North x East North x East North x East is a blog about business and entrepreneurship, blogging, marketing and startups. Articles
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
Building a SuperBlog Pt 2
2007-06-10 07:28:00 From 2000-7000 Readers in Five Fast Weeks. After the rocketing success of those two first weeks, momentum continued our growth to just over 3000 readers in what was only our third week of existence. For a few moments it seemed that all we needed to do was sit back and watch the numbers roll over. But all good things come to an end and our statistics began to plateau. Before I continue, if you haven’t already, you may like to view the first title in this series: Building a SuperBlog Pt 1: From 0 - 2000 Readers in Two Short Weeks. The FreelanceSwitch Feedburner Graph And so after our first two weeks of excitement, I happened to come across an article about how spikes of traffic can sometimes lead to *temporarily* inflated subscriber numbers. Cyan - the site manager - and I called an emergency blog meeting at our local Starbucks. The two of us plot and plan most of FreelanceSwitch there over venti cups of piping hot tea and as usual, an hour or so later we had a new plan. Havi...
Thinking Outside the Blog
2007-06-04 10:21:00 Most internet users have a good idea of what a blog looks like. In fact most blogs look pretty similar when you get down to it. Sure they come in different packages - certainly WordPress themes abound - but strip away a little of the cosmetics and it is usually the same face underneath. Today NorthxEast is changing to a new look and new format and while it isn’t entirely revolutionary, it is a little different. In reinventing this site I got to thinking about how blogs are changing and lines blurring. And so it seems fitting that the first article should be about how we as professional bloggers can think outside the blog. A New Medium Game changing innovations are few and far between. They are usually simple concepts to describe but when they arrive it takes time to fully realize their importance and impact. Television was a game-changer, mobile phones were a game-changer, and blogging is also one. What sounds so simple - it is just chronological posting after all - has had a... More About: Blog , Thinking
Why Design Doesn?t Matter in Blogging
2007-05-17 11:38:00 I’m a designer, always have been, always will be. And despite the title of this post I do believe that design matters one heck of a lot when it comes to making an impression, being usable and creating an image. But today I visited Steve Pavlina’s blog and read that he receives ... More About: Design , Blogging , Matter , Sign , Blogg
How to Write a Popular Post
2007-05-15 11:11:00 One of the keys to success on FreelanceSwitch has been the popularity we’ve had with Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. In particular a post like Top Ten Signs You May Be Charging Too Little brought some 70,000 visitors in a single day - more than NorthxEast has received in three months! The reason I’m ... More About: Blogging , Post , Write , Popular , Pula
NxE v2 Coming Online in 2 weeks
2007-05-13 12:44:00 Ever since we launched FreelanceSwitch I’ve been thinking and thinking about what to do with NxE. I haven’t got the energy to write for two blogs with any huge output and on top of that we are about to open a whole blog family very shortly. But at last one day just before ... More About: General , Online , Line , Ming , Weeks
Using CSS Galleries to get visitors - a comparison of traffic over 1 month
2007-05-05 05:02:00 Creating a good looking site and listing it in a CSS gallery has become a reasonably well known strategy for getting traffic. Being a designer I have had the chance to try this technique quite a few times and I thought I would today write up the value it brings using two case studies. The ... More About: Marketing , Traffic , Galleries , Visitor , Over
If I Could Only Read 5 blogs
2007-05-05 04:27:00 ThePaperBull.com has started a little meme called “If I Could Only Read 5 Blogs ”, and since I love a good meme, here are the 5 blogs I would read: TechCrunch.com TechCrunch was the very first blog I ever read regularly and to this day I keep going back because its just so damn useful. As someone ... More About: General , Logs
Hear me being interviewed!
2007-05-02 09:36:00 Ever wonder just who I really am… Well yesterday Eric Mattson of Jenerous.com interviewed me about our company Eden and the success we’ve had with FreelanceSwitch.com Boy its weird hearing yourself! More About: General , Hear , View , Bein , Being
Poll: Did you have or use a Business Plan?
2007-04-30 13:10:00 I suspect that many of you readers are or have been owners of some sort of web business. So I thought I would run a quick poll on the site to see how many people started their business with a business plan. I know for the company that I run - Eden Creative Communities - ... More About: Business , Business Plan , Poll , Have , Ness
Blogs falling by the wayside and why it pays to stick
2007-04-29 11:31:00 You know with only three months of blogging in my experience bank, I am still a bit of a blogging n00b. However with the way blogs come and go I am starting to feel like I have been around a while. When I started at the beginning of February I found a whole ... More About: General , Blogs , The Way , Side , Pays
Why you should not use WWW or use WWW and STICK to it!
2007-04-28 04:00:00 Well Hannes just let me know that the Google PR has updated today, my own PR bar doesn’t seem to have registered it, but you can check out a whole heap of Google servers from pageranktool.net which seems to be indicating that its just happening now. No doubt TLA is about to get inundated ... More About: Should , Stick , Tick
Success builds on Success
2007-04-25 03:09:00 Have you ever realised that you can look at your life as one long sequence of cause and effects? Something happens and it has an effect which has an effect which has an effect. So you might think to yourself “boy if I had never done so-and-so, then this other thing I’m doing now ... More About: General , Success , Build , Builds
Wondering when the next PageRank update will be?
2007-04-21 09:18:00 Wondering when the next PageRank update will be? According to the experts it should be … a week ago! Of course no-one except Google really knows when those PageRank bars will go up but SEOCompany.ca of Canada tracks the number of days between updates since all the way back in the year 2000 on their ... More About: Pagerank , Update , Next , Ring , Will
? All the *other* ways to make money with a blog
2007-04-21 03:33:00 While most of monetization through blogging focuses on advertising and affiliates there is, as they say, more than one way to skin a cat. Today I came across a post by fellow Australian Mitchell Harper writing about one way to do it, so I thought I would compile a list of that and some ... More About: Money , Make Money , Blogging , Blog , Make
How Rand Fishkin (inadvertently) saved NorthxEast
2007-04-19 02:10:00 So a few days ago I posted that I was slowing down my post schedule, then the next night as I was lying in bed I decided that I should take a leaf out of my own book and get some focus. Noone could have predicted the wild success of FreelanceSwitch which still hasn’t ... More About: General , East , North , Advert , Save
A bit of Linkage
2007-04-16 07:26:00 Time for a bit of linkage here at NxE, check out these interesting places to visit: FoundRead is yet another blog from the GigaOM network, this one is about entrepreneurship and promises to be a valuable addition to the team Making viral content to promote something? Remember the 7 Q’s of Viral Content - Worth reading if ... More About: Link , Linkage
A New, Slighlty Slower Posting Schedule
2007-04-15 11:05:00 When I started NxE two months ago I set myself a posting schedule of averaging 1 - 1.5 posts a day, a feat I am happy to have accomplished with just over 100 posts in that period. But today I made a decision (while in the bath ) to change my posting schedule ... More About: Post , Schedule , Sting , Lower , Slow
The Brokerage Model
2007-04-15 10:56:00 As you know all this month we are looking at how you do business online, or in other words at web business models. Ivan wrote a post earlier about the Donation Model and today I thought I would discuss my favourite web business model, the Broker age Model. What is the Brokerage Model of doing business? Businesses ... More About: Rage
How We Took a Blog From 0 to 500 Subscribers in just 7 Days
2007-04-13 13:25:00 Today I thought I would take a break from all the talk of business models and just share my recent experience with FreelanceSwitch and how we’ve attracted over 500 feed subscribers in just 7 days of being online - a figure that far surpasses that of this blog after almost 3 months! So first of all ... More About: Blog , Just , Subscribe , Days , Crib
The Web Puts Ordinary Business Models on Steroids
More articles from this author:2007-04-12 05:00:00 Today I read an interesting article on Read/Write Web titled “Google - the Ultimate Money Making Machine” which details why Google has the ultimate business model, which in light of this month’s topic seemed rather appropriate for a linkup. If you haven’t seen the article I highly recommend it. One of the key points to ... More About: Business , Models , Model , The Web , Steroids 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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