Personal Blogging in the 2010s

This guest post is by Karen Andrews of Miscellaneous Mum. Personal blogging has changed a lot in the last two years. Some writers now run blogs or social media campaigns to extend their profiles for current (and future) readers; some bloggers are using their reach to find or be offered writing work. The line between ‘writing’ and ‘blogging’ is blurring, which is terrific, but can also be confusing. I know this first-hand. So today I’m going to share with you some points I try to keep foremost...

How to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly (And Keep Your Readers Happy)

Is your website content ready for mobile devices? By the year 2013, forecasts predict that there will be 1.7 billion mobile internet users. And it’s a pretty safe bet that at least a few of them are visiting your site, and seeing it on a screen that takes up just a few inches. So what happens when readers feel cramped or have to work hard to navigate your site or read your content? They leave. Connection speed can also frustrate readers. A...

How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site

This guest post is by Jeff Starr, co-author of the book Digging into WordPress. Injecting a dose of Ajax into your WordPress-powered site is an excellent way to enhance functionality and streamline the user experience. Without touching a line of code, you can harness the power of Ajax to boost performance, improve usability, and fill your site with win. Ajax enables your web pages to respond very quickly and smoothly to user input by loading only snippets of data instead of the entire page. The...

Adsense Ready Wordpress Themes

Mention Google Adsense to anyone that is making decent money online, and they will probably have something negative to say about it. It’s true… Adsense doesn’t get the love it deserves. As much as everyone loves to hate on the thought of running Google Adsense on their site and losing site visitors for pennies, Google Adsense did help pave the way to online advertising and affiliate marketing. It’s also safe to say, Google Adsense is the “easiest”...

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8 Critical Questions You Should Ask Yourself as a Blogger

“I’m at a point in my blogging career where I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” Every blogger reaches a point in time where they find themselves struggling, it’s normal. However, the challenging part of that struggle is finding out what exactly are you doing wrong and how can you correct it. I’ve watched as thousands of bloggers throw away their blogging career, just because they were unable to answer this kind of question. After being in the blogging industry for about 19 months, I’ve...

13 Tips for Beginning Bloggers (Which I Learned the Hard Way)

This article is by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project. I started The Happiness Project blog as a way to test the argument that novelty and challenge bring happiness (turns out they do!), but I knew nothing about blogging when I began. Here are some strategies that I learned the hard way, through experience. As Benjamin Franklin once remarked, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” Start simple. Add bells and whistles over time. Many people get paralyzed at the...

Your Readers Buy Products! Do You Offer Them?

Recently I gave a presentation on monetizing blogs. I talked about how developing your own products to sell to readers can be an effective way to build a blogging income. During a question-and-answer segment of the presentation, one blogger stood up and said: “My readers don’t want to buy products! How else can I make money?” It was a question that I’ve heard many bloggers ask over the last year—and one I used to ask myself. I once was afraid...