Blog Articles -- content you can (re)use

I've written a number of article on blogging, including on making money blogging and overall blog success, that I've uploaded to ezine articles.

This means you are free to reuse the articles on your blog or Website or ezine etc. if you follow their terms of service. Brief descriptions and links follow.

Blog Success: Your Blog Goals
In order to have a successful blog, it's important to have blogging goals. What are your goals with blogging? If you don't have any goals, how can you know if you're succeeding, if your blog is working?

Blog Success: Your Blog's Focus
In order to have a successful blog, it's important for your blog to have focus. You can't blog effectively on several unrelated topics in the same blog and expect to have many readers.

Blog Strategy: Needed for Maximum Blog Success
If you're blogging, how does your blogging fit in with your overall business strategy? For maximum results your blog needs to be part of your business strategy. It doesn't matter whether you work for a massive multinational corporation or if you are just a one person company like I am. Ask yourself, "How does or can your blog fit into your strategy?"

Blog Design: 7 Tips
Most blog platforms come with some basic blog designs. They may call them templates or themes or something similar, and usually they are not bad although some customization is pretty common. I often see some common mistakes, and hopefully you will be able to avoid them after this discussion.

Make Money Blogging: 5 tips
Blogs can be a business themselves bringing in money from advertising and product sales and more. Blogs whose primary purpose is supporting an existing business or venture can similarly earn some extra cash.

Make Money Blogging: Google AdSense and other PPC
Google AdSense and other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements can be a great way to make money from blogs. With PPC advertisements, you get paid anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars every time someone clicks on an ad.

Make Money Blogging: Advertising
You can make money by selling advertising on your blog. It's far easier than it sounds. I know the word "sell" scares a lot of people, including me, but blog advertisers will often approach you if you have an established blog.

Make Money Blogging: Information Products
You can make money from your blog by repackaging your blog content into information products and then selling those products.

Blog to Book: Write a Book from Your Blog
Writing a book is a lot of work, but if much of the content is already written on your blog it's much easier. Trust me, if I can write two books in the most hectic year of my life, you can write a book too if that's your goal. Often some of your blog categories will naturally map to chapters, and your blog posts can form the majority of the content.

Make Money Blogging: Sell Other People's Products
Many bloggers make money selling their own products from their blogging, often advertising them in the sidebars and naturally weaving them into their blog posts. You can sell other people's products and services too via affiliate programs and get a commission, a percentage of the sale.

Business Blogging: 5 Things To Avoid
Blogging can have a significant positive effect on your business or career if done well. Many people concentrate on what to do, but not what to avoid which is equally important. Here are 5 common errors to avoid with business blogs.

Blog Traffic: Three Ways to Increase Traffic Today!
Traffic, readers, raving fans -- we all want more. Sure, traffic isn't everything. Small focused traffic is often better than large random traffic. I'd rather have 25 rabid readers who can't wait for my next blog post instead of 2500 slightly interested readers. In fact many successful blogs don't have lots of traffic, but in general more traffic is much better than less traffic.

Increasing Blog Traffic -- 7 Offline Tips
Most bloggers concentrate on online methods for building their blog traffic. There are also a number of effective offline methods worth exploring for increasing the number of readers.

That's all for now folks! Remember you can reuse all these articles as you please as long as you follow the simple terms of service. This means you need to leave my resource info at the end.

Security Certification Website

Well, looks like I'm up to 8 Web sites, or at least active domains (I own a few more).

The latest (in beta, they're all beta) is SecurityCerts.org, about Information Security Certifications, like CISSP, Security+, SANS GIAC GSEC, and other festive acronyms. Yeah, I know this stuff. I like this stuff -- perhaps because it's a chance to provide some value to some people?

Over and out
Ted

Book Review: Beyond Booked Solid, Michael Port

Beyond Book Solid: Your Business, Your Life, Your Way is Michael Port’s excellent follow on to Book Yourself Solid.

If you provide a service, let’s say you’re a consultant, a dentist, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a whatever, it’s hard to imagine doing much better than being booked solid. Hey, you’re really selling time anyways, and time is finite – you only have so much to sell. You can get more enjoyable clients perhaps and better paying clients, but that’s about it

This book is about innovation; about growing your business. Growing does not necessarily meaning hiring people and getting bigger, although that’s one option. Growing means changing the scope of your business, so you do more of what you like, less of what you don’t like, and make more money. You’re changing the scope so you are not limited to trading your time on a one-to-one basis for money.

Yogi Bera said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I’ve been doing that and I’ve decided he was joking. Chapter 5 of Beyond Booked Solid talks about building blocks for a business, and although there was nothing entirely new to me, there was a new way of looking at my speaking and consulting business. Instead of taking all the forks when I get to them, I can plan and have options ready. Chapter 5 is a very useful chapter to me

Chapter 8 is on defining and measuring objectives, something I haven’t been going since my objectives have been constantly changing (at every ‘fork in the road’ they’ve been multiplying). I also found this chapter very useful.

Chapter 10 on systems was a slap in the head for me. Sometimes I need a headslap. I need systems, defined ways of doing things. Just today I wasted 45 minutes figuring out how to do something in Microsoft Access. I also wasted 45 minutes in January on the same task. Had I systematized it, basically just documented what I had learned in January, I wouldn’t have lost that 45 minutes of my life, and better still, I could get someone else, perhaps a student intern, to do it for me in the future.

“Read once and absorb, then read again and take action” is what Michael recommends in the preface. That’s exactly what I’m doing.

This is a book I’ll read more than once, and one that I highly recommend.

Book Review: Hermanisms, Axioms For Business & Life

Book Review, Hermanisms, Axioms For Business & Life, John L. Herman Jr.

Are you in business, going into business, or just dreaming of working for yourself or running your own business? Read this book!

John L Herman Jr. is a business failure expert, and most businesses fail. Even successful businesses end up having some less than stellar times -- my consulting business comes to mind.

What's it take to succeed, what if you fail anyway, and when are the cards stacked against you? These are other issues are discussed in this book's 77 chapters, all short, delightful to read, and packed with experience. It's really just great business advice in a easy to read and enjoyable format.

"Effective Internet Presence, Now required for success in business and life" is available

An Effective Internet Presence is fast becoming critical today, whether you're self employed, work for a Fortune 500, or simply dating or interacting with others.

Why? People google you all the time. Yes, YOU!

• They google you before they hire you
• They google you before they meet you
• They google you because you're a friend
• They google you because you're dating their sister
• They google you because, well that's what people do . . .
  

My free ebook, Effective Internet Presence, Now required for success in business and life tells you in very easy and simple terms how to create an Effective Internet Presence.

No money/email address/animal sacrifice/homage required!

Let anyone who might benefit know

Those who need the information the most are probably NOT reading this now, so pass it on.

And a big thanks to my reviewers, especially
Bob Porter and Nupur Maskara, for managing to review during the holidays.

Student Scholarship ebook

I know I have some student readers, so even though we're somewhat off topic, here is a great Free Scholarship Guide for College Students!

I say it's great because not only did I read it and review it, but Christopher Penn of The Student Loan network wrote it

Effective Internet Presence, part deux

My ebook, Effective Internet Presence, Now required for success in business and life is getting closer and closer to completion.

Available Jan 3rd, and 100% free, no registration, email, tribute or animal sacrifices available.

The latest excerpt, Why You (Need to) Care, is online and getting lots of interest and comments.
I'd love your comments too.

Effective Internet Presence, Now required for success in business and life

Effective Internet Presence, Now required for success in business and life is almost done!

It's a free ebook I'm writing, will be available Jan 3rd, and you can see a preview here:
What's Your Name

Operation China: From Stategy to Execution

I'm enjoying reading Operation China: From Strategy to Execution, by Jimmy Hexler and Jonathan Woetzel. I've got a pre-release copy, but it will be generally available soon and you can pre-order from Amazon now.

China and business is something I have quite a bit of background in, from lots of time spent in Hong Kong, to meetings in Beijing, to my latest China based startup going belly-up just a few weeks ago. Not a total disaster, but I don't want to talk about it!

Now admittedly, a lot of Operation China: From Strategy to Execution seems like common sense to me, but I've been doing business in that part of the world for over a decade and I think it's just sunk into my brain over time. If you are involved in, considering, or just plain interested in the biggest market around, check this book out.

Book Review: Strategy and The Fat Smoker, David Maister

Book Review: Strategy and The Fat Smoker, Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy, David Maister

A great book with insights on strategy I have not seen elsewhere – highly recommended.

If you’re a fat smoker, especially of you have family of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other related health issues, your strategy is simple: lose weight and stop smoking.

As Maister artfully explains, knowing what we should do (strategy) is easy; doing it can sometimes be impossible. It may take a near cataclysmic event to make us do what we need to do. Or it may depend on how much we want it. For some organizations, as David explains in chapter 4, strategy is simply NOT possible!

It’s interesting how direct competitors often have nearly identical strategies. Whoever does the most of what they know they should be doing does the best.

David Maister is well known for his work with professional service firms, but his insights are applicable across business types. I haven't read his previous (and best selling) books, but I will be!

Yes, David Maiser was a fat smoker. Me? I’m just fat.