Beginner Blogging Tips: Sticking With It

So you’ve decided to start a blog. That’s great and all, but I have some bad news. One year from now, most of you probably won’t have looked at your blog in several months, let alone updated it. Now, I know it can be tough to dedicate some quality time to your blog, especially if you’ve got real life things to deal with. So, what’s a blogger to do? Stick with it!

I tend to do best when I set myself a good schedule. I am most productive in the mornings and the weekends. So, I try to get up an hour earlier than normal a few days out of the week to work in some blog time. My weekends are all over the place, so when I find myself planted on the couch, I’ll boot up the laptop and get to work while watching the latest home decor transformation on HGTV (Did I mention I’m married?). Take a look at your week and see what works best for you. If you can work in a post once a day, great! If you find that you can only get in three good posts per week, that’s great too. The key is to be appear to be consistent in the eyes of the search engines. If you have a light week now and then, don’t fret. Just pick up where you left off and try to get back into the groove. Read more

Viral Networks Prelaunch Contest

ViralNetworks, a new social networking site built for online businesses and marketers, is holding a pre-launch contest. All you have to do is sign up and start referring people. It’s a race to the finish, though, and the first person to reach 1000 referrals wins the top prize. All other prizes (21 of them!) will be distributed according to the remaining participants current position in the race. Read more

Make Big Money Online with Market Leverage

Back when I was writing our Money Blog series (parts one, two, and three), one of the subjects I covered was monetizing your blog. I have a bit more to say on the subject, as I’ve recently come across a really nice affiliate network: Market Leverage.
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A Technical Review of Baby Registries

I feel like ever other article I write mentions the fact that I’m expecting my first baby, but this time it really is relevant, I promise! You see, over the past couple of weekends, my wife and I have been bouncing from store to store trying to get registered for lots of baby stuff and i became aware of some serious mistakes.

I figured that in today’s tech age, registering would be an easy task. I was right for the most part, but in one case technology totally got in the way. In another, it was totally the store’s fault.
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Get $100 Off Amazon’s Kindle

Ok, the temptation is mounting. I’ve been thinking about getting a Kindle to satisfy the bookworm in me, and now it’s looking more and more like I’m going to. Why? Because Amazon announced this week that they and Chase have partnered up for a pretty nice offer. Here’s how it is explained on their product page:

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Blogging for your Boss – Part 1

As in any office job, I’m required to keep my boss posted on the various projects I have going on. We usually meet up once a week to touch base and for me to get direction on existing projects as well as projects that are down the road a bit.

Sometimes, due to our schedules, one or both of us aren’t able to meet. It’s these weeks that are a little more hectic than others and we find ourselves struggling to stay on track. I considered using the wiki I installed a few years ago to keep us on the same page, but it’s best used for documentation (which is what I use it for!). Then I got to thinking about using a WordPress installation and that seemed to fit the bill much better.

Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “What about email?!?” Yes, there’s no doubt an endless volley of emails can keep the ball rolling, but I was more interested in creating a report of sorts… kind of like a, “this is what I’ve been up to this week,” which is exactly what most blogs are anyway!
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HTML Basics – Tags for Beginners

While I was writing our Money Blogs articles over the past few weeks, I mentioned that people who are interested in making money with content should be comfortable with using HMTL. Then I noticed that we don’t have any articles that cover HTML Basics! So, that’s what this post is all about: Basic HTML tags that every beginner should know.

Before we dive into the details, let’s take a brief look at just what HTML is meant to do. HTML (hypertext markup language) is simply a means of marking up a text file so that it can be rendered into a web page by a web browser. You could create a web page (any web page) in a plain ‘ole text editor (like Notepad or Wordpad) if you wanted to. In fact, I’d say doing just that would be an excellent exercise. But, my point is that there’s nothing special about web pages. Ideally, if you were to strip out all of the special HTML tags that markup a web page, you should be left with a perfectly readable text document (this is the content I keep talking about!).
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FTP – File Transfer Protocol

Just a few months ago, I was taking a short vacation down in Florida with my wife’s family. It was the first time our little nieces had ever been to the ocean, so I was sure to take lots and lots of pictures. Every evening, after we had gone out to one of the many great places to eat, I would dump all of my pictures from my compact flash card onto my laptop.

A lot of people would stop there, but I like to have several copies of all my important files. So, before turning in for the night, I would open up my favorite FTP program, connect to the FTP server running on my computer at home (600 miles away!), and transfer all of the precious photos I had taken that day. Indeed, FTP is a great tool that anyone with a broadband connection should use.
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Money Blogs – Make Money With Content: Part Three

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing articles for our Money Blog series. If you missed Part One or Part Two, feel free to check those out before moving on.

This week, I’m going to talk about a few of the ways to get the traffic flowing to your site. Some of my advice is obvious and other parts of it are simply things I’ve found that just plain work. These methods can be separated into three general categories: the old fashioned way, the paid way, and the down and dirty way.
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Money Blogs – Make Money With Content: Part Two

Last week, I posted Part One of our Money Blog series. Now that we’ve covered all the little things that I think you should learn before diving into the blogging game, let’s look at the next steps you should follow.

This post is going to cover most of “the action.” I’ll talk about planning for and outlining your new blog, installing WordPress, tracking site traffic, and a few ways to monetize your site (finally!).
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