Category Archives: Quick Notes

How to Start Looking for a Better Job

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LifeSpy, a site I used to own, has a great article on how to look for a new and better job. The article could be used for finding any type of job, even one in online publishing as a paid blogger.

Broadcast. Your boss is probably not the person to know that you’re looking for a better, higher-paying job, but tell your colleagues and friends that you are on the lookout for another job. Your friends/colleagues may know people who can help you get a job interview. If you’ve been wise enough, you should probably now have a good base of contacts. Some of the companies that you’ve dealt with may have openings here and there.

Surf. The internet has an amazing network of resources and you can maximize your internet connection by checking out sites which have regular job postings. If you feel guilty doing job hunting during office hours, do it in between breaks so you can search for available jobs without using up your work time. Now if you know that the office network’s a secure one, for the love of all that’s living, do it elsewhere. Your snotty network administrators may intercept your activity and get you fired in no time.

Searching for a job can be difficult, but if you take the time to search around online, there are some great resources. I know a few people that have found decent blogging jobs on the Problogger Job Board so check it out if what you are looking for is a problogging job. I, personally, couldn’t recommend this career path enough.

Originally posted on June 24, 2010 @ 12:49 pm

Find a Sponsor for Your Blog

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Darren Rowse, as part of his 31 Days to a Better Blog project, posted about finding a sponsor for your blog, something he has a fair bit of experience with.

He gives some great tips in the post, but one stood out to me more than the others:

If you have a smaller blog and haven’t had a sponsor before don’t aim for the stars straight away. It might be worth starting out by approaching smaller retailers, websites or companies in your niche and see if they’d be interested in some sort of partnership rather than aiming for the very biggest ones right up front. I did this a couple of months after starting my first digital camera blog and emailed 10 online digital camera sites to see if they’d be interested in advertising. 3 of the 10 bought small ads on my site (I think it was for something around $15-$25 a month). It wasn’t a lot of cash (and I didn’t have a lot of traffic to send to them) but I learned so much and made a little money in the process.

With so much competition out there, it can be very difficult to find sponsors for your blog. I have been lucky a few times, and have become friends with most of the people that have sponsored one of my sites. I didn’t make a ton of cash off any sponsorships, but it out performed AdSense, and networking connections are worth much more than pretty much any sponsorship.

Check out the full article on Problogger.net.

Originally posted on October 29, 2010 @ 11:27 pm

Two Techniques That Help You Embrace Brevity

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Copyblogger’s Muhammad Saleem, has put up a great post on how you can reword sentences and remove extraneous words in order to shorten posts, and since pretty much everyone that reads blogs has no attention span, this should be required reading.

Is it worth the extra effort to ruthlessly edit? Well, if we take the time to omit needless words, sentences and paragraphs from an article or landing page, we communicate more concepts in less time and space. The point of brevity is not to say less, it’s to say what needs to be said effectively and concisely.

Editing, cutting out words, or even rewording sentences to reduce their length is something I still have to work on, but it is nice to see some easy to understand guides being written on the issue

Originally posted on September 30, 2010 @ 10:48 am

40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging

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Mashable has a list of some great add-ons you can use with the Firefox web browser in order to blog faster and easier. Many of the items in the list are for specific blogging platforms like WordPress, LiveJournal and Blogger, but others are for dealing with photos, advertising, web development and search engine optimization.

Firefox works great on its own, but it’s the thousands of extensions that make it excel. We’ve pulled together more than 40 add-ons for Firefox that provide quick access to handy blogging tools. But whatever you do, don’t install them all at once.

Check out Mashable’s 40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging.

Originally posted on August 9, 2010 @ 1:26 pm

7 Things You Need to Know About Writing Lists That Work

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Copyblogger is an expert when it comes to using the power of making list posts. He has done wonders with them, and so have many other bloggers, all thanks to the fact that none of us have any attention span.

Simply put, lists work because they conform to the idea of “Left-Brain Marketing”. Everyone has two sides of the brain, and each part controls a specific way of thinking. The left brain is analytical, and prefers a step-by-step approach (i.e. lists) while the right brain prefers to see the big picture first and then deal with the details later.

Television commercials take the right brain approach with highly-produced images and expensive repetition. On the other hand, the left brain list format has been a successful approach for many decades with direct marketers, magazine publishers, late-night comedians and more recently with Internet content producers and social media marketers.

Many social media users want to know exactly what they’re in for, and the list format caters specifically to that need. It lets them know up front in the headline what to expect and what the time commitment will be.

If you want to gain some attention to your blog, set up a few list posts about pretty much anything, and you will most likely see some decent return. I, for one, hate the longer 101 items lists, but give me a dozen points on being more productive, and I will probably read it.

Originally posted on March 1, 2010 @ 11:47 pm