I was just reading Patti Stafford’s post on Staying Motivated when you are not seeing results and I had to chuckle to myself because I’ve just recently changed things up big time on my own blog. For seven years I’ve written about myself and my life through my blog. I started doing a photograph a day in 2005 and would post the photo and write something about it or about my family. I began to wonder why I wasn’t getting many comments. I figured that I’ve been doing all the talking. So I stopped.

I didn’t stop posting my photo however. I continued to take my daily photo and instead of doing all the talking I just posted my photo to see how the conversation would go. Would the photo spark conversation? Would my lack of written post spark conversation, concern, anger, apathy. It has been an experiment going on for about a week now and I am enjoying the results.

What I’ve also been doing is getting more efficient. Ive been using PixelPipe to blast my daily photo to a ton of sites. This has helped me post so much faster and to so many different places quickly and easily. When I first did the blast I ended up spamming Twitter because I had so many separate sites automatically posting to Twitter. It has definitely been a learning curve to make sure that I am getting the information out there quickly but not overextending the amount of repeat information that is being posted. But I am enjoying the simplicity of PixelPipe, a sort of set it and forget it site.

Part of why I am changing things up is that I have been writing an ebook for content creation. The ebook is being made in conjunction for my speaking engagements at Modern Media Man and also Blog World Expo. My sessions are titled “Energize Your Blog with Surf-Stopping Images” (Modern Media Man) and “Content You Care About” (Blog World Expo). Having all this extra time by not writing daily posts has really freed me to get this ebook finished. And, after the conferences the ebook will be available for anyone through my blog. I’ll post a link to it here once I make that available to everyone.

Because of that newfound time and energy I’m thinking of actually doing a Silent September and all of my Photo-A-Day posts will be photos only and have no commentary at all from me. Maybe do a weekly recap of what was going on in our lives because there actually are people who are missing my daily recaps. So, I think this experiment is interesting because changing things up a bit actually gets me some better insight into my audience. So if you get a chance, change things up and give your audience their voice.

Listening to the Voice of the Audience


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Do you feel like you’ve been working your backside off getting your blog or website in front of the public and just not seeing the results you thought you would? Is it time to give up and throw in the towel?

I wouldn’t go that far but it may be time to pull some new tricks out of an old hat. Take a look at what you’ve been doing. Is there anything you can improve? Do you post quality content? Is your blog or website one big ad campaign? Do you have a newsletter that’s updated on a regular basis? Are people signing up or ignoring it?

How much information have you read about building your blog and growing your readership? Have you just been reading small reports here and there hoping for the answers? Some of the small reports are very good, but most of them don’t give you all the information you need for a successful blog.

One great product I suggest is Online Profits. It contains massive amounts of information and the lessons are broken down into categories. It contains 24 learning models, each full of valuable information to help grow readership and learn to make money online.

Another great product is Zac Johnson’s Six Figure Affiliate Blogging. This report is completely free but Zac gives you tons of information and takes you through his entire process of creating a profitable blog or website.

Another suggestion is to get a business coach. You can find all kinds of coaches online in almost any price range. Business coaches are there to help support you and give you tips on growing your business. Most even offer one on one coaching. Some of my favorites are Sharon Michaels, Dani Johnson, Sheri McConnell, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar and Dale Carnegie.

If you haven’t considered using a business coach or even a personal development coach, you could be missing out on a lot. I know I’ve gained a lot more confidence since I plugged in to some of these guys.

Sometimes you just need a break. If you’re motivation is waning and you find that doing the daily work for your business is just draining you, maybe it’s time to step back and take a break—just a short one. Take some time off and think about why you started this venture. What was the purpose? What did you wish to accomplish? Maybe you haven’t lost motivation; maybe you’ve just lost focus of the big picture and the things that meant so much to you in the beginning.

Staying Motivated When You Aren’t Seeing Results


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Hampton Hotels. All opinions are 100% mine.

You need a vacation. Whether you work from home as a professional blogger or you make the daily commute to a more conventional office, it pays to have some time away from the world of work. At the same time, you want to save as much money as possible in doing so.

Well, getting something for free is one way to save a few bucks. The kind folks at Hampton Chain of Friends Sweepstakes are currently hosting a contest that they call the Chain of Friends Sweepstakes. In short, they want to give you an entire hotel for a weekend. We’re not talking about a just room; we’re talking about the whole hotel!

The Grand Prize at Hampton

Hampton’s current contest has the one massive grand prize of offering you 100 rooms for two nights. This way, you can have one crazy weekend with your chain of friends.

On the one hand, you could use this sweepstakes to get some much needed rest and relaxation, but since you are reading Blogging Tips, you may have some ulterior motives. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could host your own blogging conference or other kind of meet-up? Providing all of the attendees with a hotel room in the process?

Even if you do not win the grand prize, Hampton is offering 100 first prizes. Every day, they’ll be giving away a weekend stay for the winner and three of their friends at a Hampton hotel of their choosing. Presumably, this means that you get two rooms to share between the four of you.

How to Enter

You don’t have to write a dedicated blog post or jump through too many hoops to enter this sweepstakes. The entry form is actually very short.

You just need to supply your name, mailing address, phone number, and email address. This is presumably so that they can add you to their marketing list, but there is a checkbox at the bottom to opt in (or opt out) of receiving “further communications on special offers and more.”

You can check out the official rules if you want to fumble your way through the lawyer-speak. From what I can see, it’s open to residents of the United States, Canada (excluding Quebec), United Kingdom, and Mexico.

Where Would You Go?

A weekend getaway is a great way to recharge the batteries, but thanks to the wireless Internet offered at most of the Hampton hotel locations, it doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to disconnect from the matrix. If you were to win, which hotel would you choose?

Speaking for myself, I’d love to spend a weekend at the Hampton Inn Manhattan – Times Square North. It’s been several years since I was last in the Big Apple and I’m thinking that New York misses me. Okay, maybe I miss it.

It would be on a weekend, so I wouldn’t be able to attend a taping of the Colbert Report or David Letterman, but being in Times Square would put me in the middle of the action for lots of other things to do.

Do you need to get away from it? Enter Hampton’s Chain of Friends sweepstakes and invite 199 of your closest friends to the weekend of your lives.

Link: Hampton

Win a Hotel for a Weekend with Hampton


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The other day someone I know approached me about taking a look at a business website because they’d spent a fair amount of money with a search engine optimization company toward getting the kind of traffic they thought they deserved. The mission failed miserably.

I’ve been working with SEO as a content writer for several years now but I’m no expert.  If I was though, one of the first things I would do when writing a top ten list about the things you need to know about it is let everyone know there are no experts.

Of course there are people who know more about search engine optimization than others, but if they start telling you things like you can get a number one page ranking in Google in a very short amount of time, you should take your money and run for the hills.

Still, there are a few things I have learned about how SEO works and because I haven’t made any of them up but learned them from other people, I can leave you with some of them and feel fairly confident they work fine regardless of all the shifting parameters  Google continually throws our way.

1. You need good content. Don’t even bother trying to stuff keywords in the landing page content either.  Like a friend of mine said once, you might even get away with keyword stuffing for a little while and drive traffic to your site, but you look pretty silly when visitors arrive to the kind of broken English that too many keywords creates. You’ll just wind up with traffic arriving and then clicking away in record numbers.
2. You need a good landing page.  I’ve seen people with floating content on their landing page and all kinds of graphics and buttons and tabs and in the end it all looks really psychedelic ( for those of your old enough to remember that phrase) but it doesn’t give the Google bots anything to grab onto. There’s still nothing that can replace good optimized content . Someone I work with is even experimenting with video as the main source of information on the landing page, but they still get me to write a blog at the bottom so Google has something to hang its hat on.
3. You don’t need to use every keyword you can find.  That’s why it’s called keyword research. Too many keywords doesn’t have focus. Others may disagree but I think you need to focus on a few keywords best suited to your market. Even if there’s competition, just dig in and fight it out.

Remember you need to beware of anybody who tells you they can get you a page one ranking in just a few short months. And there’s just one more thing too. If you don’t get the kind of traffic you’re expecting after three or four months, adjust the methods and keywords you’re using but don’t stop advertising with search engine optimization techniques.  The minute you abandon ship, it sinks and you lose whatever ranking you’ve gained.

A Few Facts About SEO


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

So, you’ve started your own business and everything seems to be going reasonably well. Unfortunately, you’ve tried your hand at a few traditional marketing channels and they’re not exactly performing as expected. They don’t have the kind of targeting that you need.

Helping you “find your ideal customers fast” is Rent-A-List. They have been helping online advertisers for nearly a decade, offering “a network of high traffic incentive and non-incentive publishers.” The net result is that you get targeted leads and enthusiastic customers. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Hitting the Bullseye

The problem with most traditional forms of advertising is that they lack targeting. They take more of the approach of throwing the message out there and hoping that it sticks. Rent-A-List doesn’t believe in that philosophy.

They say that they are able to plug into established sources of targeted lists, sending your message not to just random people across all kinds of demographics, but sending them to people that you are specifically targeting.

Incentive Targeted List Advertising

Rent-A-List offers several targeted advertising solutions, including standalone email drops, sponsorship advertising, banner advertising, and text link ads. However, the “star” of the group is the incentive targeted list advertising option.

There are several criteria that you can define, helping you really narrow down your audience. At the most basic level, you can choose from 66 different interest groups. The people on these lists specifically opted for these areas of interest.

Going further, you can target specific countries, specific US states, gender, age group, home ownership status, marital status, ethnic group, employment status, and income level. On the B2B (business-to-business) front, you can also choose to select the industry and position held.

With this advertising option, Rent-A-List provides an incentive to your potential customers to check out what you have to offer. This way, they are more likely to click on through and visit your website. Win-win, right?

Guaranteed 50% Click-Thru Rate

In addition to forcing prospects to stay on your web site for at least 40 seconds to qualify for the incentive, Rent-A-List also guarantees a 50% click-thru rate (or conversion rate, depending on your perspective).

This means that if you order a 500 subscriber package, you are guaranteed 250 visitors to your landing page. If this threshold is not met, the offer is sent again until it does meet this requirement.

You can track these statistics and other metrics through the robust user dashboard. This is where you create your ad copy, submit it for approval, and keep an eye on how the campaigns are doing.

Reach Your Audience

More and more Internet marketing professionals are saying that the most powerful tool they have is the email list. It’s all about building the list, but that takes time. Why not take advantage of the targeted lists already created by Rent-A-List?

The package pricing starts at just $8 (to reach 100 targeted subscribers). This gives you a net per-click price of no more than 16 cents. Ramp up to the higher levels and this can get as low as five cents.

Link: Rent-A-List

Reach Targeted Customers with Rent-A-List


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Simplenote is an easy way to stay organized on the web, your desktop and mobile device. It’s free and easy to use. Your notes are also seamlessly synced across devices. You can use Simplenote to create things such as to do lists, grocery lists, class notes, drafts for blog posts, keeping a journal, and more; the possibilities are endless.

You can view the various apps they offer from their downloads page; their selection is quite impressive. They have apps for the iPhone/iPad, iPod Touch, Palm, Android, Windows and Mac OS X. There is even a Chrome extension as well as various scripts.

To add a new note you simply click the + (plus) button at the top of the left column. Then you can enter any text that you like. There is no editor for making your font fancy, adding html or anything else; it’s just simple text pretty much like Windows Notepad.

Each new note you ad is automatically synced between all devices that you are using (desktop, mobile, web). There currently aren’t any restrictions as far as how many notes you can create. They also suggest that you not create extremely long notes (over a couple thousand) in order to cut down on the processing time.

When it comes to the interface, there are a few features that come in handy. You can add tags to your notes; you’ll then be able to use the filter to view notes by tag. You can also search through your notes, delete notes and pin notes so that they remain at the top of the list.

Another neat feature is the ability to view notes by “version history”. You can use the slider to go back to 2 minutes ago, 15 minutes ago etc; anything you’ve created before that will then be gone. You can, of course, always go back to the present when desired.

As far as importing and exporting notes, you can do this using an unofficial utility called Simple Backup. You’ll need to enter your Simplenote email and password in order to use the tool. You can “export your Simplenote notes to plain text, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, and Evernote archive formats”; this is done completely free.

They do offer a premium account for $12 (for 12 months). With premium you get unlimited use of 3rd party apps (listed on the downloads page) as well as the ability to create notes by email and an RSS feed. If you just want to remove the few ads on the site, you can pay a flat rate of $4.99 to do that.

So, if you’re looking for a painless, easy way to stay organized, Simplenote is definitely the tool for the job. Who has time to learn lots of features? Sometimes you just want to create a simple note, and that’s what this does.

Simplenote Makes Staying Organized Painless


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

What makes a successful blogger successful? Is it the time they put into it? Or who they know and associate with? Or maybe they just have a lucky charm and the world falls into their lap? All of these may contribute to their success, but for this post let’s say they’ve taken failure out of the equation; it’s not an option for them.

Does that sound strange or even hokey? It’s not as weird as you might think. Go back to childhood for a minute. Did you learn to ride or bike or play an instrument or anything else that took practice and determination? Of course you did. How did you succeed at it? Well you had the determination to get it right. You didn’t want to be the only kid on the block with training wheels, so you kept at it until you got it right. But, what really happened in the back of your mind was that you removed failure as an option. You didn’t even let that thought cross your mind. Kids are great like that aren’t they? They don’t see obstacles—all they see is the prize at the end of the rainbow. It’s pretty simple, but often the adult brain sees all the obstacles and not the rainbow.

Think of an athlete who runs track and jumps hurdles. Do they let the hurdles stop or slow them down? Are they focused on the hurdles or the finish line? They visually see the hurdle and know they must get over it, but their focus is on the finish line; the trophy at the end of the race. By doing this (and practicing) they merely glide over the hurdle like it isn’t even there.

Everything you do in life should be the same way, even blogging. Are you letting the hurdles stand in your way of success? Are you focusing on the end result or all the little nit-picky stuff in the middle?

Until you change your focus to the big picture, it’s likely you will keep self-sabotaging yourself and not see the success you desire. Change your focus to what you want to accomplish at the end, not the journey to get there. Think BIG—think as big as you can. Just by shifting your thinking and focus to the goal, you will start to glide over the hurdles like they don’t exist. Not only that, it will lower your stress level of worrying if you’ve done everything right.

Remove failure from the equation, it’s not an option for success.

When Failure is Not an Option


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Long are the days of physical business cards that you hand out in person. Qubrit lets you exchange cards the easy way — virtually. “Qubrit is a social platform used by professionals every day to connect with each other.” You can create, manage and exchange cards with anyone on the Net. Plus, Qubrit lets you message and organize your contacts.

The main card itself is pretty simple. There are spots for basic information like your company picture, name, position, phone numbers, address, email and URLs. You can also enter your Skype and Gtalk usernames.

When organizing your contacts by card, you can create (up to 5) labels and customize their color. The labels are used like categories. So you can name a label “work” and then put all of your co-workers under that label.

There is a section for you to all social links. There is a dropdown of sites to choose from and you simply enter your username in the text area. These will then be shown in the “social” tab on your card.

There is also a tab on your card for photos. While you have a main photo, you can also add more photos to be shown in this section. The portfolio section lets you add employment, skills, education and awards. If you don’t like the default design of your Qubrit card, you can choose one of the other 4 themes.

If there is a section that you don’t want to be shown on your public profile (mobile, social, portfolio, email, photos), you can hide it. If you use the labels (mentioned above) for your contacts, then you can choose to have certain labels view those hidden sections. So, privacy is a little flexible.

In order to add contacts you’ll need to know the person’s name, organization or company. You can also invite friends by email (right on the site). You’ll also have a message and notifications area as well as task area. Since I don’t have any other contacts on the site yet, I haven’t been able to test out these area.

Qubrit has a definite purpose and serves to be very useful for business professionals. It’s much easy to store and organize business cards online rather than in your wallet or day planner. Though it would be nice to have a mobile version to view cards on the go — maybe that’s in the works.

Qubrit – Virtual Business Cards for Internet Professionals


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

On the surface, writing a blog and maintaining it may not seem like that hard of a job. You set up an account, pick a theme, write some posts and hit “publish”. Pretty much anyone can do it so long as they know how to use a computer and understand the basics of the Internet.

However, there is a difference between just blogging and blogging well. If you want to do the latter, you’re going to have to learn a few additional skills to help you excel.

The good news is that the skills you need are not great and, even if you don’t have them at all, you can probably pick them up quickly with a few books and some practice.

Still, if you’re looking to move beyond merely hitting the send button and hoping for the best, here are a few skills you might want to pick up or improve on.

1. Writing Skills

This one seems fundamental but it is still often overlooked. Even if you’re a podcaster, a photographer or running a video blog, you’re going to have to write something, even if it is just descriptions.

You don’t need to be a poet in order to write a blog but you need to be able to write clearly, concisely and in a manner that doesn’t sound awkward or forced. Search engines strongly favor well-written content (because people spend more time on pages with it) and the easier your content is to read, the more people will enjoy and the more visitors you’ll have. It’s that simple.

If you struggle with this, it might be worth your time to pick up a few books on writing or even taking a short writing course. A little bit of time invested here can go a long way to helping your blog.

2. HTML & CSS Skills

Sure, every major blogging platform comes with themes that you can just click to install and use, but what happens if you want to make it unique or fix something that’s broken? If you don’t know at least a little bit of HTML, you may be in big trouble.

Knowing the basics of HTML and CSS is the difference between having a site that looks like everyone else’s and having something that is truly unique. You don’t need to change much code to make a very big difference but you do have to know what to change.

If you’re weak in this area, pick up a few basic HTML books and practice with them. Also, you may want to learn the basics of PHP if you’re using a platform that’s based on it, such as WordPress, so you can fix minor problems with plugins and themes.

3. People Skills

Blogging may seem to be a solitary activity but you have to deal with other people all day long. Though the interactions may not be face to face, instead being via email, comments and social media, the rules for how to treat others doesn’t really change.

If you treat people good and trust those who are trustworthy, you’ll probably have no trouble with you people skills, However, if you are struggling in this area, it is really about practice more than anything. Though being shy is understandable, getting out there and talking to people is crucial.

Besides, if you can comfortably talk with and work with strangers face-to-face, working with them online should be easy.

4. Image Editing Skills

For most bloggers, the primary medium is text, but, at some point, you are going to want or need to work with an image as well. Whether it’s a logo you’re adding to your site, images you are inserting into your posts or just a new avatar for Twitter, you will likely find yourself manipulating images.

As such, it’s important to understand the basics of image editing including how to crop, resize, correct, reformat and do other simple changes to an image. It doesn’t require a Photoshop wizard to be able to run a blog, but if you can do the basic changes yourself, life does get a lot easier.

If you’re weak on your photo editing skills, the easiest way to learn is usually to just download a photo editing program, such as Paint.net, and practice or read through the provided tutorials. For the most part, this is something best learned by doing though there are great books available as well.

5. Social Networking Skills

Though I am loathe to agree with the army of social media and social networking “experts” who add me on Twitter every day, they are right that a blogger, or any business for that matter, needs some basic social networking skills. To be clear, this shouldn’t be an obsession but learning how to use Twitter and Facebook as well as other relevant services can be a major help to your site.

Part of social networking is the aforementioned people skills but it also plays a role in promotion and encouraging others to spread around your site as well.

Once again, the quickest way to learn if you need some help is to simply dive in but, with a simple search, you’ll find that there are literally thousands of tutorials and guides on this topic. There is no shortage of information out there.

Bottom Line

You’ll note one of the skills I didn’t mention is computer skills. The reason is that it should be assumed. If you’re on the Internet and running a blog, you have a certain amount of computer knowledge already and the additional skills you need are more specialized (and mostly listed above). You don’t need to know how to work on a computer of replace a hard drive to be a good blogger, but knowing how to use one well helps, obviously.

In the end, the skills you need to be a good blogger are not that great or numerous. Though there are some not on this list, these are some of the big ones you definitely will need or want. If you don’t have them, it may be time to brush up on them and, if you do, there is always room to improve.

After all, one should never stop learning, especially when it comes to the skills at the core of something they love. You can always take things to the next level through practice and education and there is almost never any harm in doing it.

5 Skills Every Blogger Needs to Excel


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

You want your site to get noticed. You want your site to be popular. You want your website to rank well for your target keywords and keyword phrases. For all of these, search engine optimization can play a very critical role, but SEO can be a very tricky business.

Working on your team, should you choose to hire them, are the experts from Link Proz. As you might be able to gather from the firm’s name, one of their primary services is to help you get quality backlinks, helping your website’s overall search engine rankings.

Get High PageRank Backlinks

Link Proz offers a series of other related search engine optimization services, which I’ll briefly describe in just a moment, but the meat and potatoes comes down to link building.

On-page search engine optimization certainly helps, but getting high quality backlinks to your site using targeted keywords can be so much more powerful. That’s why the link building services from Link Proz are so important.

There’s no specific mention of how they go about getting these backlinks on quality “high PR” websites, but I think that’s part of protecting the integrity of the links. We all know how Google feels about paid links.

The Full Search Engine Optimization Package

Beyond acquiring a series of backlinks for your site using your target keywords, Link Proz says that it offers a comprehensive SEO solution for business of all sizes. Among these services are SEO content creation, website analysis, social media promotion, and more. They even dabble in website design as part of the portfolio of services offered by Link Proz.

But how good are they are what they do?

A series of testimonials are shown on the homepage of Link Proz, but I question their legitimacy. They could be real, I suppose, but it would help if we knew a little more about these previous (or current) customers of Link Proz. In the screenshot above, for example, we know that Trisha is a CEO, but we don’t know of what company.

That kind of information is ultimately more useful than the city where she resides. As the services offered by Link Proz target companies rather than individuals, knowing the companies (or their online identities) could be useful if you wanted to follow up with them with questions about their Link Proz experience.

The Results Speak for Themselves?

Since Link Proz does not have a standard rate sheet available online, you will need to contact them to get a rate quote. Even before that, though, you want to know what kind of value you are getting. As it turns out, Link Proz has some rather high profile clients.

Among the clients of Link Proz are such notable names as Newegg.com, Nine West, and Match.com. They have been able to assist these companies rank quite high for their competitive target keywords. They are currently working with BloggingTips.com as well and we are looking forward to seeing a jump in search results.

Link Proz was not able to get most of these into the number one search result in Google, but they were able to get them onto the front page. In order to achieve these results, they likely made use of a multi-facet strategy, including not only link building, but other tactics as well.

Since there are no contracts and Link Proz only charges on a month-to-month basis, you can opt out of their services at any time. Get a quote, try them for a month, and see what kind of SEO results you can get.

Link: LinkProz.com

Link Proz Helps You Ascend Google’s Ranks


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Do you ever find yourself veering off track when it comes to your blog? Or even your life? It’s not always easy to stay on the right track and stay motivated, but if you have a plan of action, it can be a lot easier.

The first step to staying on track is to know what you want. You can’t make a plan or follow through with that plan unless you know exactly what it is you want.

Sometimes it helps to know what you want if you can decide why you want it. What is your “Why” for building a website, a blog or starting your own business? Is your “Why” big enough to keep you motivated?

Once you’ve decided your “Why” and you know what you want, it’s time to decide what needs to be done to accomplish your goals. Remember, setting goals and planning them out is your roadmap to the future and to success. But we’ll get to goals in a minute.

Are you a procrastinator sometimes? Often times it’s not that you don’t want to do the work; you’re just not sure of the work you need to be doing. However, if you are a true procrastinator, you may need to give extra attention to the following tips.

The most important tasks need to be done on a regular basis. Decide what tasks are the most important for the success of your blog and do those regularly. Consistency is key.

Decide which major distractions stand in your way. You may need to document everything you do for at least a week before you can make decisions on what needs to be changed. If email takes too long, you’ll want to schedule it for a shorter time period and only during certain times of the day. Constantly checking email is a big time killer and waster.

A great product to track your time “behind the scenes” is Chrometa. It offers a free trial so you can give it a test run and discover when and where your time is actually going.

Once you know where your time is going you can start creating a plan to keep yourself on track to reach success.

When you start setting goals you need to get specific. Vague or general goals will not get you very far. If making money is your major goal, then get specific about the dollar amount you want to be earning each week or each month. If readership is your goal, get specific about how many readers you want to attract by a certain date.

Break goals down into smaller tasks. Making $5k per month or having 5000 readers are excellent goals. But to be realistic, you won’t reach those goals the first month. It will take time, so break them down. Try setting a money goal of $500 within three months, $1000 by the sixth month and so on. You can do the same with readers, set smaller monthly goals, work towards them and before you know it you’ll reach your ultimate goal.

Get involved with your goals; mentally, physically and emotionally. If you’re not committed in all three areas it’s likely you won’t do the work required to meet your goals. By being committed in all areas you will give your goals power and yourself the power to achieve them.

Create a plan of success with daily, weekly and monthly tasks. Write it down. Statistics show business’s that start with a business plan usually have more success than those which have no vision or plan for the future. Blogging and even life needs to have a plan. Look over your plan and goals at least once a week if not daily. It will keep you motivated and on track.

How do you set and stick with goals? Begin by writing down everything you want to accomplish, no matter how big or small you think it is.

The next step is to decide the tasks associated with each goal. List them as steps to complete if you need to. Decide which are the most important tasks and list them first. Does this task need to be done daily, weekly or monthly? Get all your daily tasks lined out, and move to weekly tasks, monthly tasks, etc.

Estimate how much time you need to spend on each task and start a schedule—fill it up if you need to, but don’t forget to allow yourself down time.

Make a list of resources you’ll need or plan to use so you can find them quickly while you’re working.

One of the most important factors is to follow Nike’s motto—Just Do It! When you sit down to work, check your goals, your lists, your schedule and then just do the work.

Anyone else have any great tips for setting and reaching goals? We’d love for you to share them.

Staying on Track


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Even if you’re anything but a coding expert, you may be able to fumble your way through a little bit of code to tweak your favorite WordPress theme. It’ll take some time to sort out your plugins and PHP calls, but you might be able to figure it out. Flash, on the other hand, can be a little more complex.

It doesn’t have to be hard, though, to set up a Flash-based website. Thanks to EasyTemplates, you really can have easy Flash templates to implement to your heart’s desire. Whether you need a rocking new site for your rock band or a funky online destination for your fashion design business, Flash might be the way to go.

Easy Flash Templates

That’s the main selling point of this site. They offer Flash website templates that are easy to implement, easy to configure, and easy to use.

It’s interesting that this site is now coming to light, considering how Apple seems to be so against Flash on its mobile devices and even video sites like YouTube are slowing shifting over to HTML5 instead. Even so, Flash sites can still be quite popular for a number of reasons.

The pre-built Flash websites offered by Easy Templates come both with admin galleries and without. Both sides offer a range of different possibilities, including photo galleries, business templates and more. The site also offers a number of HTML, Joomla, and PowerPoint templates as well.

Pricing and Samples

The pricing for each template can range considerably, but you can usually expect to find something in the $50 to $100 range.

The variety is quite impressive and it’s easy to sift through the catalog. Each template has its own name, thumbnail image, and product page. I found the layout of the site to look a little “clunky” compared to some other online marketplaces, but it is functional.

For each template, you can click on the “view details” link to get additional information about that particular Flash template. This also directs you a live demo, giving you a very real idea of how this template will look when you purchase and edit it.

The Real Estate Example

Shown below is one such sample, the real estate easy Flash template.

If you go to the product page, you’ll notice that this template includes a brief Flash animation as its introduction before you get to the “main” part of the website. You’ll also notice that you get more animations when you mouse-over certain elements, like the navigation links near the top of the page.

The preview can exist within the context of the store, including the “buy” link and links back to various sections of EasyTemplates, or you can check out the full screen preview if you prefer.

The Deal with Flash

It’s debatable whether or not you’d want to have a Flash website in today’s Internet, particularly when you think about the increased use of mobile browsers, but EasyTemplates seems to be a good place to get started if you do. They have a lot of Flash templates for you to consider and the pricing is reasonable, even if you don’t get completely unique and original work.

Link: Easy Templates

EasyTemplates Makes Flash Website Building Simpler


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Last week I attended Affiliate Summit in New York. While I was there I was able to attend the Podcasting 101 session with my Geek Dads Weekly co-hosts Daniel M. Clark and Joe Magennis. They were part of the session along with Trisha Lyn Fawver of Affiliate Marketing Fanatics. Trisha is on the Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast with Mike Buechele. The panel was moderated by Lisa Picarille, who has such a fantastic voice and who is the co-host of the Affiliate Thing podcast with Shawn Collins. What I learned from this session was that podcasting is such an easy way to get your voice out there and gain an additional audience.

Basically all you need are a few things to get started podcasting. A voice, a mic and recording software. Luckily every since computer has the last two pieces and if you are blogging you should already have a voice. If not then why are you blogging?

A Voice

As a blogger you have a unique voice in your writing and because of that you have a unique perspective on things that can translate to the spoken word. Do you review blogs, how about an interview series with the bloggers that you review, you can review the blog in writing and then do an interview with the blog owner via Skype as something extra to add to your post. Then make that an actual podcast and you can tap into a whole other audience.

A Mic

Many laptops have an internal mic that you can use to record your voice. It isn’t the greatest but it works. If you want to step up you can get an external mic and record better sound. You can even use a telephone to call into sites like Blog Talk Radio. There are many ways to record your voice.

Recording Software

If you are a MAC user then you have it all set with Garage Band but as a PC user I use Audacity to record my own voice. I also use a program called G-Recorder to record my own voice and the people that I talk with with Skype. When I record on Skype I can download the MP3, open it with Audacity edit it. This is a very easy thing to do.

Get it on Itunes

You also need a way to get your podcast onto iTunes. If you are using WordPress then you have some great options like PowerPress and PodPress. These plug ins will help you get your new content uploaded into iTunes. Once it is there you can use all your blogging and SEO skills to get that show seen by an entirely new audience and also give your existing audience something new and fresh from you.

Practicing what I Preach

Personally I am working on a video podcast. I am learning how to do this correctly and in the meantime I am creating the content anyway and posting it to Vimeo and Youtube. Once I figure out how to do the video podcast the best I can it will go up to iTunes and it will be an enhancement to my current blog.

Shut Up and Podcast


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

It doesn’t really matter how good your website content is if no one wants to look at your website in the first place. Part of this has to do with efforts like search engine optimization, but the aesthetic appeal of your website is also very important, not only for user experience but also for branding.

Rather than use any number of freely available templates that will make your site look like everyone else’s, it may be worth considering a custom design from the fine folks at Capsis Media. They offer completely unique site designs to suit just about any purpose.

Totally Original Look for a Totally Original Site

Whether you run a blog, an online store, or any number of other kinds of websites, you want to stick out from the crowd. With the website design services of Capsis Media, you can achieve just the look you need.

Capsis Media promises “to create custom websites that present a visual and interactive experience that makes a particular website a true original.” They don’t sell templates or set themes that everyone can have. Every creation is a one-off design, so you’ll know that you are getting something completely unique.

If you need more than just a new design (which can offered as a Joomla template or WordPress theme, should you so desire), you can also opt to make use of the website development and programming services offered by Capsis Media. Need a certain web app created? They can do that.

Pictures Are Worth Thousands of Words

Just as you would likely ask for writing samples before hiring a freelance writer, you would likely want to see some design samples before hiring someone to create a custom web design for you as well.

For that, you can turn to the portfolio page on the Capsis Media website. Here, you can see a range of different custom websites that they have designed for their clients. Among them are Twitter background images too, which are increasingly important in today’s branding efforts.

It might be just me, but it seems that a good number of the designs created by Capsis Media make use of the light blue color scheme. This might be a little more than a coincidence, but it could reflect some of the personal artistic style of some of the folks who work at Capsis.

How Much Does It Cost?

Instead of providing a set rate sheet for its custom web design and web programming services, Capsis Media requires you to fill out its rate quote question sheet.

This way, they can better understand your specific needs and preferences. It is notable that there is a banner at the top of the page saying that custom website designs start at $199, but the main homepage makes mention of a $129 starting price. Take that for what it’s worth.

One very good thing about Capsis is that they offer unlimited revisions on all their design work. If you are not happy with the initial draft, you can continue to request changes and tweaks until you are completely satisfied.

Link: Capsis Media

Capsis Media Designs Custom Websites


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

These days anyone who has a job that pays the bills should be grateful and that includes those of us who are lucky enough to working at blogging or freelance writing full time. One of the things I’ve noticed since I’ve been working at this and editing full time is the difference working on the Internet makes to the routine of your life.

I know. Right now those of you who are reading this and work at blogging are saying ‘What routine?’, and that’s just the point. While it’s really cool to be on the cutting edge of where at least some of the future economy is going, it’s a real juggling act at the same time.

Here’s a bit of a timeline for me and how I’ve been able to pay my bills sitting in front of my laptop.

When I first started, I thought I’d just discovered gold and usually after just a bit of time away from my computer I feel the same way today. Still, I can remember that first little contract I got and how excited I was to think that in no time at all, I’d be living on a lake in that part of Canada that Neil Young wrote songs about.

I was sure that the harvest would never end and that my work cup would be brimming full at all times. Gladly, just a few short years later, that prophecy seems to have some true, but I still live in a city.

I’ve seen a few things come and go in just a little time and more than a few news ideas on the Internet that were supposed to put content writers out of work.

Remember when the technology first came along so that you could place video on your site? I could hardly type at all because I was sure that people would stop reading all together and the whole Internet would start chattering with a million never ending videos like a crowded bus terminal.

That may have happened with the advent of places like YouTube, but so far video hasn’t been able to topple the written word. At least as far as I can see.

Then there was the social media craze that still seems to be in full swing. I suppose that has taken a chunk out of  some of the advertising that you need a writer for on the Internet, but I don’t think places like Twitter and Facebook will  present a future threat.

People still go to the website when they need to know about a particular good or service and while they might even watch a video there or be directed to the site from Facebook or Twitter, the real info is in those web pages.

Even when a good seo campaign gets you to the landing page of the firm that you want to look at, you need to be sure that there’s good content to read once you arrive.

What do you think ?

Content Is Still King.


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/