Category Archives: Blogging

I want to share a post idea anyone can use. It’s almost guaranteed to produce one of the best blog posts you’ve ever written. It’s an idea with limited uses, so I’d suggest that you use it wisely. It will also take some time to do it justice. The perfect scenario would be one where […]

1. The social media runaway train. Perhaps the most sought after (and least frequently attained) route to a popular blog is rapid ‘growth from above’ resulting from huge traffic spikes, most frequently originating from Digg. This route was traveled by blogs like Zen Habits (did you know Zen Habits has been on the Digg front page more than 80 […]

There are two reasons why I’ve used the above title for this post. Firstly, it’s a follow-up to my article on How to Get 1,050 Subscribers in Three Months. Secondly, because my new blog, Anywired, reached 1,100 subscribers five days after its launch on Thursday. This post contains everything I’ve learned about starting a second blog while […]

Everything you’ll learn about blogging or running a successful website, you’ll learn from someone else: either by reading how-to articles, observing the mistakes and successes of others, or by observing your readers and how they react to your blog. The second element — learning by example — has the potential to impart more knowledge and […]

When I’m in a healthy blogging mindset, I write long posts every few days. I’ve tried short and newsy in the past, but have realized I’m no Seth Godin. If I’m going to say something important and useful, I need plenty of words to do so. That’s the style that works for me, but it […]

Most of us are familiar with the old fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Two children overhear their parents planning to abandon them. They prepare a pouch of white pebbles and, when taken deep into the forest, leave a trail of pebbles leading back to their home. They are able to follow the pebbles back to their […]

Aggregating links to content by other authors has been a staple item on the web content diet for years. Unfortunately, it’s an area almost completely devoid of innovation. Links are returned like results from an intelligent search-engine: a title, a description, a recommendation — as if things couldn’t be done any other way. In this […]

One question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is: what sets the top blogs and websites apart, from a visitor’s perspective? The question has an astonishing answer. It’s not traffic, it’s often not subscriber numbers and it’s not advertising revenue. These are the things visitors don’t see, or don’t have to see. If what […]

It was a little painful to read Darren Rowse’s series of posts on letting your blog go. It hit a nerve with me for reasons that are probably self-evident: in the last four months there have only been eight new posts at Skelliewag. In this post I want to explain some of the important lessons I […]

In my last post — why value rules the attention economy — I argued that concentrating value is a wise growth plan in the Web 2.0 era. Though a number of readers disagreed with some of the extra points I made, people did seem to respond well to the idea of creating value-packed content. I do plan […]