of traffic, bookmarked in all those cool bookmarking sites-Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and most of the other social networks love lists. Hit one their front pages with your top list and get thousands of hits in one day. A good top ten list will make people want to come back and see what else you might be writing a list about. Or start a nice discussion about why the things…
Have a Blog or Have a Life
You really can’t have both you know. I’ve been diddling around here for a bit, just looking at Google Trends and this and that, I almost wrote a blog post about a service that is hiring people to be personal assistants-in the stand in line and buy me tickets sort of way. It only cost twenty dollars a months so I can imagine what they pay the people who pick up the dry cleaning. But that didn’t seem all that interesting. Then I thought about writing a blog post about the 2009 Harley Davidsons, only there don’t seem to be…
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…
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Well, I like all things Amazon.com and Amazon Mechanical Turk looks sort of interesting. The one or two HITS that I clicked on look like some kind of surveys-clearly this needs a bit of looking into. Hey, with a name like Mechanical Turk its got to be good. Though to be honest I don’t really get the Mechanical or the Turk part of the name. Amazon, well, I guess that never made much sense either, did it? So what is it and how do you make money with it? Good questions. Short answer, I’m not sure. I signed up the…
Blog Changes-Pagerank, Alexa, Etc
Or the Rise and Fall of If You Write It. My random thoughts blog about trendy things has lost its small amount of Pagerank, which was 3 until fairly recently, and is now 0. This is not a great tragedy, except for my small trickle of income from paid posts that wanted a blog with a Pagerank of at least 3. Of course, it is entirely possible that writing paid posts is what cost me the Pagerank in the first place. Kind of funny that. Alexa has also lost interest in If You Write It, my high spot on Alexa,…
I make money blogging, just not a lot
Over the past couple of years I have been trying to make money with blogging. This has sometimes been a pretty serious effort, sometimes pretty passive. I have blogged about events of the day and hit the keywords pretty heavy, so that many of my posts pop up in Google searches in the top ten. This effort has not made me rich, but it has make me some money with Adsense. Adsense’s evil twin is Adwords-while Adsense makes you money-sometimes even enough to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, Adwords spends your money. And while the nice thing about…
Readers from my Real Life-Such as It Is
“How do I find this blog of yours?” my boss asked me one day-as I seemed to spend most of my time thinking about blogging and not nearly enough time thinking about portrait photography. Well, I do blog about taking photos once in a while. So my mind was doing a bit of racing, outside of a few passing comments on cold, heartless corporations, had I said anything really bad about my job? Nothing sprang to mind, but then, my idea of something bad and his might be different. Blogging, for all it’s open for the world to read qualities,…