Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

Don’t you love blogging? I sure do. It’s not all about the money, you know. It’s about the fun. Here are seven simple ways to keep it fun.

1. Challenge yourself. Give yourself a specific challenge. For example, to write a new post every day. Or learn and write about everything you can on a specific subject for a week.

2. Make friends. There are all kinds of people out there. Some of them are bound to share many of your interests. Interact with them, not only on your own blog but theirs as well — or wherever you can get ahold of them.

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Blogging about yourself is easy. It encourages you to give personal opinions and open up about your feelings. Unfortunately, this means less time spent talking about facts that you know for certain, or that are useful for the readers. Furthermore, it can easily detract from your sense of authority. There’s a reason scientific papers don’t start out with “In my opinion…”

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Today marks the 31st day of daily posting on this blog. I have decided to give myself a break, as a psychological reward and to prevent burn-out. For the next 7 days I will not be publishing any new posts on this blog. From the 6th through 12th of April, 2008, there will be a blank spot in the calender. Then it’s back to the daily grind!

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The title for this post was “borrowed” from a recent TUK posting — where you’d better post a quick comment or you’ll fail at life. Anyway, he makes some great points:

I will tell you one thing right now - if you read posts and don’t comment, you are wasting your time. I used to be like that too - I used to bounce from post to post in the blogosphere, just skimming, rarely commenting… before realising that ultimately, I wasn’t doing anything of use to improve my own blog. By commenting, you are.

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I just signed 10kluke.info up for a new site called rssHugger. The brainchild of Collin LaHay, it is an interesting, and unconventional blog-promoting tool. I think it has the potential to become a very big name in the blogging industry.

While the original plan was to charge a $10 entry fee, it is currently possible to get in the directory for free. In exchange for writing a review of rssHugger, and provided you can pass a manual inspection for quality non-spam blogs, your entire RSS feed will be featured in their searchable directory. The review can be avoided if you want to pay $20 to be featured directly.

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There are three good ways to title (and theme) a post.

1. Comparisons of wildly different things. Example: What Bloggers Can Learn From Donald Trump.

2. Numbered lists of simple points. Example: 10 Reasons Never to Get a Job.

3. Anything “How To”. Example: How To Become an Early Riser.

These always sound authoritative. Even if you’re not really an expert on the subject, you’ll sound like one. Further, in writing the post you will actually be more inclined to think like an expert.

Sharp, concise, well-supported thoughts with lots of original input. That’s what readers want, and that is what will boost your blog’s popularity the most.

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I was looking through some Digg posts and noticed this from OIBO. It’s an interesting, simple idea, for a blogger like me who posts daily: Recycle your old posts by rewriting them better and in different words.

It’s less work than staring at a blank page and writing a completely new article from scratch. The ideas are already in written form — they just need put into different words, hopefully better words. And it’s not really the same as copying and pasting; entire new content actually ends up being created.

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I have just installed the Nofollow Free plugin. This is good news if you have a blog or website and are looking to get some google ranking by posting comments here.

In case you didn’t know, Google recently implemented a convention of not counting any link labeled “nofollow” towards their rankings. The good news is that this reduces the chance that spammers will be able to get higher ranking from posting nonsensical comments to blogs. The bad news is that it keeps legitimate commentors from being able to tell others about their site as effectively.

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An extremely valuable plugin for me has been the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. I like to publish articles in advance, and wordpress’s default pinging behavior on this is really lame. It sends the ping as soon as you hit “Publish” then fails to ping when the article actually shows up on your page! MBP Ping Optimizer delays the ping to the time when the article shows up on your page.

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