May 19, 2012

Valuable Blogging Advice from the WordPress Crash Course Webinar with Carol Tice

Wordpress logo imageOn Wednesday of last week I had the privilege of doing a webinar for Carol Tice from the Make a Living Writing blog. She’s a freelance writer who helps other writers make their writing goals come true, and she recently started The Freelance Writers Den to create a community where writers can help each other succeed.

She also invited me and another blogger named Brandon Yanofsky from B-list Marketing to join her for a webinar to discuss the technical aspects of WordPress for her writing inclined audience. The webinar went very well, and I was really excited to be asked to participate. If you’re interested in listening to the full webinar, you can buy a copy here.

If you’re not interested or aren’t ready to pay for it, I’ve summarized some of the highlights below. Enjoy! [Read more...]

Why Your Blog Won’t Survive without Providing Value

Blogging isn’t about getting a few people to read a post every now and then.

It’s about finding readers that like your blog enough to subscribe and read week after week.

The goal is to gain raving fans that can’t get enough of what you write because that’s the only way your blog will survive.

So how you do get more fans? How do you get readers who come back to read what you’ve so painstakingly written?

The answer is value. [Read more...]

5 Easy Sources for Great Blog Post Ideas

Consistently coming up with great blog post ideas can be tricky.

For posts to be successful, they need to provide value for readers, but it’s not easy to constantly come up with topics that do.

To help with this, here are five sources to help you find useful and valuable content ideas: [Read more...]

Get a Free Blog Review AND Win a $100 Blog Tweak

Update: Entries to this contest are now closed. The winner for the basic blog tweak has been selected. The winner is … drumroll … Melanie from Solo Mompreneur! Woohoo! She’s chosen to have a subscription form installed on her About page (which happens to be one of the most effective pages for capturing e-mails). If you’re still interested in a blog review, feel free to leave a comment. I’ll get to as many of the reviews as I can, but even if I’m not able, someone else might offer advice.

Would you like to receive a free blog review and be entered to win a $100 blog tweak?

Now’s your chance. [Read more...]

Why Your Blog Shouldn’t Be About You

Many people make the mistake of writing their blog about themselves.

They think that blogging is the act of an author writing about himself, so they post about how their day is going or about what food they’re eating.

Here’s the bad news: unless your name is Ashton Kutcher, your blog won’t be popular if you only write about yourself. [Read more...]

7 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog’s SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking content so that it ranks well in search engines.

The first step is to write content that will resonate with readers, and the second step is to optimize the content for search engines.

Once you know that basic premise, you can move on to learning how to optimize blog content for search.

So how do you optimize blog content? And how do you get your blog to rank higher in Google searches?

Here’s how: [Read more...]