Chris Garrett
Build your business by sharing what you know
As some of you knew, I am on vacation right now. Finding internet connectivity in this part of France has proven tough, but I have managed to locate a shaded, quiet corner with reasonable coffee and a free WIFI connection
I should have brought business cards, it's amazing the conversations you can strike up just by displaying the Apple symbol around an internet hotspot! (If you want free …
Last week I put a message on Twitter that prompted a couple of people to ask for more details:
On way to sunny Reading, fighting through traffic and rain to see a client, writing blog posts on the road and trying to not feel car sick
Yes, I was literally "blogging on the road" and it seems other people would like to do the same, so here is how I do it.
My setup is comprised:
Macbook
Nokia …
It’s common now to think of writing a blog as an education for your readers, but I find the blogger also learns a great deal in two significant ways. Reader feedback and discussions – The most obvious ways a blog helps you learn and understand your topic better is when you put ideas out and …
It's OK to not have all the answers. Let's face it, everything changes so fast, it's hard to keep up with absolutely everything. Sometimes though we have burning questions that Google can't solve. What should we do?
Well, as bloggers, a great thing to do is to ask the question and publish the answers.
If you don't know the answer, it could well be lots of people want to know too. Plus, if you …
Chris Guillebeau is one of those people who absolutely lives his philosophy. His blog is about travel and "Nonconformity" and you can believe he follows his own advice 100%. Recently Chris and Reese Spykerman worked up a fresh design and asked me to provide some feedback, so here is their critique.
Note on Blog Critiques
If you don't have the funds right now to buy one of my critiques, you can …
How would you like the chance to win one of 10 copies of the ProBlogger Book AND get lots of interesting stats and facts about bloggers worldwide?
If this sounds good, take the survey!
Every 100 survey entries up to 1,000 I will pull an email address out at random to win a copy of the book, so all you have to do is enter the survey to be in with a chance of winning.
All the details are …
Social Media tools have an enormous power to put you in contact with thousands of people. As I have said on numerous occasions though, attention on its own is useless, what are you going to do with that attention?
If you want to build your online brand you have to know how all your activities work together. You need a consistency and congruency. Each part of the social media puzzle builds into a …
One aspect of my presentation over the weekend that I have been giving some thought to is the value of fewer, more in depth articles versus many shorter posts.
Traditionally people would look to the top blogs like BoingBoing and think to be successful in blogging you need to post many times a day. Recently though on the blogs I work on I have seen more benefit from scheduling planned, deep and …
If you are blogging for a purpose it is not enough just to attract attention, we need things to happen as a consequence. That means at least providing the right content to the right people. As I have said many times before, while many people are looking for “traffic”, you can often be more successful …
You may have spotted that I migrated my email subscriptions from Feedburner to my Aweber account. This was not a decision I took lightly. FeedBurner has a lot of advantages, not least it is free and automatic, but most importantly, I didn’t want to lose anyone. That said there were problems with FeedBurner and no …
Over the weekend I had discussions on Twitter with someone who is against the democratizing of the web. This person believes it brings the overall quality down and the media should be left to “professionals” (although this was never defined). This discussion, combined with last weeks Cluetrain thinking, brought about a thought that I tested …
Yesterday I drove down to the middle of the country to meet up with Doug Scott. He might not look like much ( 😉 ), and the name might not be familiar to you but he is a bit of a mover and/or shaker in the Affiliate and SEO worlds Doug has just started blogging …
Yesterday on the Blog Herald I wrote about how bloggers seem to be focusing on just the attention part of the blogging equation. What are the other parts we need to be aware of? Attraction is just one step in a process. If you think of your blog as being a system then attention brings …
Chris Cree asked an interesting question in the comments of yesterdays post about my Twitter competition. I’m curious what criteria you use when deciding whom to follow in return. Would you share some insight into that at some point? The thing is I am not sure I know the right way to decide who to …
I have been blogging for over 10 years, longer depending on your definition. Perhaps my 1996 science fiction site was my first blog? Perhaps it was my online diary in 1998? Whichever definition you use, while there are constant innovations in blogging, some things I learned from the start remain true today. Here are 41 …
When you create a blog there are three ways you can approach your subject matter. Which approach you choose will have a big impact on how fast you grow awareness and audience, plus will be decisive in how easy you find the actual writing. It is something worth thinking about but people rarely do until …
Most people will know by now that I offer a free ebook on this blog. Fact is, I am not the only one offering free resources that are useful to bloggers. Here are some of the best. Develop mini-sites using WordPress with Caroline Middlebrook Aaron and Giovanna offer their SEO for Bloggers guide Remarkabloggers 12-step …
How can you get good strong links? What can you do to get big name blogs to take notice of you? Yesterday I got lucky and was linked to by Duncan at Techcrunch which led to Techmeme taking notice of our Google Hijacking 404 Pages story at the Codswallop blog. This all came about from …
A common frustration from bloggers is they get to a certain level of momentum then stall. It’s like there is a ceiling that they can not break through. Rather than steaming ahead toward your goal, do you feel like you are going round in circles? How can we keep driving our growth? I often see …
Someone on Twitter remarked that they were sick of all the “Why blogging is like …” posts. To be honest I like them, and I will continue to write posts like that, but I am not surprised this particular person is sick of them. It is like top ten lists and all the other formula …
Lately I haven’t watched a lot of television, for a couple of years actually now I think about it. But, thanks to my handy satellite dish and DVR (Sky+ for the locals) I do keep up with some of the latest geek viewing. This is lucky because Ben over at Blogging Experiment has got a …
Is your blog Reader-Centric? Yuk, I know, horrible buzz word, but stay with me! What I am asking is important to your blog success; how well do you cater for your reader when working on your blog? In the programming world people talk about “user centric” where the users needs are elevated and in customer …
You can be charismatic or be innovative, if you had to choose, which would you prefer? I asked on Twitter and got overwhelmingly “Innovative!” as a response. This is pretty much what I hoped and expected to hear. While most people would say they value innovation more highly than charisma, I look around and I …
Interesting thought here from David Peralty I think that writing on numerous blogs can be detrimental, but as Chris Garrett has proven, it can also be very helpful, as everywhere I turn around his name pops up Do you think I’m getting over-exposed? As David says, part of my personal branding has been from writing …
Have you seen Jon’s “Drunk on Your Own Words” post at Copyblogger? It’s a good piece, go read it if you haven’t already. After reading it I realized blogging has some things in common with drinking the booze: Inhibitions – For some of us blogging can strip away inhibitions. This could be in the way …
Over at the Authority Blogger Forum my friend and super forum moderator, Jen has started a great thread about freelance blogging rates. What would you charge for freelance blogging? As she says, while there is a lot of information out there about freelance blogging, the one thing people rarely talk about is how much you …
Would you believe I have a blogger doppelgänger out there? Yes, it’s true, and cruelly he is both younger and better looking. Not only that, he is a skilled designer. Luckily for me I can redress the balance somewhat by trashing his new blog. But no! That last piece of evil revenge has also been …
One of the Twitter personalities I have been following is Sam Freedom who found one day his account had been suspended. It turns out from support there are several reasons this happens, mainly: you’ve followed a large number of people in a short amount of time there is a small number of followers compared to …
I think bloggers might be the most self-critical people I have ever met. In some cases monitoring our own progress can be a great thing, I expect we have all worked with people who we wish would have cared more about their own performance! But when we routinely beat ourselves up, something has to change. …
I am by no means a wealthy man but I do enjoy living well, given the opportunity. Vezeo is a blog especially for people who have a passion for the finer things; international travel, food, restaurants, and resorts, and either have the means or the aspirations to match. The blog is off to a good …
It’s funny but whatever you do, there will always be people who misunderstand you. The more public you make yourself the more you will be misunderstood. In many ways it is our own fault, in different scenarios we wear masks to shield part of ourselves so we feel less vulnerable. Our “work mask”, the persona …
Digg users are famously hostile. In fact you could say the internet in general has long had a reputation for being hostile. What can we do to avoid the worst? What can be done? This post will probably kiss away any chance of me getting on the Digg homepage again but such is life. I’m …
So was Blog Action Day a success? I feel like it was. My post got a warm response and there was a lot of buzz around the intarwebs. It seems though my comment about the topic getting folks hot under the collar was spot on. I had the worst day for unsubscribes ever! I have …
In the first part of “Buying and Selling Blogs” we looked at ways to see value over and above the traditional income and value of the domain. The next step after looking to see what value is there, is to see what value you can add. It’s just like in the real world of real …
Selling blogs is a growth area of professional blogging. Having said that it’s not just people who want to buy or sell blogs that want to know how to value them. Bloggers often want to compare their progress against others. This is a very difficult question because often you are comparing apples and oranges, plus …
A blog critique for Adii, a designer from South Africa.
You already know how effective guest posting can be for building your profile as a blogger and also driving more visitors to your blogs. There are opportunities for guest posting and then there are also paid blogging gigs out there if you know where to find them. Over the weekend I discovered a third type …
Dear FeedBurner, Let me start by saying I love your service. Of course I have no choice. There are no alternatives. But really, I do love your service. I find it looks nice, is easy to use, and mostly gives me what I need. The main issues I have are in the area of your …
I just did my first ever Sketchcast over at Codswallop and I found the experience quite strange. For years my teaching method was to speak while I write and doodle on a whiteboard. That felt natural and fun. For some reason recording my voice while trying to draw didn’t really work for me. Perhaps with …
In my post about web community building and participation I mentioned making friends and contacts. I think this is an important and much overlooked factor. For people who work online, usually from home, it can be a terribly solitary and lonely existence. Over the years I have had the good fortune to meet some great …
