Creating and maintaining a blog can be hard work, as it takes a lot of trial-and-error and can cause many headaches and frustrations. If you truly want your blog to succeed, you have to treat it as a business; this often involves putting in long hours of research, tweaking, optimizing, and much more. While those who are new to blogging often don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into, they quickly learn that blogging is not for everyone. If you’re not willing to put in the work and effort, then you

This guest post is by Karol K of ThemeFuse. Is it just me, or do you ever find yourself in a situation when you just want to lock someone up for the things they’re doing either on their own blog or while commenting on other people’s blogs? You know, moments when you wish you were the blogging police … anyone? I do. Quite often actually. And I am by no means perfect myself. But you don’t have to be perfect to have an opinion, just like you don’t have to be a musician to be able

For someone who is about to start up their own business, whether online or not, this is an essential question to ask. When you sell a product or service you need someone to make a purchase so you can make money. The most important principle in business is that there are two different types of people involved in your business; customers and clients. While both of these may appear at first to be the same they are critically different and concentrating on one over the other can be the difference between

This guest post is by Marcus Sheridan of The Sale Lion. We’re all communicators. That’s what we do. Some of us love the feel of pen in hand. Others find joy as the fingers hit the key pad. But for me, the magic is in the communion that occurs in front of a live audience, a place where I feel more at home than any other. Like you, I’m a blogger. I’m also a business owner. In fact, I own a swimming pool company. Ten years ago, I started the business with my two partners. The challenges of entrepreneurship

So many bloggers put tons of time and effort into getting more traffic – but perhaps that sounds like trying way too hard. Your ideas are so awesome, your personality so strong, that readers will just come to you. I’m going to give you ten straightforward ways to make sure the whole world knows you’re not going to pander to your readers. (Oh, and if you would like to have a few more readers – try doing the opposite of everything on this list.) 1. Give Your Post the First Title You

Writing killer blog content isn’t enough. You also need to be linking to your old and best content in your latest blog posts. Why you ask? For multiple reasons… So that’s easy enough to understand, but what if you have an old blog that you have just been focusing on writing content for and haven’t been doing any internal linking? Well… there’s a plugin for that! This free plugin, which has been downloaded a gazillion times, will be your savior for when you need to start

FanMix describes itself as “one inbox to rule them all”. The tool allows you to manage all of your social conversations from across the Web. While they currently only support three social sites, you’ll soon be able to manage your blog comments as well as various other sources. It’s meant to be a “dead-simple inbox, just like email”. So if you’re still suffering from social overload or just looking to make your life easier, FanMix is worth giving a try. It will help you keep up with all mentions of you or

This guest post is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash. Everyone has them, except possibly R.L. Stine. I’m referring to those days when you’re lacking either the inspiration or the energy to write something fresh and/or inventive.

Experienced bloggers may have a profound understanding of the dynamics of composing an engaging and informative blog but they may also be entirely clueless when it comes to applying their writing skills to a very different medium: their email newsletter. The creation of an effective email newsletter requires a very specific form of writing moxie and the mastery of a structure which varies considerably from your garden variety blog post. The first determination which must be made is what your readers want