Coming up with ideas for blog posts is one of the toughest challenges a blogger faces. We’ve talked before about using a feedreader to speed up your blog writing. That may be all you need if most of your posts involve linking to someone else’s and then offering insights of your own. It can also ...

There’s been a lot of uproar in recent months (okay, years) about US states passing laws that force Amazon to collect sales tax or, um, something. There also seems to be a lot of confusion about this, based on comment threads I’ve been reading. Some people don’t seem to understand how sales tax actually works. ...

Keywords are important, whether you’re writing a thesis paper for a high school English course or a blog. In any form of non-fiction writing it’s “best practice” to include phrases and tie in with your title and subject. This has nothing to do with search engines. Human beings need to see clearly that your article ...

We recently talked about using personas to target ads. The idea was that by forming a vision of who your readers/customers are and how they live, you could begin to guess what sort of advertising would be effective with them. But there’s actually so much more you can do with personas. Personas: the How To ...

Unless you’ve got a huge advertising budget when you start up your website – and let’s face it, you probably wouldn’t be reading this site if you did – you need free methods for boosting traffic to your website. Years ago, one of the tried and true methods for getting free traffic was simply to ...

Blue Mushrooms is now Blog A Living. This change has been a long time coming, and I’m very excited about it. Blue Mushrooms began as a journal I kept while I was learning how to manage, run and promote websites. It contained a lot of rants, a lot of questions, and lots of useless tidbits. ...

Finding topics to write about is one of the most common problems for bloggers. There aren’t a lot of topics most of us could have a conversation about daily, let alone post an article about daily. We’re always looking for new ways to keep the inspiration flowing. If your current approach to blogging is something ...

Over the years, I’ve had several of my blogs hit the front page, or a prominent secondary page, of Reddit. This typically sends anywhere from 10-20k extra visitors to the site in a single day. “Yay!” you think. “That means more money in CPM and affiliate sales! And new subscribers!” It often does result in ...

There are a lot of ways to build websites that make money. You can build for search engines, and searchers will keep you afloat. Or you can build for visitors and patiently wait for the word to get out about your site. If you build for visitors, it does take longer for the buzz to ...

More than a few times over the years, I’ve switched several of my sites’ RSS feeds from full feeds to excerpt feeds to see what happened. Every time it was the same: feed subscriptions leveled off or fell. I’d switch back to full feeds, and they’d resume their slow, steady climb. Until recently. My most ...

You’ve heard that stirring up a shitstorm of controversy on your blog is a great way to build traffic, and you can’t wait to try it. The rumors are true, grasshopper. If you write a halfway decent post on a topic about which no one is dispassionate, and even 100 people read it, those people ...

Here’s something nobody warned me about. When you’re blogging, particularly on a controversial topic, there’s something unpleasant that happens when you start gaining popularity. It involves people coming to your website and telling you in comments how you’re doing everything wrong, and you must do what they say instead. You’ll notice they don’t talk nearly ...

I recently talked about the importance of getting not only spammers but trolls and jerks off your blog. I offered a lot of reasons: that if you keep the comments relevant and interesting, your old articles can be as golden ten years from now as they are today. That it’s your damn blog, and no ...

WordPress 3.0 has a new php call: comment_form. It’s awesome in that it replaces about half the code in a typical theme’s comments.php file. But it’s not in most legacy themes, and the way to add it to your theme is not so obvious. Also, it’s nerve-wracking to customize because there’s no HTML to edit, ...

There are a lot of articles out there telling you how to make your site “Digg-proof” or at least resistant to the likelihood of going down or getting shut down by your host. This article is all about what’s actually going to happen when you hit Digg, and provides some real numbers based on what ...

The trick to building a successful website is simple, but not easy: find out what your audience wants and give it to them. Simple! But there are several reasons why it’s not so easy to do this: Your audience may not know what they want. Targeted shoppers looking for reviews on Ford trucks do, but ...

I’ve talked before about plugins that are supposed to prevent people splogging your WordPress blog, as this one has been splogged oh so many times. But the very best weapon remains setting your feed to excerpts only. Then sploggers can only conveniently grab the excerpt, and sploggers are notoriously lazy, so they just move on ...

Adults with sight and hearing impairments make up at least 7% of the US population. The most commonly discussed disabilities affecting website accessibility are sight and hearing impairments. These specific impairments encompass 6.8 percent of the population age 15 years and older – and climb to encompass 21.3 percent of the population when you look ...