As blog consultants job is as much about listening as it is advising. A complaint people often grumble about is why do some people find it easy to get exposure, while other people have far better work but get overlooked. It's the same in all walks of life. Some people naturally attract attention, even when there are seemingly more deserving recipients. It doesn't matter if we are talking about art, blogs or careers. My Dad and I will most weeks find ourselves stood outside shops with … [Read more...]

Mixx is a relatively unknown Social Bookmarking site. Ask around and half the people you talk to haven't used it. The other half either dismiss it or seem to have a wait-and-see approach. My view? I like it. What I like: Design - Nice, modern, clean and easy to use Content - Stories are served up that match the tags you specify rather than just those voted up Features - Has all the features you need plus some that Digg could use, such as being able to see who voted you … [Read more...]

photo credit: Gaspa Teaching Sells was already excellent value but I just heard yesterday that you can sign up now for $1! If you were thinking of trying before but didn't make the leap you should get in now before they put the price back up. Why on earth would they give you all that for one dollar? Especially when people stampeded to get the courses at full price? Here we have a useful lesson in marketing. $1 is News First of all is the most obvious benefit to the customer; $1 is a … [Read more...]

Many times I have seen bloggers become disheartened because of a lack of traffic, engagement or income from a new blog. They put in the research. Found phrases with a lot of traffic at Wordtracker, where there was a reasonable amount of competition in Google, and where they had a sufficient interest to blog long term. The problem comes when you find the audience is not as enthusiastic as you are. Fact is, there might be "interest" but that doesn't translate to a "need". This is where … [Read more...]

If you do the same things as everyone else, why would someone visit you?How can someone remember you if you are just the same as all the rest?What are you giving people to talk about?Lots of people write about productivity, life skills, etc, but none are as unique and memorable as Monk at WorkPopcrunch could have been just another celebrity blog but instead they created a weekly video showDavid Hobby could have created a generic photography blog but instead he focused on a niche and dominated … [Read more...]

People are irrational animals. In fact, there are a lot of scientists who believe we don't even have free will. Scott Adams calls us "moist robots" because we merely react to our programming and stimulus. Is it any surprise then other moist robots decisions confuse the heck out of us? The fact is in most decisions emotion trumps logic. Even decisions that we think were arrived at via rational thought usually have a large element of emotion. We are wired to listen to our hearts and guts … [Read more...]

Knowing your audience inside out is a critical part of blog success. If you do not know who your reader is and what they need, how can you possibly delight them? Your blog has to be for your reader first and you second. Yes, before anyone comments, there are notable successes with huge audiences who largely ignore their readers. These people are the exceptions. If you want to go that route, good luck to you. You will find in most cases that only works so long. So how do you get to know … [Read more...]

Sometimes we try too hard.It's easy to complicate things.This is the lesson I took from the Macworld keynote.How do you make a laptop remarkable? How do you communicate the difference in a way that anyone can "get" immediately, graphically?Do you think this is memorable? Easy to talk about?Regardless of how useful a thin notebook really is, I think this was mighty clever.What do you think? … [Read more...]

A key SEO tactic is to gain inbound links containing your most sought after keywords. Many webmasters aim for their exact phrase. If you can manage it, great. The problem is this can be far more challenging than it at first seems, and secondly over-doing the exact phrase can raise red flags in search engines. The main issue I find facing clients who want a certain anchor text is they run out of things to say.One way around these issues is to simply approach the phrases less obviously. Check out … [Read more...]

Yet again there is another traffic exchange doing the rounds with widgets appearing on blog sidebars. Of course people are asking if they should join in. Here is my advice ...Is it really free? - OK, in most cases you don't actually pay money to be a part of it, but in return for the hope of traffic you have to give valuable attention away to people you do not know nor endorse.Does it work? - By all means try it, but in my experience they don't tend to work as well as advertised once the initial … [Read more...]