Writing and Blogging Info

Writers write. It’s a given. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. Notice that we haven’t said anything about “publication”. Publication follows, when you write.

Publication’s inevitable.

When you write, your skills improve, and sooner or later you’ll get published. This by the way, solves none of your problems - it just gives you a different set of problems to deal with. You solve these new problems by… yes, by writing.

So how do you become a prolific writer?

I’ve covered “writing more” on this blog previously, so let’s cut to the chase:

1. You trust yourself

You set goals. You have NO idea how you’ll achieve these goals, but you trust yourself. And you start writing.

2. You realize that writing is just one word after another

Each day, at your appointed “writing” hour or hours, you sit down, and write. You write well, or badly, but you write.

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I get lots of questions every week, and 95 per cent of those questions can be answered with: “It really, really REALLY doesn’t matter.”

Your obsessions stem from a lack of confidence

Writers have many obsessions and all of them stem from a lack of confidence.

For example, it doesn’t matter:

* How you format a magazine query; or

* What blogging platform you use - use WordPress, Blogger, TypePad; or

* What you charge - what you charge is up to you. Set a fee, and people will either pay it, or not. You can always change it later. Or -

* What your current credentials are. If your have no writing credits, that’s perfectly fine. Everyone starts somewhere. Write some samples… Make it clear you’re a new writer. Be honest. It also doesn’t matter:

* Whether you’ve finished your book or not. Send off a query letter to a selection of agents. They’ll respond, or not. If they respond, they’ll offer suggestions. Accept the suggestions. Or not…

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I just came across an interesting interview with Google’s founder Larry page. The interview is about how to change the world. Sounds challenging huh? This guy actually did it, so he has credit to talk about it.

When asked about how to get more people actually thinking about and working on things that might end up changing the world, he answered:

There are a number of barriers in place. Let me give an example. In our first founders’ letter in 2004, we talked about the risk profile with respect to doing new innovations. We said we would do some things that would have only a 10% chance of making $1 billion over the long term. But we don’t put many people on those things; 90% work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. And if you look at where many of our new features come from, it’s from these riskier investments.

Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.

This advice is good for pretty much anything you decide to carry on in your life. Blogging and online ventures are no exception. If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.

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The folks at InsideCRM created a nice compilation of tips to speed up your website, titled The Webmaster’s Turbo Kit.

There are all sorts of tips and tools included, from reducing the number of HTTP requests to compressing images and playing with caches. Here are six articles that I wrote on the topic some time ago (they were included on the list):

1. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images
2. Speed Up Your Site: Image Formats
3. Speed Up Your Site: Optimize your CSS
4. Speed Up Your Site: Use a slash on your links
5. Speed Up Your Site: Use the height and width tags
6. Speed Up Your Site: Reduce the HTTP Requests

Remember though, the first step towards a fast website is actually the hosting company that you choose.

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Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out to make sure you have not missed any.

• Let’s Follow Each Other on Twitter, Shall We?: After reading about it virtually on every single website on the web, a couple of weeks ago I decided to give Twitter a try. I must say that, contrary to what many people claim to, I did not get addicted to it.
• Embracing the Status of Part-Time Blogger: 5 Practical Tips: I’m sure you read a lot about pro blogging and what it takes to earn a full-time income from your blog. This is a common topic among active bloggers and there are plenty of great articles that cover various aspects of the subject. With the huge amount of focus that is given to becoming a pro blogger, I think that becoming a successful and profitable part-time blogger is often overlooked. Earning a reasonable amount of money on a part-time basis is actually more desirable than most people realize.
• May 1st RSS Awareness Day: Get Involved: What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits.
• Killer Domains: My First eBook is Available Now: If you tried to find some good domain names lately you know how disappointing the experience can be. It feels like all the marketable domains are already gone. And the problem is that the success of your website starts with the domain name.
• 7 Reasons Why You Might Never Be Productive: Are you disappointed with the fact that, no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to get things done in a productive manner? If so, then acting now is the way to go because you can rest assured that things will not exactly get better if you just stand there and wait for a miracle. As a blogger, being productive is definitely a must if you are serious about long-term success and living in denial is simply not an option.
• Open Discussion: What Do You Think of Internet Marketers? (aka the long sales page gurus): The same cannot be said about people that resort to the long sales pages, though. If you navigate around the web you will notice that there is a great deal of controversy around these practices.
• The Best Sources of Content for WordPress Users: If you’re looking for technical documentation or support, the codex and forums are usually the first place to look. However, I would like to share some blogs and websites that provide a good amount of WP-related content that I think you will appreciate. Whether you are a theme designer/developer or a blogger who is looking to get more out of WordPress, visit some of these sites and see for yourself.
• Website Traffic Series Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs: On the first part of this series we talked about how you can generate traffic to your website by getting it featured on Web Design and CSS galleries. On the second part we talked about Blog Carnivals. Today we will cover another basic yet effective strategy: leaving comments on other blogs.
• Make Sure Your WordPress is Not Hacked: Lately there there seems to be a hacking spree around old versions of WordPress. Most of the times the hacker will edit your theme files to insert spam links. One of my older and non-active blogs got that problem, and I had several friends complaining to me about it as well when chatting over IM.

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In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write content on an ongoing basis. As you add content to your blog, new posts are automatically positioned on top of previous posts, so your visitors can see “what’s new.” Then they can comment on it or link to it or e-mail you if they choose to do so.

A blog can be a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts.

Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.

A blog is often a combination of what’s happening in someone’s personal and business life and what is happening on the web–a kind of high-tech, hybrid diary/guide site– and there are seemingly as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

Although, you’ve probably only recently started hearing about blogs, individuals actually maintained blogs long before the term was coined or became popular–but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Google’s Blogger at blogger.com.

Thousands of individuals use services such as Blogger to simplify and accelerate the publishing process.

Blogs are also called web logs or weblogs. However, the name “blog” is less confusing, because “web log” can also mean a server’s log files.

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A “niche” refers to a targeted market with profit potential that is not saturated with competitors. The whole idea is to realize the benefits of building niche blogs and then find the niche markets out there and start building.

Benefit #1

Niche Blogs are essentially niche websites that are alive!

That’s because your blog will grow as you continue to publish posts or pages regularly to your blog. In contrast, many niche websites are seldom modified or updated after they are created.

Benefit #2

Blogs are designed to publish and update contents easily once you have them set up, configured and running.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s a matter of getting into that habit of writing blog posts and pages and publishing them regularly.

Benefit #3

They are either FREE or cost very little to set up.

You can create your blogs easily by visiting blogger.com or wordpress.org and taking time to study and learn the “how-to”.

Benefit #4

You can make money with your niche blogs in many ways, such as:

- Publishing third-party ads in your blogs (eg. Google Adsense pubishing)

- Recommending affiliate products and services in your blogs (eg. Amazon)

Benefit #5

Unlike websites, blogs are interactive. Visitors, or blog readers, are usually allowed to post comments for a blog post (or article) to the blog owner.

This ‘dialog’ helps to build rapport and relationship between the blog owner and his visitors or members.

Benefit #6

Since blogs are usually updated regularly via blog posts and pages, blogs will rank higher in search engines as compared to websites. In contrast, you have to do a lot of tweaking to a niche website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Search engines will visit your blogs more regularly as you blog more regularly.

Thus, you can also place links of your other websites to get them indexed quickly by the search engines.

Benefit #7

A blog’s syndication function is its most powerful benefit!

You can syndicate the contents of your blog by allowing other website publishers to publish your feed (or channel) on their sites. This helps to bring more traffic to your blogs as the visitors of these sites subscribe to your feed via web-based or desktop newsreaders.

So, with the above benefits, doesn’t it make a lot of sense to start building niche blogs as quickly as possible?

original post by Roger Loh

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The Associated Press reports that U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters launched the DOT’s first blog on Tuesday. It is called Fast Lane. In the blog’s launch post Secretary Peters admits the need for twenty-first century communication.

I want the Fast Lane to be a true on-line community, and I encourage you to submit your comments and thoughts. After all, if I’m going to insist on twenty-first century solutions for our transportation system, I better communicate in a twenty-first century way!

The AP says the blog was already receiving about as much traffic on as the main DOT website on the first day.

The blog has received about 11,000 site visits since 10 a.m. compared with 13,000 daily visits to the main DOT Web site, the agency said. Comments are reviewed to make sure they’re free of personal attacks, slurs or inappropriate language. If a topic attracts hundreds of comments, an agency spokesman said a representative sample of them may be posted instead.

The agency also plans to start hosting Web chats with Peters and other senior DOT officials as well as building a YouTube.com video page some time this year.

In Peters’ second post, she announced from Chicago that the city was awarded a $153 million federal grant to reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Guest blogger Mayor Richard Daley followed with a post of his own thanking the department.

Darrell West, a public policy professor at Brown University, said that government blogs represent an opportunity for officials “to shape and be shaped by public opinion.”

“Blogs inherently are interactive and help agencies learn what is on people’s minds,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I see this as a plus for agency responsiveness.”

There will be some interesting guest bloggers on Fast Lane giving their perspectives on U.S. travel. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley guest blogged on Tuesday. The DOT is also working on a YouTube site according the AP article. There is no Twitter or other social media account to go with the new blog. Maybe this will change in the future because the State Department’s Dipnote blog does have a Twitter account.

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If Twitter is not yet in the mainstream maybe someone should tell that to the spammy folks who are desperately trying to get their messages distributed on Twitter. Some Twitter users are launching tools in an attempt to fight the rise in Twitter spam. There are a few spam methods that are bothering Twitter users. One is follower spam where a Twitter user attempts to follow an exceedingly large number of people. Twitter sends out email notices when a new person is following you but there is scant information in this new follower email so people have to visit the new followers Twitter to see who they are. Another type of spammer is one that sends out lots and lots of tweets (often using popular and topical keywords) and clutters up Twitter search services like Tweetscan.com. Yet another variety of Twitter spammer tries to send numerous @replies to many people in an effort to get attention.

A couple Twitters have been set-up to track spammers and Twitter spam. @OddFollow is an aptly named Twitter that watches for people following lots of people and for Twitter users following just women. @Stopthespam has been doing an excellent job tracking the Twitter spam problem. StoptheSpam also has a website: stoptwitterspam.com.

A new service called Twitter Twerp Scan (@TwerpScan) (via Download Squad) will scan the list of people you follow to look for users that have a following-to-followers ratio that is equal to or greater than 1.5 to 1. You can then unfollow these “people” if you think they are spammers.

A recently launched website called the The Twitter Blacklist has made a list of “known spammers and other morons on Twitter.” The site uses a scale tweeted by Twitter user @evan.

The ratio idea doesn’t always work and at least one noob was caught on The Twitter Blacklist. A new person may come on Twitter and follow a couple hundred Twitterers. It doesn’t take long to get to that number if you are also adding Twitter news services (that generally don’t follow back) and the Twitter accounts of some of your favorite blogs. It may take a while for a newbie’s ratio of following-to-followers to get close to 1:1 so they may temporarily have a ratio that appears spammy. One Twitter newbie caught up in the was Chris Needham. Needham loved the attention and made a tshirt.

Note: The Twitterblacklist tweeted that they aren’t using titles like “Worthless Attention Whores” to indentify possible spammers any longer.

Follower spam may end up being the easiest type of Twitter spam to solve. Simply adding more information about who has followed you in the emails Twitter sends would go a long way towards curbing the annoyance. Others have suggested a weekly or monthly list that contains information about new followers. Twitter could also allow people to sort their list of followers in new ways. The big future problem that will be much more difficult to eliminate are the spammers that try and fill up the Twitter search engines with spam tweets. As more and more people use search engines like Tweetscan and Summarize it becomes easier for spammers to spam Twitter - and they won’t even have to follow a single person to do it.

Posted in Twitter

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