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North x East

North x East
North x East is a blog about business and entrepreneurship, blogging, marketing and startups.

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Curiosity Killed the Cat, but it Saved the Blogger!
2007-09-13 04:55:00
As a blogger your job is to take a close look at the world and share your interpretation. Readers come to you looking for up to date information, but even more importantly, they want to hear what YOU have to say about the world around them. Can you give your readers what they are after? Can you do it every day? For the next year, two years, or even the rest of your life? As Leo discussed recently, blogging isn’t always easy. Fortunately there’s something that will help you keep your blog alive and growing even after your initial excitement has died: cultivating curiosity and becoming insanely interested. Insanely interested in your topic, and insanely interested in everything. Here?s why: It keeps you going: For a person looking at the world with both eyes open, there is always a new post idea waiting behind the corner. Looking at your kid learning to turn around might be a lesson in perseverance. Seeing a metro cart painted like the New York subway to advertise a local...
More About: Blogger , Killed , Curiosity

NxE’s Fifty Most Influential Bloggers
2007-09-11 18:30:00
There are literally millions of bloggers out there, each of them with their own voice and style, and yet in the blogging world, a handful stand out. These are the movers and shakers. When they speak, the blogging world listens. These are our Fifty Most Influential Bloggers , and if you don’t know them, you need to. Are there others out there who matter? Sure there are - they just didn’t make this list. Is the list in perfect order? No, that would be impossible - every person on this list is important, and depending on what’s important to you, they might rank higher or lower on the scale than what they have here. But what’s important is that these bloggers - and some of them are much more than just bloggers - are influential beyond the norm. The voices of these fifty bloggers reverberate throughout the blogosphere. They have had ideas that spread like viruses, and have styles that are mimicked by numerous others. They’ve created major blogs that have majo...

Building A More Communal Blog
2007-09-09 02:16:00
Communities have been around since the dawn of time, well the dawn of internet time anyway and their benefits to a site are well known: increased ’stickiness’ and return visits, a member feeling of ownership and loyalty, a userbase to tap into for anything from promotions to assistance. Blog s are inherently communal, but without effort, they are only so at the most basic level. There are however things you can do to make your blog more communal, and here are 29 of them, split up loosely into basic and advanced: Basic Things you can Do Focus at least a portion of your posts towards Discussion as opposed to just Readership This can mean ending the post with a question - like “what do you think?” or posting on a controversial topic Create a Top Commenters List One of the key four components to community is recognition and showing a list of top commentors can help users achieve recognition. There is a famous WP-Plugin to do this. Reply to Comments The core of a...
More About: Building

Sustainable Blogging: 12 Ways to Keep Your Posting Going Forever
2007-09-05 06:23:00
Many bloggers have lived through this scenario: they start off their blog with a flurry of posts, with a lot of enthusiasm. But once that enthusiasm dies down, posting slows to a trickle, with every real post matched by a promise, “Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly — I’ll be posting more from now on.” So the question every new blogger must ask himself is: how do you keep the fire burning? How do you ensure that your initial blogging enthusiasm lasts beyond the first few weeks? It’s not easy, and it should be recognized that blogging isn’t for everybody. You have to love to write, to share with others, to interact with those who love what you write and those who hate it. If that’s not you, you might give it a shot, but you might not last long. However, if you’re destined to be a long-term blogger, with a sustainable posting schedule (and finding that perfect schedule is a matter of experimentation), there are some things you...
More About: Blogging , Forever , Sustainable , Going , Goin

Challenges Every Blogger Must Overcome
2007-09-04 02:49:00
Every now and then I return to a blog that I haven’t visited in a while and find one of these statements, “I’m taking a break from blogging for a while. Stop back sometime soon.” Unless you’re a die-hard fan, I’m guessing that becomes the last time that you visit that blog. The “I’m not blogging” statement reveals something profound: successful blogging is hard work and not everyone is up to the task. Cultivating a durability over time is only one challenge that bloggers face. Here are a few more as well as some strategies for overcoming them: Boredom So you’ve got yourself a steady stream of RSS subscribers and maybe even your Adsense is generating some dough- now what? Boredom settles in and you ask yourself why you’re blogging in the first place. Tim Sanders of SandersSays has written agreat article about blogging passion, he writes that your choice of posting can mean the difference between feeling charged u...
More About: Blogger , Overcome , Halle

3 Rules for Finding Great Post Ideas, and 15 Places to Look for Them
2007-08-30 10:10:00
Every blogger faces days when he stares at the screen thinking, “What in the world am I going to write about today?” One of the keys to successful blogging is how you handle that question: do you turn tail and run, or do you dig deep within you for a great post idea. A great post starts with a great idea, and every blogger has to learn to find those great ideas somewhere. For myself, I’ve learned a few key habits that have led to some successful post ideas, and I’ve learned to look to a few key places for those post ideas. 3 Rules for Finding Great Post Ideas Before we get into where to look for great post ideas, let’s look at three rules that will get you those ideas every time: 1. Be observant. Always keep your eyes open. Take a look at the world around you. There are tons of post ideas in your every day life. Look at what you’re reading, what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, what is being discussed around you. An observant blogg...
More About: Places

13 Reasons Bloggers Should Use a Tumblelog for Links
2007-08-23 06:30:00
On my other blog, Zen Habits, I have a companion tumblelog that I use to link to articles I think will interest my readers. It’s been one of the best things I’ve done on my blog, for a number of good reasons, and I highly recommend it to any blogger. Let’s start by talking a little about tumblelogs. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re about the simplest blogs there are — basically a collection of links, quotes, photos, videos, dialogue, snippets of text, or anything else you might run into while surfing the net. A tumblelog can contain regular blog posts, but for the most part it’s links and other media you stumble across that you want to share with others. And it’s easy: you can use a service like Tumblr and get a free tumblelog running in minutes. Using their bookmarklet, you can link to a post or photo or video within seconds. No hassle, no wasted time. From my blog’s main page, I have a prominent link to the Zen Habits ...
More About: Links , Bloggers , Reasons , Tumblelog

The Secret to Getting Others to Talk about You
2007-08-21 18:01:00
Let me begin with an anecdote. Mary was actively involved in community service. She became the president of United Way of King County ? a non-profit community organization - in 1975. Mary would passionately tell anyone willing to listen about her son and his new company. One of the people who listened was a fellow United Way board member: John Opel. Five years later, John Opel ? president of IBM is looking for a computer operating system. And where does he go? To Redmond, Washington to meet Mary?s son ? Bill Gates. Thanks to that deal with IBM, Bill Gates today is one of the richest men alive. Arguably IBM would never have sent people to Redmond to see a virtually unknown company as Microsoft was then, if John Opel hadn?t heard the name before. Ah ? the power of contacts! The Limitations of Networking Aristotle Onassis ? the shipping tycoon - was once asked: what would you do if you suddenly lost all your money? His answer: ?I?d get a job, and work till I had saved up $300. T...
More About: The Secret , Talk , Secret

The Secret to Getting Others to Talk about You
2007-08-21 18:01:00
Let me begin with an anecdote. Mary was actively involved in community service. She became the president of United Way of King County – a non-profit community organization - in 1975. Mary would passionately tell anyone willing to listen about her son and his new company. One of the people who listened was a fellow United Way board member: John Opel. Five years later, John Opel – president of IBM is looking for a computer operating system. And where does he go? To Redmond, Washington to meet Mary’s son – Bill Gates. Thanks to that deal with IBM, Bill Gates today is one of the richest men alive. Arguably IBM would never have sent people to Redmond to see a virtually unknown company as Microsoft was then, if John Opel hadn’t heard the name before. Ah – the power of contacts! The Limitations of Networking Aristotle Onassis – the shipping tycoon - was once asked: what would you do if you suddenly lost all your money? His answer: “I’d get a job, and work till I ha...
More About: The Secret , Talk , Secret

Bloggers Unite to Help the Environment - We Need You!
2007-08-16 06:34:00
For the past few weeks Leo and I have been working on a project to get bloggers together for a cause. Today we launched. Blog Action Day is based on the premise that if every blog posted on the same issue on the same day we could effectively change the conversation on the web that day. So we’re asking bloggers - i.e. you! - to register their blogs to participate. All you have to do to be a part of the initiative is post on October 15th a post that relates to the environment. It can be to do with your usual topic or totally just about an environmental issue. So for example on NorthxEast I’m planning on doing a write up about the best environmental blogs around so that it fits the usual subject of the site. We’ve been busy marketing the idea so that we’d have some momentum prior to launch, and so far there are some top 100 blogs already participating as well as a ton of my favourite blogs who’ve committed too! So head over to the site and Get Inv...
More About: Environment , Bloggers , The Environment , Iron , Envi

Choosing The Right Advertising For Your Readers
2007-08-13 01:43:00
In this post, guest blogger Ali tackles the issue of finding a suitable monetization strategy for a new blog. It is possibly one of the least thought about points for almost any new blogger. What is the right type of advertising for my readers and my blog? If you set up a free blog account, especially with Blogger, you stand a particularly high chance of being completely brainwashed with Google Adsense so you don’t even look beyond that option. This happens primarily because of the simplicity of getting Adsense working. It’s OK, don’t blame yourself for that, blame Google - they’re very good at what they do! This article is not about choosing the easiest monetizing methods but rather the right monetizing methods. A trap that many bloggers fall into, is to think that just by popping up a few blocks of pay-per-click (PPC) ads, the same sort of money that more popular blogs are making will happen for them. Sadly it doesn’t work that way. Here’s why...
More About: Advertising , Readers , Vert

10 Ways to Write a Great Lead for a Blog Post
2007-08-08 03:27:00
In journalism, the first paragraph or two of a newspaper or magazine article are known as the “lead paragraphs” or simply “the lede”. More time is spent writing that those few words than the rest of the story. Why? Because if you don’t catch the reader’s attention, they won’t read the article. The same applies to blog posts: after the headline, the most important words you write are in the lead paragraphs. If you want people to actually read your post (and thus come back to your blog for more), you need to focus on that lead. A great lead should do the following things: Grab the reader’s attention. Make the reader want to read more. Set the tone for the rest of the post. Summarize what the post is about. That’s a lot of jobs for just a few words. Many leads won’t accomplish all four tasks, but the best ones will. You should strive for as many of the four goals as possible for each of your leads. Here are some tips for...
More About: Post , Write , Blog , Great , Lead

Why Opportunities are So Important, and 12 Places to Look for Them
2007-08-03 01:32:00
Bloggers who are looking to increase the traffic to their blog should start thinking not in terms of links but in terms of opportunities. Because it’s opportunities, more than anything else, that are going to get you that traffic in the long run. What do I mean by opportunities? There are so many, and I list some of them below, but basically I mean opportunities to collaborate with others, to grow your blog, to attract new readers, to create a brand, to reach a new audience, to help others, to network. The problem is that many times we don’t recognize an opportunity when it comes along. Someone might email us about a link exchange, but because we have a policy not to do link exchanges, we pass on the opportunity. Should we do link exchanges, then? Not necessarily — but someone emailing you is an opportunity to make a friend, to work with another blogger, to gain a reader. Seize it if you can, by being friendly to the person, by suggesting an alternative, by finding...
More About: Places , Opportunities , Unit

9 Blog Ideas to Help you Profit with Amazon
2007-08-01 14:24:00
Amazon’s Affiliate program is one of my favourites, simply because it is so adaptable to virtually any blog or topic. They also have the benefit of a lot of trust, so you don’t need to sell the reader on Amazon as a business, rather you can focus on the products themselves. When I first started using the program I was rather dismayed that the results it was yielding were small. The key however is to build many, targeted, relevant links over time. I learnt this after reading a reading a ProBlog ger article on the subject where Darren Rowse discusses his experience with the program. After a couple of months it appears to be working with my monthly income from the program climbing from a few dollars up to the low three figures. While that still isn’t a lot of money, I suspect if I simply keep applying this principle of developing solid links to the program, this figure should continue to rise to eventually become a solid earner. So here are 9 ideas for working Amazon links int...
More About: Ideas , Amazon , Profit

10 free ways to gain exposure for a young blog
2007-07-25 06:27:00
Every blogger knows the frustration of starting a new blog, and not having any readers. You’re writing great posts, but no one’s listening. Sure, maybe eventually people will hear about your blog, but you want traffic to start building up now. Well, growing traffic will take patience, and you won’t get a flood of new visitors overnight (at least, not without some luck). But you can do things that will start to get you noticed, and start to get some traffic, and over time, those things will add up. The more of them you can do, the faster your traffic will come. Build a destination. The first step, of course, is writing the content. There’s nothing more important than having great content if you want to attract readers. If you think you can skip this step, you should probably skip blogging. However, it’s not enough to write one or two great posts and then try to attract readers. Think about it: you get a few readers to come to your blog, and they read yo...
More About: Free , Blog , Young , Exposure , Free Way

Why Guest Blogging is a Powerful Way to Gain Exposure for Your Blog
2007-07-18 08:06:00
Every blogger has been there: you’ve been blogging for a few weeks, but not many people other than your close friends and relatives every stop by. You ask your readers a question, and the response is a resounding silence. You need to find ways to gain exposure for your young blog. And guest blogging is one of the most powerful ways of doing that. When I first started Zen Habits, I faced this challenge, just like everyone else does. “I’m writing great stuff,” I would say to myself, “but no one is reading it. What do I do?” I tried guest blogging, and it paid off big time. I now regrettably have to turn down requests to write guest posts elsewhere, just because I’m so busy writing. I wish I didn’t have to, because every time I do, I miss an opportunity, but there’s no question that guest blogging has been a major part of my success. There are many things you can try, but I can tell you that most of them will flop if you don&rsquo...
More About: Blogging , Blog , Exposure , Guest

Pick a Niche, Any Niche
2007-07-15 03:06:00
Perhaps the most important blogging decision you can ever make is in choosing what to blog about. Your niche or topic area plays a huge role in defining everything that comes after, including how successful your blog is. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to simply wander into a niche without even thinking about what the consequences down the road might be. On NorthxEast I’ve written two articles about the flying success we’ve had on FreelanceSwitch, but the truth is that 90% of the site’s success boils down to choosing the right niche to write in. Freelancing is a niche with a big audience and previously not a whole lot of good content. Contrast that with the blog you are reading now. This site is also growing steadily, but not at any particular pace. I would argue that although NorthxEast does many things right – good content, good writing, well networked and so on – it has one major failing that will mean, while the site will continue to grow at a good rate, it w...
More About: Pick , Niche

10 Ways to Focus on the Reader and Build Long-Term Traffic
2007-07-11 09:48:00
Too often bloggers focus on themselves - blogging is a form of journaling, right? - or on making money, on advertisers, on marketing, or on social media. As a result, if they attract a reader, they have trouble making them stick. The goal of most bloggers is to build up readership and traffic, but the only way to build up long-term traffic (as opposed to say a two-day spike from Digg) is to get the readers you are able to attract to stick around for a little while. So your goal should be to get the reader interested not only in reading your article, but in exploring the rest of your site, reading more and ultimately getting hooked. The way to do that: by focusing entirely on the reader, all the time. Here are 10 suggestions to do just that: The Reader ’s problem. Every post you write should be useful to your readers — which means you must focus on a problem that the reader has, and how to solve it. What problem will you solve for your reader today? How to lose weight? H...
More About: Traffic , Focus , Long , Build

10 Books to Make you a Better Blogger
2007-07-07 01:00:00
Is it odd to look to traditional media for advice on becoming a better blogger? Not as odd as you might think. Covering issues in a much more in-depth and logically ordered way than reading online, books are also just easier on the eye… From post ideas, to writing, to web development to marketing, in this post we’ll look at a bunch of books that will make you a better blogger. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog As we like to stress here on NorthxEast, writing quality, unique content for your blog is what sets it apart and ultimately leads to success. Margaret Mason demonstrates she knows a thing or two about writing just by having such a damn catchy title! And though it’s a quick read, this book should get you thinking. More at Amazon: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog WordPress 2 (Visual Quickstart Guide) If you’re new to WordPress and looking for some hand-holding, this could be the book for you,...
More About: Books , Blogger , Make

Make Your Blog More Powerful by Optimizing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio
2007-07-05 02:22:00
“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” - Henry David Thoreau (who would have made an excellent blog writer) How much of your blog is actually useful content, compared to stuff about your blog, about your cat, about what you did today, or about why you’re not posting as frequently as you should? People come for the useful stuff, but they’ll leave if your Signal -to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is too low. SNR is a term borrowed from electrical engineering by Usenet, used to describe the amount of real information in a post (or in a forum) compared to spam or irrelevant or false information. You come for the signal, but you leave if the noise level is too high. You don’t want to sort through a bunch of stuff to get that one little nugget of information. The useful stuff should be jumping out at you, from every corner, and the non-useful stuff should be kept to a minimum. Otherwise, you’ll quickly lose those visitors who you do happen to attract. How can you keep your ...
More About: Blog , Make , The Signal

19 Blog Designs that are a Sight for Sore Eyes
2007-06-28 14:06:00
Despite the fact that blog themes abound all over the web, strangely blog design on the whole isn’t exactly the pinnacle of aesthetics. So it’s nice to come across blogs that are slick, sharp and sound in their design, that are high on visual goodness and low on eye-jarring nastiness. Here for your viewing pleasure are 19 of the best and brightest in blog design from across the web. WebRevolutionary WebRevolutionary.com Mark Bixby MarkBixby.com/site ErraticWisdom ErraticWisdom.com Elixir ElixirGraphics.com Svenigson Svenigson.com CircleSixDesign blog.Circlesixdesign.com TheBigNoob TheBigNoob.com HtmlLife HtmlLife.com Webzapisnik Webzapisnik.cz Blog Ministry BlogMinistry.com Chocol8blog YannickMyrtil.com/Blog Bartelme Bartelme.at Backword Back-word.Blogspot.com YoungGoGetter YoungGoGetter.com Jen Gordon WhoIsJenGordon.com/Blog 31Three 31Three.com/weblo...
More About: Eyes , Sight , Designs

12 Ways to Turn a Boring Post into Pure Gold
2007-06-27 08:58:00
Perhaps your blog is not getting the kind of traffic you’d like, or perhaps you’ve submitted some of your stories to Digg or Netscape or Reddit and they never go anywhere. You need a way to ramp up your writing, and get the kind of posts that people are scrambling to read… It’s time for a 12-step makeover for your posts. First, you need to realize that all the time you might spend checking your blog stats and optimizing your ads and redesigning your site and optimizing it for search engines and submitting it to high-ranking sites and social bookmarking services … all of that is well and good, but it’s not going to get you anywhere until you focus first on the content. Good content and good headlines drive traffic. Focus on the things you can do to improve your content and headlines, and ignore the rest, for now. Once you’ve built up some good content, you can worry about those other things. The most productive use of your time is spent do...
More About: Gold , Post , Pure , Turn , Boring

7 Deceptively Hard Blogging Tasks
2007-06-16 13:21:00
As a delightfully faddy sort of thing to be doing, blogging attracts waves and waves of newbies to its folds, all looking to get a blog started and for it to rise to success. Today I reflected on some of the tasks involved in blogging that have turned out to be a lot harder than I had expected. 1. Making Money The well known blogger Steve Pavlina once wrote in his must-read post on blogging: Can you make a decent income online? Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home … Can most people do it? No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. What makes this such a deceptively hard task is that the success stories of blogging have very loud megaphones and can leave you thinking your ro...
More About: Blogging , Hard , Tasks , Task

Free Your Subscriber Stats
2007-06-13 07:05:00
If you are one of the many bloggers using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed, there’s a good chance you’ve chosen to display your feed numbers using their FeedCount chicklet. Ever wonder if you could free your feed count from the confines of that tiny graphic and let those numbers bound free, to be styled however you might please with the magic of CSS? Well folks you can! And in this post I’m going to explain how. One caveat to this tutorial, unless you are using WordPress you will need some coding skills as we will be using a WP Plugin to make life easier. Examples of Chicklets and Free d Feed Counts First of all though, here is an example of the chicklet that Feedburner provides: The chicklet is great as it’s easy to make and displays your stats with very little hassle. I’ve also noticed that the chicklet updates my feed numbers before they change in the actual Feedburner control panel. Unfortunately the chicklet is very constrained and in my opini...
More About: Stats , Subscriber , Subs , Scribe

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