Tips, tutorials, exercises and inspiration from the fields of visual art, writing, photography, blogging, design and invention. Next time you’re stuck for ideas or inspiration I hope you’ll find something here to get your right brain firing. A tip: sometimes the best sources of inspiration often lie far outside your own creative field.

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Photography: listen carefully by 416style

Viral articles are word of mouth worthy, and will grow your site more so than any other kind of content. Previously, I examined six strategies you can use when you want to create content with a decent chance of going viral. In this post, I want to focus on 37 concrete ideas for viral posts that should be readily applicable to your niche.

This post could be a useful port of call the next time you run out of inspiration, or if you want to try something different with your content.

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I’m sure I’ve mangled that word, but as far as I’m concerned, the word was probably mangled in the first place. I wanted to update a previous post on rethinking link round-ups by pointing you to an interesting strategy by Michael Martine.

He’s used the ‘Quotes’ format (where you take a quote from the piece and include a link bundled with it), but with a twist.

My suggestion was to pull out the quote that best encapsulates the core message of the piece, but I think Michael may have discovered something all-together more clickable.

From Brian Clark at Copyblogger:

“This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded.”

Works, doesn’t it? Next time you do a links round-up, consider some de-contextualization.

Great idea, Michael!

[See it here: Overheard in the metablogosphere]

If you’re not in the market for a new project, you can skip this one. If you are, consider these three ideas. Not sure if they’ll be useful to you, but I had to get them out.

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Photography: Tunnel [Cheonggyecheon / Seoul] by d’n'c

Regular readers will know that Skelliewag runs no ads or affiliate links. I’ve never made a cent of direct income from this site, but I have lost money as a direct result of it. The money I lose each month is a modest double-digit sum: something I have no regrets or anxieties about.

There are countless blogs and websites devoted to making money online, yet it seems strange to me that there are no sites devoted to doing the opposite: losing money online, and doing it proudly.

In this post, I want to outline 8 ways you can begin to see that losing money online isn’t all bad. In fact, it might not be given the credit it deserves.

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