10 Realizations that Will Crush Your Little Heart In Your First Year of Blogging

This guest post is by Moon from Experiments in Passive Income. This post comes from someone who has made a ton of mistakes and is on her way to learn from those mistakes. You and I probably have a lot in common … after all, you’re here to learn about blogging and how to do it well and, well, I’m trying to do the same. Being the owner and author of a blog that is in its first year of infancy, it’s been an emotional roller coaster ride—kind of like riding a car with a driver who makes you think...

What’s In A Name – A Domain Name That Is?

NOTE: This post was originally written by me in 2006, but I have updated it with new numbers and tools. You are getting ready to start a new business or expanding your current one to include an online presence, what is your first step? These days you might want to check what domain name is available for your potential business before you purchase your business cards. According to Domain Tools, there are 125,067,779 ACTIVE domain names, of which...

How Changing My Intentions Made Me Money

This guest post is by Roman from how this website makes money. Two years ago I stumbled across the concept of blogging for money.  Instantly it hit me as the perfect thing: sit behind a computer, design a site, write, be my own boss, work from home, what could be better? I knew nothing about traffic, SEO, backlinks, Pagerank, or keywords.  I knew nothing about how to make money with a website.  So what did I do next?  I registered the domain name howthiswebsitemakesmoney. Looking...

Start Creating Killer Content

You know you need great content in order to succeed at blogging, but how do you keep coming up with interesting and useful ideas? How do you keep your blog content compelling over the long haul? Darren Rowse and I have put together a brand new short online course called Creating Killer Content for your Blog that shows you exactly that. The course is presented using lots of bite-sized videos in 5 modules (over 5 days or work through at your...

StudioPress Offer 25% Off Themes – Last Sale Ever

If you’re looking to start a new blog or redesign a current one you’ll want to check this out. Starting today – StudioPress (the creators of some amazing themes) are offering 25% off all of the products that they make – if you use the word ‘BLACK’ as a coupon code. It’s part of their BlackFriday sale which ends Tuesday. This is a discount that applies to all of their themes and frameworks including: Genesis Framework (the framework behind my ProBlogger...

Top 5 Affiliate Sales Techniques

This guest post is by the team at E-junkie.com. Working with so many merchants and affiliates gives us a great opportunity to see what different bloggers are trying to do to generate sales of affiliate products, and over time we’ve noticed that some strategies work much better than others. These are the top five affiliate sales techniques we’ve seen work time and time again. 1. Only promote products you’re willing to stand behind 100%. We had one incident on our site where someone bought something...

Will Your Site Survive the Google Shrink Ray?

Google likes to play a little game with those of us who do business online. The game is called “change all the rules and see who survives.” It’s often a fun and rewarding game for Google users, but it can be painful for business owners. In the latest version, Google has rolled out a feature called Instant Previews. When enabled, users see a cute little magnifying glass sitting next to their search results. The user can view a quick snapshot...

How to Nurture Your Creativity

This guest post is by Ali Luke, from The Creativity Toolbox. How creative are you? A lot of bloggers feel that they’re not very creative people. Perhaps they come from a technical background. Perhaps they’ve never picked up a paintbrush in their life, and think that means they’re not creative. Perhaps they see creativity as something for other people. The truth is, if you’re blogging—or even planning a blog—then you’re already much more creative than a lot of folks. As a blogger, you’re not just...

How to Get Started Video Blogging

Lots of people have been asking me about video recently. Partly because I am pretty vocal on Twitter about finding it difficult but keep doing it anyway, and partly because I have been encouraging my clients to do more of it. If it is so hard, why do some people make it look easy? And if it is so uncomfortable, why bother? Fact is technically it does not have to be difficult. In fact I am going to show you that it is very easy technically. There...