A lot of new bloggers believe that you have to personally brand your blog. That is, you have to use your name and face in order to gain trust and popularity. This advice comes from a lot of marketing experts, but it's actually not the right approach for every blog. What's personal branding? What we are talking about here is the difference between Amy Lynn Andrews branding ... [Read More]
Business Development
ICANN Domain Abuse Email Scam (also Domaincop, others)
I got an email today for one of my sites. I've unlinked the links for your protection. Also, when I copied and pasted it from my email client, I discovered an exciting little invisible iframe at the bottom that was, I'm sure, designed to infect my computer. I'm calling this one the ICANN Domain Abuse Email Scam. Dear Domain Owner, Our system has detected that your ... [Read More]
Why You Might Want to Blog Anonymously
Many moons ago when I started out, no one ever would have considered blogging under their real names. We all chose to blog anonymously. Who knew what sort of criminals and weirdos might be reading, after all? So you blogged anonymously - unless you were already famous under your real name - and your only real source of traffic was Google. And Google was more ... [Read More]
How I became a full-time blogger
One of the most common questions I get asked is "How did you become a full-time blogger?". So I thought I'd write an article to answer it. And then I thought, why not back up, tell the whole story, and probably give you more background info on me than you ever wanted? How I first became a part-time blogger I actually didn't start out blogging. In 1996, I started teaching ... [Read More]
Ransomware: how to protect your PC, and why bloggers must
I've been away for a while. A big part of the reason was that, for the first time in my 20 years online, I got a computer virus. This nasty bit of malware, Cryptowall 2.0, strolled right past ESET, my highly-rated antivirus and firewall and beganencrypting all my data files. (Crypto has also been known to beat Norton, Kapersky and most of the others.) So I have spent the last ... [Read More]