Over on Freelance Folder there is an amazing post that talks about improving your productivity, and really it centers around reducing your distractions. Something that can be quite difficult, but also very important.

I find myself struggling with this periodically because my office is at home, and currently so is my wife, but there are some great points in the article.

Here is a sample:

Work in a separate room if possible

Last year I moved to the sitting room to keep an eye on the baby while my wife worked on her computer; this was because the computer could not be moved around and I had a laptop. But soon it became a free for all situation; everybody in the house needed my attention or my counsel for everything.

There were times when I could only achieve three to four hours of professional work during the whole day. And of course the baby always wanted to be on top of my table and bang on my laptop keys. Eventually I had to take a stand and move to a separate — fortunately a spare — room.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like a separate room is enough in our small house, and I might have to look at an office share or something so that I can get the peace and quiet I need to focus on producing a large amount of amazing content for everyone to read.

Definitely a great post over on Freelance Folder, and a great site for bloggers, and really all types of freelancers.

Originally posted on October 30, 2007 @ 10:43 pm

Finding sites to make money online can be fairly difficult. It seems most people stick to Google’s Adsense, and a few other select services, but there are so many out there that it deserved a list. Thankfully, I stumbled across one at TechMagazine.

While I don’t recommend some of these services, there are still a large number of great companies on the list, as well as some businesses that might suit your needs, better than they did mine. Either way, it is fairly comprehensive, and very helpful.

Check out TechMagazine’s 70+ Resources to Make Money Online.

Originally posted on October 26, 2007 @ 4:22 pm

For years, people have been putting MediaTemple badges on their sites, and it is easy to see why, they are not cheap, but provide an amazing service to their users. Over on Blogging Tips there is a post about how MediaTemple saved the day when a blog got promoted to the front page of the popular social news site, Digg.com.

A bit from the article:

Anyways at the start of those two days when the first Digg hits started flooding in I received an email from MediaTemple which I have pasted below. This is what kept me alive through those two days, and I couldn’t be happier with their service.

Dear Patric,(mt) Media Temple’s automated MySQL monitoring systems have detected an increase in database activity for your Grid-Service (topsecretblogger.com). To help your web applications scale during this surge in activity, your databases are now served from a MySQL BurstContainer. MySQL BurstContainers, are an innovative new component of our MySQL SmartPool v.2, that allows your websites to instantly handle intense, temporary bursts of database activity.

That is pretty amazing, and while eXtra for Every Publisher has not really hit the front page of any major social news or bookmarking site as of yet, I still feel very confident that my host, Hostgator (affiliate link), has this site covered, and while not everyone would agree with me, I have found their customer service and hosting to be some of the highest value for my money I have ever received.

I have used a variety of hosts, and there are very few that have been absolutely amazing. I would say to most people, find someone you can trust to host you, be they a big company, or a smaller one, and that service is the most important thing.

Originally posted on October 22, 2007 @ 10:05 pm

Recently, I read a post on Sarah in Tampa, and I can’t even explain my joy as I found out that Technorati had made some changes, thus bringing back some features I constantly used.

Here are three of the six from her post:

Filtering tools are back. Filtering search results by the source blog’s authority is a tool that bloggers wanted & were very upset over when it was removed.

Tag search results and keyword search results have been separated once again. As Richard says, “We also know now that we alienated bloggers who tagged their blog posts, say, as being about Facebook (a really nice little company, I might add) by burying them with all blog posts that mention Facebook.”

Charts are back – you can see the popularity of a word over time.

Thank goodness for that because I was slowly moving away from Technorati due to the lack of features, and blog oriented tools. Why can’t companies just focus on doing one thing the best?

Originally posted on October 22, 2007 @ 6:49 pm

Over on NorthxEast there is a great post talking about what you can do to successfully sell your blog. There are six points on what the seller should do, and four on what the buyer should consider.

A great post all around, and very relevant, especially with Splashpress purchasing some well known blogs from Bloggy Network.

From the post:

Here are some pieces of advice on changing blog ownership:

Ask the old blog owner to stick around for a while
Change is always easier if the lines are blurred, so asking the old blog owner to stick around for a few posts is a good way to make a steady transition between writers. This is probably harder for cheaper blog sales, but I know that in this instance when Cameron asked if I would post once or twice more, I was quite happy to given that the sale price was so much higher than I’d expected!

Introduce changes incrementally
Change is inevitable, but it’s best done incrementally. If you try to add a new posting schedule, new writers, new design, new topics and so on all at once, you are going to alienate some of the existing reader base. You might attract new readers, but why alienate old readers unless you have to. It’s much better to incrementally change your new asset and keep the old readers and attract new ones.

A great post with some valuable lessons.

Found via Crenk.com.

Originally posted on November 1, 2007 @ 5:26 pm