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Wage Slave Rebel Dispatch
Category Archives: Blogging
How to Blog Effectively
Effective blogging is blogging that values both your own, and your readers time. It’s an approach employed by the likes of Tim Ferriss and Tina Su: only post when you have something worthy to say. Essentially it’s valuing impact of your content over frequency.
Instead of posting every day like some bloggers do you might start posting 1-2 per week but go into greater depth with each post and be more willing to trash ideas that aren’t up to your standard.
So You Want To Be A Blogger, Part Four – Promoting Your Blog
After you’ve spent a few weeks naming your site, finding your niche, writing your posts, putting together your design and setting up your blog, you’ll find yourself in the awkward position of actually launching it. The first day will feel really “make or break” ( even though it isn’t.)
On July 13th, I saw my first three posts go up with little fanfare. In fact, if you check, all three of them likely have zero comments. In those first few days I was happy to get 20 views. In the weeks that followed, though, I started seeing the effects of certain marketing techniques I’d put in place. By the end of the second week, those 20 views per day had turned into 200 and a small community started popping up around the site leaving a comment here and a comment there.
When my traffic spiked at the beginning of the third week I was euphoric. Three thousand views per day!
In this post, I’ll reveal to you some of the best ways to induce the rapid growth of your readership. These are all things I’ve done and things that, I believe, have most contributed to WSR’s success.
So You Want To Be A Blogger, Part Three – Creating Compelling Content
Once you’ve decided on a topic and your blog is all set up, there’s just one factor separating you from success — content. I probably don’t have to tell you that content is what will make or break your blog over the coming months. The design might have hooked them, but they still need reeled in. Trite and unthoughtful rants won’t do that. Neither will poorly written monotonous articles.
In this post, we’ll look at the requirements for writing compelling content and how you can learn to develop engaging, insightful and creative posts that will explode your readership.
So You Want To Be A Blogger, Part Two – Setting Up Your Blog
In Part One of the Blogger Series, we talked a little about choosing a niche for your blog. By now you should have at least a rough vision for your site based on whatever it is you’re passionate about. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to search for blogs in the same niche or similar niches to you. Take note of what they have in common, what makes the best ones more special than the others, what makes the bad ones bad. The more you know about the strengths and weaknesses of the existing community, the better you will be able to cultivate an image and a reputation that will set you apart from the rest.
Now, you’re ready to start on one of the most fun and important aspects of a blogger’s journey. Today, you’ll make your ideas tangible!
So You Want To Be A Blogger, Part One – Choosing A Topic
Blogging is a wonderful way to ease yourself into the lifestyle of a wage slave rebel. It’s something you can get started on cheaply, it’s not terribly time consuming so you can work it around your current schedule and — as we’ve seen time and time again — it has the potential to grow into a full-blown, full-time career.
For those of you who want to make the escape from corporate culture but are still nervous or afraid, blogging is probably even the best possible option. A successful blog can give you the confidence you need and connect you with people who can help you get where you’re going. As Corbett Barr notes in his post on choosing business ideas, a blog is a delayed revenue business. What this means is that you’ll spend most of your time at the beginning creating quality content and building a community around your site in order to accumulate a large readership. Once your readership is large enough, you can monetize your blog through advertising or by offering products such as ebooks, screencasts, etc. This model might not be desirable for a lot of people, but it’s perfect for aspiring wage slave rebels because it allows you to get something out there fast and to be gradually pursuing your goals rather than jumping into self-employment.