As a father of three boys aged five and under, there’s a word I hear a lot in my house. I’m sure other parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, child care workers, and people with kids in their lives will know what it is. “Why?” The questions come fast and while there are a few “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions mixed in, “why” questions seem to dominate—at least at our place. Of course why questions are a normal

The last couple of weeks have turned up some valuable blogging advice for those who are working to hone their craft and become better blog post writers. Not everyone falls into this category—some bloggers are happy with the way they write. Others publish videos or sound files instead of text. And that’s fine. But for the rest of us, I wanted to put together a little roundup of advice on each of the parts of a text-based blog post. Have you seen a great article on crafting quality blog posts recently?

Yesterday we were talking about how benchmarking your blog and your performance against those of others only goes so far to give ou an idea of “how your blog’s going.” As I said then, looking at others—other people, other blogs—even subconsciously for an indication of where you and your blog sit isn’t usually very helpful. I said then that today I’d give you some examples of areas where I think my blogging’s doing okay—things that have less to do with stats and revenues

Last week, I told the story of how I achieved my best month ever on DPS. While I used that post as a case study to present some ideas that I hoped you may be able to use on your own blogs, there’s a hidden hitch with that kind of post: it can give you the impression that you should be aiming to triple your revenue each time you hone a promotion on your site. We could take that a step or two further—a post like that could give you the expectation that you should be selling products, or even that you

We’ve all been there … You sit down to write a post. You get the opening line down, but half-way through the second sentence, you go back to tweak the first. A bit further on, you decide to chop up the paragraphs you’ve done so far and rearrange them … but on second thought, is that really the better option? In two minds, you “finish” the post, then spend a half-hour writing and rewriting the “ideal” headline. Finally, happy(ish!) your cursor hovers over the

Mid-December 2010: on my photography site, we launched a new campaign—our first ever 12 Days of Christmas promotion. The result was my biggest month of earnings ever up to that point. The idea was simple: offer discounts on 12 products over the 12 days leading up to Christmas. I used a mix of my own ebooks and products from other photography sites with affiliate commissions.

As bloggers, each of us has to deal with criticism. Blogging is a very public activity—almost all of us has the goal of gaining readers to our blogs—and the more people you reach, the more likely it is that you’ll hear criticisms. “You’re wrong…” “How can you say that? You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I couldn’t disagree more…” “This is the last time I read this blog!” These are just some of the criticisms

A couple of weeks ago I ran a census of ProBlogger readers to help us work out how to serve you better in 2012. Thousands of people participated (thanks to everyone!), so I thought I’d share a few of the results that stood out to me. Some of them are based upon comparisons we made to last time we ran a similar survey, around two years ago. Thanks to everyone for participating in this year’s census. The above info, plus your thousands of suggestions, have given me (and the team behind

Feeling frustrated today about a lack of ideas to write about on your blog? If so, you’re not alone. Here’s another technique that I use to overcome it. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post here on ProBlogger that gave a tip for fighting blogger’s block. It asked you to identify a problem that you had three years ago and to write a post that solved that problem for your readers.

“What was ‘the tipping point’ for your blog?” This question is one that I’m regularly asked in interviews, and it is one that is challenging to answer. The assumption behind the question is that there is often some kind of event that pushes a blog into the limelight. The reality is that it’s not always this way. Let me illustrate this by telling the stories of my two main blogs—ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.