Sure, if I Googled for a specific question and your blog came up on the first page of results, I might read what you have to say, but unless you can provide a compelling, convincing and satisfying answer to that lingering question before I close my browser tab, I’m likely gone forever.

This means your site needs to answer this key question within a few seconds or, at best, a couple of minutes. That’s a challenging task for sure. You can’t write an essay trying to convince someone that they should stick around, subscribe to your site, or take a keen interest in you, because chances are a given reader will leave before they’ve even read that post. Therefore, as is often the case in life, first impressions really do count.

I’m not claiming you need a gorgeous looking blog, though having one certainly doesn’t hurt either. What I’m talking about is answering the pressing question at hand by presenting an obvious answer. You’re aiming for an answer that can be inferred immediately upon visiting your blog.

The following are a few variables that can be used to answer the important question that this post’s title asks.

Your content

The most frequent interaction visitors will have with your blog is through a random post. If your content is good, readers may naturally assume you talk about that particular topic on an ongoing basis and appreciate the way you’ve covered it.

Providing value to the reader in each and every post, ensures — above all else — that the user will feel a rapid connection with your blog and a have justified reason to care about it.

Your blog title

Explicit is better than implicit. Your title should explain to the user what your blog is about. Obviously there are some popular exceptions of sites that have succeeded with seemingly meaningless titles, but you are unlikely to be a statistical outlier like those sites. As such, why not do yourself a favour and opt for a great name that really explains what your site is all about from the get-go?

Take any advantage you can get to convey the essence of your blog through your title. “John’s Personal Blog”, for example, doesn’t mean anything to me, the viewer. Why should I care, and what is the site actually about? “John’s Travel Adventures” is a better starting point (assuming I’m interested in travel).

Your tagline

Your blog’s tagline should sell your blog to the reader. You want it to not only continue to explain what your site is about, but to also introduce some form of benefit to your visitors. For this site, mine is:

Grow your audience and make money online by sharing your knowledge.

Assuming you are interested in gaining popularity through technical writing or in making extra cash by blogging, this should sound appealing to you, the reader, and succinctly provide you with an answer regarding why you should care about it.

In the example of John’s travel blog, a tagline like, “How I travel throughout the world on a shoestring budget” would narrow the focus of the site to a certain type of travel. If a visitor falls into this audience, they would likely care about John’s site because they also would enjoy traveling around the world on the cheap.

Your about

What’s in it for them? Your sidebar blurb (if any) and your About section should do a detailed job of explaining what your blog is about, what you cover within it, and what benefits it will bring to your readers. My About starts with the following two paragraphs:

Technical Blogging is a blog dedicated to relentlessly helping bloggers and entrepreneurs succeed online.

Our aim is to provide you with all the practical information you need to start and grow a successful technical blog (as opposed to a personal blog about your kids).

Note how this isn’t really about me. It’s about the reader and what I can help them with.

I then go on to include a Who is this for? section which explicitly tells the reader if they’re the right audience for the type of content I intend to unleash to the world. Finally, the page ends with a list of reasons why you might want to trust me on the topic of blogging.

Don’t forget to include a picture of yourself to connect at a more “primal” level with your visitors. Including a small picture of yourself within the sidebar is also a good idea (only a few people will check out your about page).

Your ‘start here’

A powerful way to guide the user towards a deeper understanding of why your blog is worth paying attention and subscribing to is provide them with more than just the specific article they landed on.

On some blogs you might have seen a link within posts that says something along the lines of, “If you’re new around here, check out our Start Here page”. From there the viewer will be sent through a rabbit hole of some of your best, and most organized, content that provides both the bigger picture and immediate value to the reader. (See this page for example.)

Get these fundamentals right to better answer the “Why should I care about this blog?” question your visitors will have. Then integrate opportune calls to action to subscribe via RSS, email, etc. You will grant yourself a higher degree of conversion from random viewers to regular readers. It really is as simple as that.

noIf you’re also on the hunt for some top-notch cold weather reads and/or if you’ve been considering picking up a copy my book, Technical Blogging, then you’re in luck!

Today is the last day that my publisher is offering a very substantial 40% off of all the books in their catalog, including Technical Blogging. Sales like this don’t come along everyday, so now really is a great time to pick up those titles from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

To save a hefty 40% off of your purchase, use the coupon code TURKEY when you checkout.

Happy shopping, reading, and start of the winter holiday season, everyone.

It is natural for bloggers who start to gather a following to consider revenue opportunities to reward their time and effort.

Google AdSense is a popular option for its plug and play nature. Sadly, it tends to be a disappointing source of income for most bloggers. The average RPM (revenue per thousand impressions of an ad) is fairly low in most niches, so you won’t get much side income from AdSense unless you have a very large audience. For example, if you average $3 RPM, you need a thousand visitors per day to pay for your daily latte (or more if you frequent Starbucks).

Bloggers who look around and explore their options a little more in-depth, may find the lucrative world of affiliate marketing. It’s a simple idea really. Imagine that I create a product and then want you to help me sell as many of it as possible. You, the affiliate, will promote the product for me through your blog. When a sale is made thanks to you (we’ll track that through a special link and browser cookies), I’ll give a portion of that sale to you. The percentage varies but it can be very high, with 50% being the norm for digital products.

If you are unscrupulous you could promote all sort of junk to make a buck, whether you honestly think it’s worth recommending or not. You could even promote products that you down right know suck, and still get your cut. And it turns out people actually do just this. As a result, affiliate marketers have a very bad reputation, despite there being nothing inherently wrong with receiving money for providing a marketing service.

Amazon Associates was one of the earliest and, currently, largest affiliate programs around. The operating margins are much smaller for Amazon, so the percentage that you get for each sale is rather small compared to that of most products online. We’re talking about 4-8.50% for most items, instead of the 50-75% you’d get from other digital products you could be promoting. Furthermore, with Amazon you don’t generally receive recurring referral revenue like you do with other digital products that charge a monthly fee and not a one-off fee.

Amazon’s operating agreement also requires you to be above-board when it comes to the way you go about promoting their products. Other affiliate programs online may gladly close one eye on your techniques if you are moving sales and making them money.

To further make Amazon less appealing to some affiliates, the referral cookie only lasts 24 hours, versus 30 or 60 days, which is common for online sales of digital products. This means that if you refer someone to Amazon.com today, and they were to buy a product three days from now, you won’t be getting anything at all. With more common affiliate relationships, you’d be getting a cut even if the user were to make a purchasing decision a month and a half after the first visit you generated (assuming that they didn’t clear their cookies, that is).

As a result, Amazon Associates is often ignored or berated by large affiliates. In fact it’s even a much underrated revenue option among bloggers. Amazon, and not AdSense, should be the first go-to option for bloggers looking to earn some money from their blogs. Amazon Associates is, and has been for years now, my number one source of blogging income.

To make this case, below I list a series of reasons why I recommend giving Amazon Associates a serious shot, despite its shortcomings.

Reason #1: Amazon Associates is straightforward and dependable

Once you sign up and provide the details of how you’d like to be paid (cheque, direct deposit, or gift certificate) you’ll receive your payments once you’ve reached or crossed the pre-established threshold limit (e.g., $100, with a two month delay for the payment). If you move enough sales, after two months, you’ll be receiving a steady monthly paycheck from them.

Other affiliate programs can make you jump through hoops to sign up and get approved (e.g., eBay’s affiliate program), or may require certain conditions to be met before issuing payments (e.g., ClickBank’s requirement for five different credit card purchases before releasing the funds, which progressively reduces the amount that you’re owed over time until you get those five separate credit card payments).

Reason #2: Amazon’s cookie has site-wide coverage, and is not just limited to a specific product

Yes, you only get a 24-hour window, but in that timeframe you’ll get a cut of anything a referred visitor buys, not just the product you pointed out to them. I’ve had visitors buy all sorts of expensive and odd items when they left my site to check out a $10 book on Amazon. And trust me, pink vibrators can add up quickly.

Reason #3: Amazon has a humongous inventory of extremely reputable products

You don’t have to promote “belly fat secrets” on your blog to make a buck. Their huge selection of high-quality books and other products, means that you can be selective and only recommend or point out items you truly believe are worth your readers’ time and investment. You can select books that are entirely relevant to your topic of expertise, and review products you have actually read/tried/consumed.

Reason #4: People trust Amazon

Being such a well established household name implies that most of your visitors won’t think twice about putting a purchase through on Amazon. Many will have accounts already, and perhaps even have their credit card stored on the site for quick checkouts. This in turn means that more people will buy instead of second guessing whether it’s safe to use the shopping cart.

Reason #5: Amazon is a master at converting visitors into customers

Amazon spends millions of dollars in research to optimize the amount of sales they squeeze out of new and existing customers. All you really need to do is send people to Amazon and they’ll do a good job themselves for the most part. Of course, if you are considered a trustworthy expert in your field and you send people to Amazon to check out a specific item, your conversion rate will be even higher.

Reason #6: The percentage of your cut raises in a given month, as you sell more items

The more products you sell, the greater the percentage of your total sales will be awarded to you. You start at a very low 4%, but can reach the 8% range in a relatively short amount of time (if your sales are good).

I strongly encourage you to give Amazon Associates a go.

Update: Several people wrote me asking for further details on how to make money with the Amazon Associates program. I’ll repeat here what I suggested privately via email:

1. Niche Profit Course by Chris Guthrie. This video course on Amazon Associates is amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone. It’s full of legitimate information on how to make a lot of extra income from your site through Amazon. I’ve taken several courses on the subject and this is the best one in my opinion.
2. In my book on technical blogging, I go in-depth about techniques that can help ensure that you get most out of this program (including statistics about my income, if you need further guidance to maximize your own earnings).
3. The Easy Azon plugin is super-handy and a time saver if you plan to feature Amazon links in your WordPress-based blog or site.

Blogs are an excellent tool for promoting your startup or business. If you’re not careful however, it’s easy to end up putting in a lot of effort into something that yields little in the way of reward. The following is a series of common blogging pitfalls that entrepreneurs should be aware of and which you’ll want to address when it comes to your own blog.

Blogging mistake #1: Not prominently linking to your main site

It can be extremely irritating for visitors to arrive on your blog, and not have an easy way to reach your main site. Yes, the reader could remove blog. or /blog/ from their address bar, but you should work under the assumption that inertia is a strong force. If it takes more than a negligible effort, a large percentage of visitors won’t bother doing it.

One of the chief goals of your blog is to get people to check out your product. You need to make this process as easy as possible.

How to fix it

• Link to the homepage or landing page of your choice from within your navigation bar. Home should link to your main site’s homepage, not your blog’s index. Call that link within the navigation bar Blog instead.
• If your main site’s logo is present at the top of your blog template, have it link to the main site.
• If the main site’s logo is not included in the template, add such a logo or a fairly good sized icon derived from it within your sidebar, then link that to the main site.
• Finally, link generously to the product or service when you mention it, be it from a short description in your sidebar or from within your posts. You want a person to look at your blog for a second, blink, and immediately know where to click to check out your offer.

Blogging mistake #2: Not integrating with social properties

Typically you opt to have a social presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ because you assume that doing so will help you reach a wider audience. If your site and these social properties are entirely separate spheres unto themselves however, you won’t capture the true value that they can offer.

It’s a mistake not to link back to your main site from these sites. That’s obvious. What might not be so obvious, is that it’s also a mistake not to promote these social properties from within your blog. In fact, properties such as your Facebook fan page, can help show your visitors that you are more than just an anonymous, faceless company. If you do a good job on these social sites, you can demonstrate how you interact with your community of customers and fans, to prospective customers.

Linking to your social properties also acts as social proof. When someone sees a large number of fans or followers, it leads them to consider you as being more authoritative, established, or worth following as well. And since you are showcasing these properties to your blog visitors, this will in turn boost these numbers and increase further your social proof.

Finally, it’s a mistake not to promote your blog posts on social properties. For example, when someone likes your fan page on Facebook, they subscribe to your updates there. By posting a link to your articles within that page on Facebook, you automatically reach visitors who may have otherwise vanished for good after their first visit to your blog.

How to fix it

• Link to your main site from social media properties that allow you to do so.
• Add a Facebook Like widget, a Twitter follow button, and +1 button to your sidebar. Note that this Facebook widget should be used to get people to like your fan page (therefore subscribing to your updates) and not your site. Specify the former URL, rather than the latter, when configuring the widget. Show faces when it comes to Facebook, as they are very effective at helping you immediately connect and capture the interest of your readers (after all, you’re showing them faces of their friends who like you, a quasi-direct endorsement for you).
• Post a link to your new posts on all of your chosen target properties. TwitterFeed is one of many available tools that can take care of automatically posting your RSS to social sites (currently, both Twitter and Facebook are covered). But even doing it manually, if you so choose to, does not take much of your time.
• Include a widget such as AddThis or ShareThis within your template, so that your individual posts can be liked, shared on Twitter, and posted on a variety of other sites by your readers. If possible, favor quality over quantity and opt for buttons that include counters (again, for social proof).

Blogging mistake #3: Making it harder to subscribe to, and regularly follow, your blog

Blogs that don’t make it easy to subscribe to new content rarely achieve a great deal of success. These day, browsers like Firefox and Chrome even ignore auto-discovered syndication feeds, making the process of subscription much harder.

You might think that RSS doesn’t matter anymore. In truth it does matter — more than most people assume actually. Even conceding for a second that your prospective customers are not the right demographic for feeds, you still need to provide and promote ways for them to keep up with your new content. You simply cannot expect them to come back to your site periodically.

How to fix it

• Keep track of your subscription stats via FeedBurner.
• Have a large orange RSS icon linked to your feed URL (see mine as an example).
• Include a way to receive your new posts via email. You can use FeedBurner (enable it through Publicize -> Email Subscriptions) or much more ideally, set up your own mailing list with a service like Mailchimp (that’s what I use and I highly recommend it). Mailing lists are one of the biggest assets you can have as a business, virtually regardless of what you do. Set one up even if your crowd is technical. Include the signup widget near the top of your template, like I’ve done here in the sidebar. You can then setup an RSS-to-email campaign within Mailchimp to have your new posts automatically appear in your subscribers’ inboxes.
• At the bottom of your posts invite readers to subscribe either via RSS or by email. You can generally accomplish this by modifying a template file or using the option to do so (if provided) within your blog’s software. For this blog, I use a plugin for the Genesis framework (i.e., Simple Hooks).

Blogging mistake #4: Only blogging about product announcements

While you certainly should use your blog to talk about and promote your products, unless you have more than one blog, it would be a big mistake to focus your site just on announcements about your products. You’d be missing out on the true marketing power of your blog if you went this route.

How to fix it

• Write for the audience you want to attract. If you prospective SaaS customers are people who intend to lose weight, don’t spend 90% of your blog time discussing cool features you introduced in your app. Instead, write about topics that interest this particular demographic such as weight loss, fat burning, healthy foods, lean mass gain, etc. This way you’ll gather a community around that topic. Make it the blog that absolutely anyone who is losing weight should follow, whether they use your app or not. All the readers that you’ll attract will be exposed to your product either by sheer branding (ergo the importance of logos and links in the template mentioned previously) or by following your blog regularly, and then ending up reading your occasional bona fide product announcements.
• Even when announcing a feature or posting about a product promotion, try to focus on how this will benefit the reader. Tell a story. Don’t just write a dry announcement. For example, if you are talking about an Android version of your app for dieters, talk about how stressful it is to try and keep track of calories when dining on the go, and how this new addition to your product line up will facilitate the lives of those who use your product.
• Focusing on providing value for your readers, rather than just pushing a sale, will greatly help you increase your business. This will in fact make you come across as more trustworthy and genuine, as well as help you establish yourself as an expert in your field. If I trust you and consider you to be an expert, I’m willing to buy from you and your recommendations.
• Have a small blurb or banner ad for your products at the bottom of your posts, rather than each post just being an ad itself for your products.

Blogging mistake #5: Hiding what your product is about

I hate it when I’m five minutes into a post of a startup, and I have no idea what these guys actually do or what they’re trying to sell me. This is far more common than it should be.

How to fix it

• Have a small description at the top of your blog (typically in the sidebar) that explains who you are and what you do. (e.g., “Acme Fat Loss” is a web application that helps you lose weight by tracking calories and suggesting recipes that are within your daily calorie allotment”).
• If your post has anything to do with your product, quickly introduce what your product does within your post. Don’t just assume everyone knows. For example, “The investment we received means that we’ll be able to allocate far more resources to the development of our calorie tracker and healthy recipe generator application”.

These are not by any means the only mistakes businesses do when trying to succeed at blogging. They are however some of the major, and perhaps most common, ones. Thankfully simple, effective fixes, as shown, are far from hard to implement and can be such a massive boon to you and your company.

I just found out that my technical blogging book is no longer in beta. I’m happy to announce that it’s now shipping. You can get your copy here in digital format for $21, paper for $33, or both for a discounted combo price of $41.

Please consider spreading the love on Twitter,  Facebook, Google+, etc. And if you have a blog, I’d truly appreciate you reviewing my book and sharing your comments with your readers (assuming you liked it ).

Thank you so much for all your support and encouragement throughout the production of this book.

The catch is that virtually anything worthwhile in life takes time and effort, and blogging is not an exception to this statement. So before committing your energy to such an endeavor, you may rightfully stop and wonder what’s in it for you. Is blogging really worth it?

In this article, I briefly illustrate some of the main benefits that directly derive from running a technical blog.

1. Blogging can improve your communication skills

Communication and writing, much like programming, are skills honed through countless hours of practice. As you work hard at articulating your thoughts into words, you’ll find that the process ends up improving your ability to express yourself. And communication is key, almost regardless of your profession.

Over time, you’ll become a faster and better technical writer, who’s able to come up with an insightful essay or tutorial in just an hour or two.

Even better, you’ll be able to concisely formulate confusing or undefined thoughts into exact words. Vague thoughts that you considered in your head will either prove to be valid and gain strength throughout the process of formalizing them into words, or quickly fall apart as flawed ideas once you see them on the screen.

This habit will make you not only a better communicator, but also a better, clearer thinker.

2. Blogging can improve your technical skills

One of the most successful learning technique I know is to try to teach what you’re currently learning yourself to other people.

The process of explaining something to others quickly solidifies your knowledge and outlines its shortcomings, exposing your own doubts about the material you’re studying. This is why writing down and paraphrasing a book, something bright student often do, is a powerful technique that helps retain and clarify your understanding of the information you’re gathering.

As a blogger, you are likely to improve your technical skills because you are forced to research further topics in order to properly share them with the public. You might be corrected by commenters who know more about the subject than you do, and learn a lot from them in the process. As well you may learn more as others expand on what you had to say within their blogs, or perhaps force you to answer more questions about the topic than you thought about in the first place.

As I mentioned in my book, blogging is just as much as teaching as it is about starting a conversation. These conversations will often help increase your expertise and well-roundedness.

The collaborative power of blogging was truly highlighted and pushed to the limit by the Fields medalist Professor Timothy Gowers with his Polymath Project, in which his blog and commenting section was used to figure out unsolved mathematical problems collaboratively.

3. Blogging can provide you with a repository for your knowledge

Some people like to use personal wikis for this purpose, but blogging can be an excellent way to keep track of information you intend to retrieve at a later stage. For example many programmers use their own old posts to find particular snippets of code, the exact steps to configure a server, or a given URL for a useful service they blogged about.

At times you’ll find that googling for a given problem will bring up an article from your own blog that you may very well have forgotten about. (And if that post doesn’t solve your problem, you can curse your past self for not providing more details back when you wrote it.)

Looking back at your old posts is also a great way to keep track of progress, and have access to a timeline of what you were dealing with, thinking, and doing at a given moment in the past. It’s fun to look back once in a while and introspect about how far you’ve come. This can often provide you with glimpses of insight about where your career and professional interests are headed.

4. Blogging can help make powerful connections

Technical blogging injects you into an online community of fellow professionals who are passionate about the topic they are writing about. If you are contributing valuable information and insight, and link to others, you’ll likely end up on the radar of these people, and ultimately connect with other world class players in your field.

Blogging is certainly cheaper than flying across the world non-stop to meet all these folks at expensive conferences (though blogging is not a substitute for in-person human interaction).

Society functions through people interacting, connecting, and networking. How you use this opportunity is up to you, but it can definitely be a boost for your career, business, or even life in general to be in touch with other experts in the field of your choice.

5. Blogging can help you make friends

Even better than powerful acquaintances are friends. As a prominent blogger you’ll get to meet and interact with a wealth of people online. If you’re social and available to others, you’ll end up making friends (influential and less influential ones alike) online.

I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve come to know thanks to my technical blogs.

Sometimes it’s a case of someone who comments often and you get to know them better through this route. Other times it is a fellow blogger. Often, it’s someone who noticed you through your blog and gets in touch via email. If you are fairly popular in your field, you may even get the occasional ego boosting, “Oh, I follow your blog” when introducing yourself at meetups or trade conferences.

6. Blogging can provide you with a second income

Most bloggers live under the false assumption that you can’t make serious money from running a blog on the side. They understand that if you dedicate yourself full-time, there is money to be made, but they severely underestimate how much revenue you can generate with just a couple of hours of your time per week. They’ve tried or heard horror stories from people making mere pennies with AdSense, and assume that they can’t monetize their own blog unless they’re really famous.

A few hundred dollars a month from your blog is absolutely within the reach of any professional out there. If you do everything right, and put in the work required, your blog can even make you thousands of dollars, both directly and indirectly.

My technical blogs make me a few thousand dollars every month, and I often end up not touching them for weeks at the time. Blogging is not passive income, but if you know what you are doing, all the content you produce compounds and ends up providing you with a substantial income – even when you neglect the blog for a few weeks or months at a time.

Blogging can provide you with some serious extra income that you can then use to finance your hobby, buy gadgets, pay off debt, or do whatever else you desire. It’s a really nice feeling to receive a few extra checks each month, and it will further motivate you to continue blogging.

In my book I cover in great detail how I go about monetizing my blogs, but I’ll also talk more about this subject on this site (subscribe via feed or email if you’d like to be notified of such future articles).

7. Blogging can score you freebies

Publishers and PR firms have become aware of the influence bloggers have on targeted audiences. Even as a mildly successful blogger, you can expect to be contacted by a multitude of people offering you freebies. Depending on your niche and field, these offers will typically be for books, but it’s not uncommon to receive offers for other items, including tickets for conferences, gadgets, software, etc.

As long as you disclose your affiliation (in a way that makes the FTC happy), it’s actually very nice to routinely receive freebies of this kind. If you like what you receive, you can then blog about that product and review it for your readers.

Often, if you establish good relationships with publishers and PR firms, you can even organize giveaway contests which benefit your readers, not just yourself.

8. Blogging can advance your career

A few of the previous benefits I mentioned have already revealed how blogging can have a positive impact in your career. However, I’d like to stress just how much blogging can open certain doors for you. Every post you make is a new opportunity to get people to notice you on a professional level.

Because of my blogs, but primarily my programming one, I’ve received countless job offers over the years, including some from a selection of the largest and most sought after companies in the world. Some offered me generous relocation packages to the US, and a few went so far as to offer me the job, no questions asked (e.g., they didn’t even require a formal interview, they had sized me up enough through my blog writing).

I got my job at IBM in Canada mainly thanks to my blog (at the time I was still in Europe).

Whether blogging allows you to find a new job, customers, partners, investors, publishers who are interested in having you authoring a book, or something else entirely, it is certainly a great career booster.

In fact, my number one piece of advice for new professionals who are interested in building their careers is to start blogging today.

9. Blogging can make you popular in your field

Most professionals work hard because they want to be successful and gain recogniztion in their field. Blogging aides with that and can make small celebrities out of regular professionals. For those in the tech world, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Names like Joel Spolsky, Derek Sivers, Steve Yegge, and Scott Hanselman come to mind.

I’m reminded of Joey Roth’s “Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler” poster. If you do incredible work but nobody knows about it you are a martyr. If you accomplish nothing and do no work, but talk a sweet talk, you are a charlatan. If you can walk the walk, and talk the talk, then you are a hustler.

Blogging helps you ensure that you can talk the talk and reach the right audience, once you have walked the walk.

10. Blogging can help you reach and teach a wide audience

The number one reason to blog for many people, is the desire to share their knowledge and teach others.

For some, even in the technical realm, it’s a matter of politics. For example, an Agile development professional may actually want to influence the community and advocate his theories and ideas about the process of developing software, so that they (potentially) become widespread.

Others, may use this teaching tool to promote their technical projects. An example, also from the software development world, is blogging to help people become aware, loyal, and eventually proficient in an open source tool that you created.

As you can imagine, these are just some of the many benefits of blogging. As you begin creating your own blog posts, you’ll likely find that some of them fall into place organically, whereas you need to work at others. All however, stand to enrich your career and life, and help inspire you to keep blogging for years to come.

http://technicalblogging.com/a-new-blog-a-new-adventure/#.Tu9uCXN5vmM

My first assumption was that this was some sort of hash used by the WP Super Cache plugin, but even disabling that didn’t get rid of the issue. After investigating the code a bit, I was able to track the issue to a window.location.hash call in a JavaScript file that’s used by the Add This plugin.

Comparing the Add This settings of my various blogs, it immediately became clear that this annoyance was caused by having Track address bar shares checked. Unchecking that option got rid of the extra #. hash string.

Here are the full Add This settings I now use for this blog:

This enables Facebook, Twitter, Google+ counters within posts and pages, but not on the homepage or on other archives/categories.

Should you be experiencing this same problem, unchecking that particular setting, as you can see here, is all you need to do to remedy the issue.

I wrapped up writing a couple of weeks ago and the book is now headed into production phase, where any additional intervention on my part will be limited and the heavy lifting will be left to the fine folks at The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Over two hundred and fifty pages is a lot of writing on any subject, no matter how much you love it, and I’m currently enjoy a bit of rest from this recent large scale project. This small break from writing has given me the opportunity to think about what I’d like to do next.

Despite being a very passionate programmer, a few years ago I caught the internet marketing bug. I’m thankful I did, as it has brought me plenty of satisfaction and many economical rewards as a web entrepreneur.

This is to say that I’m the rare breed of programmer who doesn’t despise or belittle marketing. Quite the opposite actually; I love it.

As such I realized that I’m not quite done talking about blogging and internet marketing; I’ve only began to delve into it. Therefore I’m launching this new blog, aptly named after my book, for the following three reasons:

1. I want to share my knowledge about technical blogging with an as large audience as possible. While the book is admittedly selling extremely well even before it’s gone to print (it’s in beta as of December 2011), I’d like to reach an even larger group of people. Blogging is the best way I know of to achieve this goal.
2. I’m a fan of eating my own dog food. Within the book I outlined a great plan to transform virtually anyone into a successful blogger. I have done it before, but I intend to follow my own plan and advice to the letter with this blog and showcase how things turn out.
3. I’m a business man. There is plenty of money to be made by sharing your knowledge online through a blog. As I help other people do what I’m already doing with my technical blogs, I’ll also get to increase my influence and income through this blog as well.

The third point is self-serving, but there is nothing wrong with that. When you work hard at something, it’s totally fine for those who find value in what you do to end up rewarding you economically for all your diligent effort.

That’s the very spirit of entrepreneurship and much of what makes modern society a comfortable place to live.

Periodically I’ll detail the progress of this blog, in terms of statistics and perhaps earnings as well (as I touched on in the book regarding some of the other blogs I own).

For the time being, I encourage you to subscribe to this site via email or RSS feed, for free, insightful, no-fluff tips on how to become a successful blogger.

If you are not convinced, check out the about section where I outline my mission, what’s in store for you here, and who my target readers are.

Happy blogging!