One piece of advice I see repeated over and over is for new blogs to forgo displaying ads until they've become established. To be honest, it's never made any sense to me. On Yaro Starak's blog today, Mark Riddix wrote: 5. Don't Make This Mistake One of the first things that new bloggers do is...
[read more]

I'm listening to an interview with Andy Jenkins and fellow Nebraskan Jeremy Shoemaker (a.k.a. Shoemoney) this morning, and just heard something funny I thought you might enjoy. Jeremy is talking about how he uses controversy to get links. One key, he says, is to take a controversial position on things that other people have a...
[read more]

One of my most popular posts from last month (as you'll see below) was the one where I shared which of my emails from March had been opened most, and which got the most clicks through to my blog. Here's the report for April. Where you see (+), (++) and (+++), that indicates that the...
[read more]

It's been about 7 1/2 months since I started blogging daily. I've only missed a handful of days in that time -- mostly around the holidays. This morning, I got to wondering how many of the posts I've written have been Blog Riffs, and how many have been "original". Here are some stats: Month Blog...
[read more]

Blogs are generally considered social media. But not all blogs are social. Last December, I wrote a post about how to connect with other bloggers. Today, let's explore the idea a little more and talk about how we can make our blogs more social. As I wrote in December, if your blog is floating around...
[read more]

I've had a hankering to do some guest posting. But rather than pitching ideas to the Big Boys' blogs, I thought I'd try something a little outside the box and throw out an offer to post on your blogs. To make this fun, I'll keep the offer open to a wide variety of topics --...
[read more]

Every time I post to this blog, an announcement goes out automatically to my mailing list, which tracks how many people opened the email and how many clicked through to read the full article. I thought I'd start a new monthly feature here, listing the headlines that got the most people to open the email,...
[read more]

I've been taking a CERT training class at City Hall for the last month or so, learning about how to help in an emergency when the professionals haven't yet arrived or are overwhelmed. We've learned about emergency preparation, handling small fires (including a live exercise that would have been more fun if the fire had...
[read more]

When you're starting out at blogging and your audience is small, it can be tempting to save your best content to publish when you've got more readers to impress. It's been a long time since I started, so don't remember whether I ever held any content back. But I certainly remember times when I published...
[read more]

You've heard the phrase "Think globally, act locally." In other words, think about what's good for the world, and do something about it where you live. In blogging, I can think of several reasons to turn the formula on its head: think locally, and blog globally. A blog's reach is global. Your blog is accessible...
[read more]