I want you to think about this one for a couple seconds. What makes your blog unique? Chances are it’s not your content – cause really everything’s been written about at one point or another. This topic for example has definitely been written about before but it’s still differentthan the rest.

Now unless your name is Jason Santa Maria and you create one off layouts for every post – your blog probably has the same basic layout as every other blog just with a little bit of color here and there.

So if it’s not your content or your design that makes your blog unique – what does? Or should I say who does?

Now if you didn’t catch the hints yet -  it’s you that makes your blog unique. I’m done bolding “yous” now, except for the next one.

You should come out in your posts

All your writing, videos or podcasts should have you infused in them. It may sound cheesy but I try to put a little bit of me in to all my posts – and definitely in my about pages. Weather your blogging about dishwashers or roller coasters you literally need to take a little chunk of your heart and put it into that post. Preferably in the middle somewhere.

Another way you can come out in your posts is by using your own words. I encourage research but you really need to word things the way you speak – not the way another blogger speaks. Then expand on those topics with your own ideas and experiences – not just those of other bloggers.

These things are especially important in very saturated niches – like blogs for bloggers – so you may notice I usually refer to a past experience in my posts and try to make each post unique in it’s own way.

So not to be extremely repetitive but it really boils down to simply being different in your own way. Or at least that’s the way I see it. Now you tell me what makes your blog unique, I’m kinda curious as to what you think.

p.s. If you liked this post I think you might like an earlier post Your Niche Is Under Your Nose.

Image by mdare55

It’s a tough question to answer, but an important one  nonetheless. Just like finding your posting frequency, post length depends heavily on the depth you go into, niche,  readers, and even your posting frequency. Now, I’ve read a ton of theories that say very short or very long posts are horrible SEO wise, but I believe that finding your ideal post length should again revolve around the topic at hand, the overall niche, and two other variables, so I won’t be touching on SEO here. Maybe another post though.

1. Deeper the depth means longer the length

It seems pretty obvious, but when you look at post length it should mostly depend on just how deep into a topic you go. This post – for example – goes into what I would call some detail, making it an average length, around 500 words long. But if you go into more depth like I did in my post about getting comments on your blog you need to have a longer post – about 1000 words – to cover everything you need to.

2. Your niche really matters

Think about it this way – if your writing news updates, like engadget does, your posts are typically going to be short compared to say a tutorials which usually need to go into a lot of detail.

3. Your readers really matter too

We’ll as long as your writing for people and not search engines your post length should revolve around them. People now-a-days have a very short attention span, including myself, but there are ways around this. You could make your posts readable or at least scanable – which are two very different things – making sure your readers can go through an article and it won’t seem like a task to them.

4. Posting frequency – more posts means shorter posts

Now this doesn’t always hold true but the great majority of the time when people write more posts it means that they are shorter – again think about engadget or uncrate. They post multiple short articles through out the day.

My goal here was to give you a basis of what I think post length should depend on. But in the end it boils down to these two questions, “did I explain everything I needed to?” and “can this do the job in a shorter post?”

Image By lissalou66

I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to commenting. Yes, I love getting comments on this blog and the handful of other blogs I run. My infatuation with comments doesn’t end there, no, I love commenting on other blogs and adding to the ongoing conversation for multiple reasons. Mainly for the promotion aspects, but that doesn’t take away from my liking it! Anyway like I said, I have quite a bit of experience on this and today I will share with you 5 ways to get all your comments noticed. Seeing as getting noticed is half the battle of promotion, this should help a lot of you.

1. Be First

So it may not be a surprise that number one is actually being the first commenter. Being first gives you the most visibility, when some one finishes reading a article they tend to skim through the comments looking to see what was said. The thing about being first or at least in the top three is that nearly everyone will see your comments, what you added and hopefully click through to your site.

2. Be The Only

Never assume a comment-less post doesn’t get traffic. I find that commenting on posts without comments or with very few comments actually gives me the biggest return as far as traffic goes. Cause the post either already gets good amounts of traffic or it eventually gets some good traffic. Be that only commenter, chances are it’ll be worth the 20 words.

3. Use Your Real Name

This is simply good practice with a ton of perks. Every time you go around commenting on some good posts use your real name, preferably first and last name. This creates consistency and can eventually build a brand around you. People are going to start to recognize you as “Jim Sams” instead of “#1 Fishing Blog.”

Plus most blogs have comment policy’s – which I will be adopting very soon – that say these keywords aren’t allowed in the name field.

4. Personalize Them

What makes your blog yours is the personality you infuse in the writing, videos or audio. Well the same concept goes for comments. The only thing really separating your comment from the others is the fact that you wrote it, so put your feelings about the post into your comment, make it alive and loud.

Just make sure you don’t go on a CAPS LOCK and explication point rampage, and I guarantee your comments will be seen and read.

5. Reply To Replies

Conversations get noticed. So if some one replies to you – this goes ten fold if it’s the author – respond to it. It shows that people are noticing you so for a lack of better term notice them back. Show people that your not just in it for the traffic but for the community and conversation as well.

Some blogs have a subscribe option at the bottom of the comment are – like the one here – so it makes it easier to keep up with replies.

Well, if your like me you love the power of comments, but you know that getting them noticed is really the most important part. What do you think gets comments noticed? Also do you think comments are really useful as a promotion tool?

Image by Quasic

What should I blog about? What niche is gonna make me money? Can you give me an idea for a blog? They’re the questions that truly irk every time I hear them. Call me a bad person for wanting to drop kick people that come to me with these things – but to me it seems obvious that no one else can tell you what you like and what you know. Which brings me to my two main points, you should blog about either what you like or what you know. It’s how long term blogs are built.

What You Like

When you want an idea for your blog go ahead and dig deep, real deep. Figure out what you like or better yet what your passionate about. Blogging about your passion will not only come naturally to you but it’s going to be fun too.

Think about it this way – if I ask you about cars and your really passionate about cars – you could probably talk to me all day about them. You don’t even have to know everything when you start – cause you like the topic so much you’ll have no problem researching it.

I know Gary Vaynerchuk would agree with blogging your passion cause his book – Crush It – pretty much bashed it into my head.

What You Know

Maybe your not passionate about something but you be a true professional in the field? Well you have a huge opportunity. I drive over 1,000 miles a week and I drive them fast – real fast. I wouldn’t call my self passionate about driving but ohh am I good at it. I’m practically a stunt driver locked up in a suburban town – and this could make for a damn good blog. Well now that I think about it…

Sometimes blogging about what you know turns it into a passion so the only problem that I could foresee is not getting that spark turning it into a passion – eventually it might seem like a chore.

These are the questions I asked myself both when I decided to restart this blog, and now before I start all my other blogs. Do you blog about what you know, or what you like, or neither? Hows it working for you?

When I first jumped into blogging it was like diving into the frigid ocean in the middle of December. I was expecting a tough time being a complete newbie in blogging but when my balls shriveled up into my stomach really wished I looked into it first. Now that I look back on those days I really wish I knew some of these the following tips, I would be so much bigger, and richer now.

1. Don’t procrastinate.

This is huge in blogging, especially for some newer bloggers, you have to keep your schedule and stay focused and consistent. We all now that 5 hours on Twitter is procrastinating and it’s easy but hard work is what pays off in the end. So close your stats page, YouTube, Twitter and that video game running in the background and get to work on that next post.

2. Know what your talkin about.

Make sure if your blogging about cars, that you really know about cars. So do your research and write what you know. Take me for example, I’m always upfront with my readers, and take a no bullshit approach to writing about what I know. Not one person want’s to or will, for that fact, read bullshit plus it ruins your credibility which follows you everywhere.

3. Link in and out.

Don’t be afraid to link out , you won’t be sending your readers away forever. So if you have something related to the content at another blog link to it. It’s gonna add to your overall credibility and your gonna get a few grateful bloggers coming your way. Linking in has some very different benefits, you get people to read old posts and (they say) it helps with SEO. Not only do you want to get people looking at older posts but those search engine spiders as well, so link to em and show them off.

4. Write for rainy days.

Writing extra posts when you can is like having an insurance policy for your blog. Whenever you have some extra time you should write an extra post or two and save it. Keep a stash of 5 or 6  draft posts in your panel cause they really come in handy when you get pulled away from your computer for any reason. No only have I been stuck in a position like this I see it happening left and right. With these rainy day posts you’ll always keep fresh content up and stay with your posting frequency, no matter what happens.

5. Promote more than you write.

Promotion as we all know brings in tons of traffic and can build links for that PR that every one is after. Do some post by post promotion, go hit up them forums, and be a little socialite with Twitter. Personally I’ve always put 4 times more work in promotion than the actual writing, and then Gary Vaynerchuk told me through his book, Crush It, that I was spot on with my theory. You’ll be amazed at the results, promise.

There you have it, the five things I wish I knew when I first started blogging. Now its your turn, tell me with a comment (or tweet or email) what you wish you knew when you started blogging.

Post Image By: Sukanto Debnath

It happens to the best of us, we let our blogs just die away or become the opposite of what we really wanted. Usually it’s cause we burn ourselves out, writing too often or putting too much time into it. Sometimes we simply start blogs for all the wrong reasons, or maybe we just get bored of the niche. What ever the case maybe there is a way to get your blog up and running again.

I recently let two of my blogs die, this one and my personalish blog TheArdit. When I went to relaunch them both I found that they both had very different needs. I couldn’t do the same thing to both of them which brings be to the first step of a blog resuscitation.

What Happened?

Before you even think about a design, content or the actual relaunch you need to analyze what happened to the blog in the first place. Look at it and think about what went wrong and figure out what you dislike about it. Doing this is gonna guide your decisions throughout the entire process.

Trash The Content, No Wait Keep It

Deciding if you should keep the content you have or if you should just junk it maybe a tough decision for some but it’s an important one. It will actually pave the way for the rest of your “blog resuscitation.”

Get Rid Of It All

Getting rid of all your content maybe extreme, but sometimes it’s just what’s necessary. At my blog I needed to get rid of all the content. Not necessarily because it was horrible stuff, it just wasn’t at the quality I wanted. When I created the blog I wanted only the best content I could find, but this is only one of the many reasons to clean up, some others are:

• The content is way off-topic.
• It’s very poorly written.
• They are nothing but a bunch of bull shit.

Just remember you don’t get rid of the content cause your ashamed of it or you want to ‘sweep it under the carpet’ and deny writing it. Acknowledge your writing mistakes and learn from them.

Keep It All

You could say I let this place sorta die when I got tired of it. Well now that I decided to come back I knew I wouldn’t delete any of my posts for a couple of reasons. The reason this place ‘died’ was cause I got burnt out, but the content I have here is actually pretty good. Some posts got over 30 comments, they all stayed on topic  and I believe people can actually learn from them.

Maybe I’ll Keep Some

This is actually the third option which consists of keeping only a few articles. This would work if you have a few ‘diamonds’ surrounded by ‘pebbles’ or in other words awesome articles in the middle of a shitty pile. What I suggest doing it one of two things, get rid of the crappy ones and leave the good ones as they are. Or delete the bad posts and then actually rewrite the good ones to freshen them up.

Get A New Suit

No, don’t go to the local wedding store just yet, I’m talking about getting a new look for an old blog. At my personalish blog I changed my theme and logo out for a fresh theme and clean logo. I really needed that new look to fit my new ideas for it, plus it get’s rid of that feeling of blog death. But I know what your thinking, why didn’t I change the theme here? This place is sorta an exception, I started with this theme and logo and thought it would be best for my “identity” to keep it. What I could have done though was have some one design a new updated version of this theme.

Finish Everything

Get everything up and running before you re-launch, finish that about page, get the advertising page up and your contact page should be ready to go. Make sure you do the little things too, clean up your old categories, plug-ins, and old themes off your server. If you have no other work to do other than write and promote, there’s less of a chance your gonna get overwhelmed. Plus with all the basics up visitors are gonna feel like it’s a finished blog not one that’s still under construction.

Kick Off

Well depending on the type of blogger you are, you want to decide how your gonna start the blog back up. Will you promote it lightly and add content slowly or are you gonna start off with a bang?

Like a Turtle

You might be a new blogger that gets caught up in the early success of a blog and is crushed when that initial buzz wears off. Maybe you just get bored quickly, well you may want to start off slow. This way that gradual growth in traffic and readership keeps you going, and makes sure you never really get bored of it.

Like a Rocket Ship

Well if your a more experienced blogger who doesn’t get to caught up into things you should definitely kick off with a bang. Post something awesome and promote harder than ever before. Tell everyone that your back and your going no where any time soon.

Make sure you avoid making the same mistakes you did the first time around. Cause no one wants to do Blog CPR a second time around.

Have you let a blog die? How’d you go about bringing it back?

Image by Leppre

I’ve always been a person that learned as he went, never really asked help or got help weather it was blogging, photoshop or coding I learned on my own. I still do this, and I probably shouldn’t but whatever. I’m here to help all you newish bloggers and get you ahead with tips and tricks so here are 30 tips to make you a better blogger.

30 Tips To Better Blogging

1. Don’t procrastinate
2. Know what your talking about
3. Write for rainy days
4. Post only quality articles
5. Write readable posts
6. Don’t post too often
7. Keep a posting schedule
8. Ask questions in your posts
9. Write controversially
10. Promote more than you write
11. Use forums for traffic
12. Comment to get comments
13. Use Top Commentator lists to your advantage
14. Reply to comments
15. Work on your PR
16. Link out
17. Link in
18. Take criticism like a man
19. Don’t treat your readers like idiots
20. Don’t stare at stats all  day
21. Cloak affiliate links
22. Don’t monetize too early
23. Don’t get in it for the money (i’ve made $0 here and i don’t care)
24. Befriend your readers
25. Allow email subscriptions
26. Hold a contest
27. Sponsor a contest
28. Get mad subscribers
29. Don’t be afraid to fail
30. Start with a BANG

I could honestly keep going but those are just some of the things I have learned that I wish I knew earlier. So get ahead and learn from these tips and other bloggers, it will help you in the long run.

Image by grassvalleylarry

That’s right, my car taught me something about blogging. It was two days ago, I had to change my engine oil before the weekend since I was at 3500 miles since the last time (500 miles over my normal). Because I didn’t want to put even more wear and tear on the car by adding another 500 miles over the weekend, I needed to change it. The only thing was that it was about 6 degrees Fahrenheit (-14.4 degrees Celsius) and with the wind chill it was probably below 0.

Long story short I went out in the freezing weather and I withstood the bone chilling winds to change my oil, because I knew I needed to to keep my car running long enough to turn a profit with my delivery job

This whole experience where my hands almost fell off taught me two very important things about blogging.

Never give up.

Somewhere between my nose nearly freezing and my hands becoming so numb that I could no longer feel them. I truly wanted to give up and call it quits.
This carries over into blogging cause I know a lot of people (including me) hit walls at some point and they get tempted to just call it quits. If their traffic drops they just wanna quit and sell the blog, well my advice to you is DON”T. You need to keep going and get back on track. You can break through the walls with the right mindset. (read my comment and Wei’s reply)

Keep up the maintenance.

If I just kept up on my oil changes, I would have changed it a week earlier when temperatures were above freezing. My whole ordeal could have been avoided completely.
How does this transcend into blogging? Well if you just keep up your promotion methods, link building and posting there would be no reason for your blog to fall. Your traffic will only go up and you would avoid “the wall” and intern your blog will live another day.

Whats your opinion on hitting walls and what not, would you just give up or keep going strong?

Image by: Mcgraths

Well recently I’ve had  a few people say that they like the pictures I use in my posts. Alot of them, Klajdi, Swastik, and Ajith to name a few, asked me to tell them how I do it. It’s surprisingly easy, I swear I even did a comment-post about it over at my writers block post. You technically don’t even need to own a camera to get perfect pictures for each of your posts. All you need is internet and a little time.

My perfect picture (not so) secrets:

Knowing the Creative Commons Licenses.

The most important part of finding the right images for your posts is actually knowing what you can and cannot use. Also knowing what you need when you use them and what you can and/or cannot do with the them. The licenses are pretty simple, and theirs only a couple of them.

The first one is the Attribution License. If the picture you want to uses this one then, your pretty much allowed to use it and edit  it as you wish, but you need to link to the author.

Number two is the Attribution-NoDerivs License. This one basically means you can use the picture but you CANNOT alter, transform, or build upon it and you need to link to the author just like the Attribution License.

Special number three is the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. It’s much like the Attribution-NoDerivs License but a little more complicated. You can use the picture but NOT for commercial purposes, you cannot alter, transform or build upon the picture and you need to link to the author.

Numero quatro is the Attribution-NonCommercial License. If the image you wanna use is under this license, then your allowed to use it but not for a commercial purpose. You can also alter, transform, or build upon the picture but like the other Licenses you need to “attribute” to the author (aka link to em)

The fifth is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. It’s just like the fourth License (above this one) but with one added term, if you do share it/use it after altering, transforming, or building upon the picture you need to share it with the same license (ShareAlike)

Last But not least you have the Attribution-ShareAlike License.This one is just like the first but with the added term of the fifth. Your allowed to share/use these images as you wish, you can alter, transform or build upon the picture but you need to share it with the same license.

I stay away from the Non Commercial licenses but I honestly don’t know what qualifies as “commercial” and I have yet to figure it out. So if some one here can explain it in simple, layman’s terms tell me in a comment and I’ll add here.

Where to find the pictures?

Ok, so you know what the different creative commons licenses are, where can you possibly find a place that has a ton of pictures that use em? Well if you look at most of the picture sources, such as the one about getting more comments at your blog, you’ll see that it’s from the one and only flickr.

I use their advanced search page, and I try a few different terms/keywords that my post has. For my writers block post I simply typed is “writers block, like so:

Then I just checked the two boxes at the bottom like so:

This way I know that I can use the pictures here without worrying about lawsuits and threatening letters. I usually check the third box also just so I can safely put that text on the top. Anyway I just hit search and go through the results and pick out my favorite one.

Like I said earlier it’s a simple process, it won’t take you more than 10 minutes per a picture. So how do you find pictures for your post? Do you do anything differently?

P.S. Don’t for get to check out my post 10 tips to writing better posts, and find out why images in posts are important.

Image by: Smanography

I get writers block every three months and if you have me on your MSN list you may already know that this past couple days, I’ve had the worst case of it EVER. I had no problem coming up with topics, but I couldn’t write about them. Everything I tried to write turned into complete shit, and it took me a while to realize but eventually it hit me. I needed to cure it this time, cause time alone wouldn’t do it for me.

What I Did:

1. Stopped trying to write, and took a breather.

The first thing I did is stop trying to write, I figured why waste time trying to do something I knew wasn’t gonna happen. So I closed up shop and shut my laptop, got a jacket and took a long drive with one of my friends to the candy store she loves. I wanted to take a break from the internet for a little bit and just clear my mind and sorta evaluate my problem.

2. Got rid of the stress.

On my long drive it hit me, I stress out a lot and sometimes that stress turns into a sorta depression, and that was the cause of my block. So as soon as I got back home I finished all my home work and projects and even changed the oil on my car. I got rid of all the worries I could in order to get rid of all those subconscious thoughts. Because there’s no real instant cure I still needed to wait a little while before I got back to normal but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t do anything.

3. Worked in the back end.

Like I said earlier, only time will cure your writers block even if your stress free, so do something else. Instead of writing, I went around the net and promoted this place. I did some blog commenting and what not, but you can try to get more RSS subscribers, maybe start building links and traffic from forums, shit maybe even figure out how to monetize your blog better. Their are other ways you can do “back end” work for your blog, so do it.

Well, I know every one is different but you should use the same steps the next time you have a bad case of writers block.
1. Take a breather and access the problem.
2. Solve the problem.
3. Do something while you wait.

Have you had writers block before? What do you recommend doing about it?