Category Archives: Blogging

I like blogging, but there are a few things about it that drive me a little crazy. Maybe you can relate? 1. Your daily traffic plummetsLinks and social media votes dry up and so does your incoming traffic. It will rarely disappear completely, but if you’re like me and don’t get a lot of search […]

The idea of blogging as a source of passive income has always seemed a little off to me (and others). In fact, I’d suggest that most bloggers earning significant money from blogging devote as much time to it as a part-time or full-time job. That’s not as close as we can get, though: passive income […]

When I studied journalism last year I learned that your ability to write is largely irrelevant when it comes to producing hard news stories (e.g. a young male driver was killed last night when he collided with a passenger bus… those kinds of stories). The words you use are just a vehicle for what’s really […]

Some of you may not know this about me, but I work full-time as the manager of Envato’s educational network, including FreelanceSwitch, Nettuts+, Psdtuts+ and 9 other sites. Each of our sites have had Facebook Pages for a while now, but they never really took off until I set aside the time to do an in-depth investigation on Facebook marketing strategies, […]

As bloggers, webmasters and web workers, none of us are perfect at what we do. From the A-listers to the Z-listers, there are things we all need to work on. For the sake of illustration, try to think of yourself as a leaky bucket (hopefully something you don’t do too often). The little holes in the […]

New visitors to your site want to know straight away what your site has to offer them. A prominent link to an ‘About’ page says: “Want to know what this site is about? The answer is right here.” Usability should be conversational. A new visitor asks, internally: “What is this site about?” Your About page provides […]

eBooks are books or pamphlets in a digital format. They’re a unique form of web content because they’re inherently portable. An eBook can be shared and spread far beyond your web presence. There are a number of ways bloggers, webmasters or any web user can leverage an eBook to achieve a variety of outcomes, from building […]

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”– (Herbert Simon 1971, p. 40-41) You’ll never read every good, relevant post in the blogosphere on any given day. You’ll […]

In light of the positive feedback received for A Beginner’s Guide to Making Your Site More Usable, I’ve composed a 19 point checklist that should be useful to any blogger looking for a practical way to evaluate (and improve) the usability of their blog. Many of the principles here will apply to websites, as well. 1. […]

The marketer’s daydream is to ‘evangelize’ products and brands — to create customers who are passionate about what the marketers are trying to sell. When it comes to blogs and websites, having a passionate readership is just as valuable. By evangelizing your blog, you create an audience who is eager to link, comment and vote for […]