If you're a blogger, you'll be asked to work for free. Companies will ask you to review sample products. You'll be invited to run press releases. Here's why you should turn almost all of it down. Working for exposure Once upon a time, a professional hula hoop performer told the story of being asked to perform at a $1000/plate event for Oprah Winfrey for free. The ... [Read More]
Business Development
Being a full-time blogger
Things have changed around here - again. I started this site about nine years ago (actually under a different domain name) as a journal of my struggles to learn everything I could about running websites. Then for the past few years I stopped maintaining this site for the most part because I was too busy actually doing the work to journal it. Now, finally, I'm a full-time ... [Read More]
Coming up with new blog posts
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 give you brand new ideas as your mind goes off on tangents from what you've ... [Read More]
Redirect a subdomain to totally different URL
Htaccess redirecting is a powerful and somewhat frightening tool. After all, one typo and your domain is pointing nowhere in an infinite loop. It's okay, though, because you can always get back in through FTP or Cpanel to fix it. As long as you kept a backup copy before making your changes. And that's exactly what you need to do before following any of the instructions in this ... [Read More]
Working with Personas
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 First, you need to know how to construct personas. If you have some ... [Read More]