Archive for the 'In the Sphere' Category
Posted on May 16th, 2008
Spring has finally arrived here in Vancouver, so I hope you’re all out there enjoying the sunshine and looking forward to a terrific long weekend! In between those outdoor barbecues and trips to the beach, be sure to take a few moments to explore the blogosphere too, because the rest of the world wants to have a word with you. Here are a few posts to get you started.
Eric Doggett of The Man Page reminds us of a very simple rule to adding some artistic expression to your photos. Whether it is at a child’s birthday party or just a lazy Sunday on the back porch, be sure to use the easy rule of thirds when composing your pictures. They make for much more interesting photos.
Shoemoney has got the skills to pay the bills, so he’s always on the lookout for interesting ways to make money online. You may have heard about pay per click and pay per action, but what is the best way to monetize an online video? Maybe you should consider pay per view. Loren Feldmen charges a dollar for each view. Imagine of those viral videos on YouTube did that.
In keeping with the creative flow, Bloggrrl says that kids should be bored. When they are bombarded with too much entertainment — video games, television, music, and so on — they don’t have an opportunity to let their creative sides express themselves. When they are bored, they’ll feel compelled to actually do something. Anything.
Mack Collier of Search Engine Guide is talking about Twitter like everyone else these days. While most Twitter profiles come with a link to the person’s personal website, Mack recommends that you make a Twitter landing page instead. This lets your fellow tweeps learn a little more about you.
Lisa Bettany of Mostly Lisa spent a solid six years in university and she shares what she learned in school (and what she didn’t). It truly is interesting to see what makes it into the curriculum and into our long-term memories, isn’t it?
Posted in In the Sphere
Posted on May 9th, 2008
The sun is shining and the birds are singing. Spring is here! That doesn’t mean that you’re going to neglect the blogosphere, now are you? Let’s see what people had to say to this week.
Mr. Gary Lee has been involved in a number of link trains in his day, but his latest scheme is actually a lot more altruistic. He describes 20 ways to pay it forward offline. Have you done your good deed today? Maybe you should blog or tweet about it.
John Cow has become somewhat of an Internet celebrity, so he’s begun to wonder what other superstar bloggers would be doing if there was no such thing as the world wide web. Where would Shoemoney be? What would Problogger do? What would become of the dot com lifestyle of John Chow?
Chris Bibey is certainly glad to be a freelance writer, but he also knows that there are drawbacks to freelance writing as well. No career is free from its shortcomings and freelancing is no exception.
Bob Buskirk used to be pretty unhealthy, sitting in from his computer all day, slamming down Mountain Dews like they were nothing. These days, he is trying to live a healthier lifestyle by joining the gym, cutting back on the caffeine, and eliminating fast food from his diet altogether.
Derek Semmler of The Man Page, despite being a rather outspoken blogger, is actually quite the shy person. He’s made huge strides SOBCon08, though, where he managed to step out of his comfort zone and meet some rather terrific people.
Posted in In the Sphere
Posted on May 2nd, 2008
Welcome to the wonderful month of May. You may have suffered through some April showers, but we all know that those are supposed to bring May flowers. In the world of the Internet, it seems that flowers are all related to blogging. Here are some great posts rounded up from the ’sphere this week.
Courtney Tuttle says that that we should consider lead blogging, instead of the conventional route of setting up ads that direct your blog visitors away from your site. Manage those contacts and sell to them again and again.
Dharmesh Shah has a guest post at Shaun Low’s site. He says that hates blogs that are too cluttered and filled with countless widgets. As such, he reminds us to clean up our blogs to provide a better user experience. Get rid of useless widgets folks.
RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex has a useful post that explains why your Wordpress blog isn’t receiving pings. There could be more than one possible cause, but RT goes through many of the usual suspects.
Yaro Starak is living the dot com lifestyle, taking his online business with him as he travels around the world. If you want to achieve the same level of freedom, you’ll want to read his 5 tips for success when traveling with your business. This includes mobile blogging.
Scott Young not only defines what it means to be a geek, but he also explains why you should be a geek. It’s not only important to be passionate, but you need to be passionate about something a little more obscure to be a real geek.
Posted in In the Sphere
Posted on April 25th, 2008
Time for another tour of the blogosphere. Enjoy!
Jonathan Morrow of Copyblogger tells us why valedictorians make lousy bloggers and why the blogosphere is better suited for class clowns. I personally still remember the valedictorian from my high school graduating class, but I have no idea who was the valedictorian from my university grad class. I do remember class clowns from both though.
Robert Janelle of Freelance Switch knows that the freelance life can be a lonely one, so it might be worthwhile to look into something like co-working. This is basically some office space that you can share with other freelancers, providing the same co-worker dynamic that you would have in a regular company office.
Stan Tonoski of Thinkreferrals Blog Network reminds us of the importance of keeping consistent with your business. This is not only important in terms of brand recognition, but also from a customer service standpoint. Don’t you hate it when you order the exact same thing from two Tim Horton’s locations, only to have two very different experiences?
Over at Killer Startups, they’ve come across a fun new website that pits your typing skills against other users on the Internet. Called TypeRacer, the speed of your typing dictates the speed of your vehicle, which is racing against other typists in real-time.
Last but not least, we have Stefan of Perfect Blogging. He’s providing an excellent guide that teaches you how to increase your income in eight steps. I think we can all stand to make a little more money and diversification of income sources is of paramount importance.
Posted in In the Sphere
Posted on April 18th, 2008
Friday’s here, so as we prepare for a relaxing weekend (at least we hope it’s going to be relaxing), let’s have a look at what’s happening in the ’sphere.
We all know that Twitter has exploded onto the scene, so it goes without saying that people are starting develop some cool applications for it. Killer Startups recently highlighted a creation called TweetLater, which effectively lets you tweet into the future. It’s like the timestamp feature for Wordpress, except for Twitter!
If you’ve checked your Alexa rankings lately, you may have noticed that your number has increased greatly (not good). GoogleLady noticed this too and wrote a post on how the Alexa rankings have changed. This is because Alexa is taking more information sources into account than just their Alexa toolbar.
There are a lot of ways for you to make a living, but what if I told you that you could make $200,000 a year chatting with beautiful women? That’s the subject of a post at Free Money Finance that describes the rising popularity of male geishas in Japan. Is this just a thinly disguised version of male prostitution?
DNXpert is a blog about domain names, but they took a break to list the top 10 things Shoemoney, Problogger, and Britney Spears have in common. Number nine is funny and disturbing at the same time: “All three are known to be prone to show their crotch to the public.” My, oh my.
From Al Gore to David Suzuki, we’ve been told continually that we should “go green” and take better care of the environment. Israel Lagares has determined that fat people cause global warming. He’s a fat man himself, so he’s allowed to say that.
Posted in In the Sphere
Posted on April 11th, 2008
It’s halfway through April. Have you completed your income taxes yet? Me neither. To further perpetuate your procrastination, let’s have a look at what’s going on in the ’sphere.
The latest post by Neil Patel might come off as a little on the cocky side, but he does raise some rather interesting points in describing 8 reasons why he is successful and you are not. From the power of location to the value of networking, Neil has no trouble rolling in the dough.
Mark from Courtney Tuttle’s blog (that’s not confusing at all) takes a moment to talk about large Adsense clicks. We all know that certain keywords pay more than others and Mark reminds us to not be afraid of chasing after these higher paying niches.
The bovine mooooogul known as John Cow challenges the notion that the value of a website can roughly be found by looking at the annual revenue. Instead, he takes a look at other ways to determine your blog’s worth, all of which value his blog at more than the “10-12x monthly revenue” paradigm. The reason why he’s evaluating the value of his blog is because the cow is for sale.
Is he a presidential cheapskate? My New Hustle takes a look at what five dollars can and cannot do. That single bill holds a lot of power. If you manage to save just five bucks each day, that translates to about $1800 a year!
Last but not least, we have the good people at about:blank showing us yet another random video. This time, we go behind the scenes of a BBC April Fool’s gag wherein they had flying penguins. Pretty convincing stuff.
Posted in In the Sphere
