Blogging on a consistent basis definitely has its ups and downs. When I find myself in a bit of a slump I always like to find inspirational stories of others that have paved their own path online. There really is no better way to get back in the groove.
The video below is a keynote speech that Gary Vynerchuck gave just over a week ago at the Web 2.0 Expo. Gary produces the content at Wine Library TV and is a very dynamic character with a great story. Enjoy!
{ 0 comments }
WordPress posted a survey yesterday asking users to provide some input on a couple user interface aspects of 2.7. If you want to participate just visit the link below.
{ 0 comments }
In recent months the internet has experienced a meteoric rise in the popularity of Micro-blogging. Twitter.com has nabbed the top spot in the space and has become an essential tool to many high profile bloggers and internet marketers. Twitter’s service provides 140 characters per post and allows users to follow others and be followed similar to an rss subscriber (more about Twitter). We all know bloggers and internet marketers aren’t using the service just for kicks, which begs the question, why are they using Twitter? Let’s take a look.
5 Good Reasons Bloggers Should Use Twitter
1. Attract New Subscribers
By allowing users to follow and be followed, Twitter proves to be an excellent tool to find and attract your target audience. Conversing on your topic can net you followers through Twitter search channels and through the profiles of followers or people you are following. Twitter allows you to add a url in your profile so there is a good chance your Twitter followers will make their way to your blog if they like what you have to say.
[click to continue...]
{ 0 comments }
I’m going to start this post off with a few blogging statistics.
Looking at those numbers it sure seems like new blogs are almost set up for failure before they ever get started. So many blogs to compete with and and at the same time so many that seem to have already failed. The truth is blogging is not easy and every blogger will face numerous failures. Whether it be a missed opportunity, a post that gets criticized by commenters, a hosting outage or a factual oversight, failures are going to happen. How a blogger manages failure is what is important.
Notable Failures
To get us started in the right direction lets take a look at a few failures of successful people.
Michael Jordan - Cut from his high school basketball team.
Rush Limbaugh - Dropped out of South East Missouri State University his freshman year after failing 2 speech classes.
Walt Disney - Fired from a newspaper job because he didn’t bring original ideas and lacked imagination.
Kurt Warner - Worked at a grocery store stocking shelves for minimum wage after being cut by the Green Bay Packers.
Abraham Lincoln - Defeated in 8 elections and had 2 failed businesses.
To add some blogging perspective lets look at one of the top internet marketing bloggers Jeremy Schoemaker. Jeremy recently posted some of his failures at Shoemoney.com with a notable tongue in cheek comment that he is, “about 5 for 500 when it comes to successful ideas vs flops”.
{ 0 comments }
Yes! It was announced yesterday that IntenseDebate was being acquired by WordPress’ parent company Automattic.
IntenseDebate offers a system that makes blog commenting more social and discussion oriented with features like comment threading, reply by email, comment voting and twitter notifications to name a few.
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic noted that the service would remain independent of WordPress as a whole but that users could expect integration into Wordpress, WordPress.com and Gravatar moving forward. He also mentioned one of the features that can be expected in WordPress 2.7 is comment threading which should be a welcome addition to many.
From an editorial point of view I feel this is an excellent move by Automattic. User commenting has been a fairly stale aspect to the WordPress platform for quite some time and this acquisition allows the team to have total control over what has become an emerging niche among WordPress related services. One such service that will probably take the biggest hit is Disqus which has seen rapid growth offering similar enhanced commenting services via plugin. All in all the net result should be an enhanced user experience for WordPress blogs.
{ 0 comments }
