If you’ve established a goal of how often you want to publish new posts, chances are that you’ll eventually find yourself staring at the blank editor box, your muse strikingly absent. Sometimes that means you need to come up with a better routine or learn to work with your muse, but sometimes, you just need something to jump-start your mushy brain.

Here are three sources of inspiration that I’ve been using recently. Continue reading →

As part of the business changes I’m making, I’m going to start offering some blog promotion services. However, before I start selling them, I’d like to test them out on different types of blogs. That’s good news for you, because in exchange for volunteering as my test subject, you’ll get some free blog promotion.

Because I’m testing, I obviously can’t promise any specific results, and I’ll also be testing one strategy at a time (rather than putting them all together as I will when I’m selling the service) so the impact might vary somewhat. Regardless, you won’t have to change anything you’re currently doing, and you’ll probably get some extra visitors out of the deal.

To qualify, you just need:

• a blog that you’re writing regularly (three or more posts per week, average)
• a specific topic or audience
• willingness to add me to your Google Analytics account (if you have one) or set one up (if you don’t); this is how I’m going to track the results

Interested? Send me an email with the subject line “Blog promotion guinea pig” and a little info about your blog.

Earlier this week, HubSpot sponsored a webinar with Paul Gillin, author of the highly rated book, The New Influencers. Paul is focused on the ways that new media allows individuals to have much more influence than they have previously.

The webinar covered a fair amount of ground and was targeted at business and marketing folks (as opposed to techies or bloggers). If you fall in the afore-mentioned categories and are wondering whether to start a blog, the webinar recording would be a very good information-gathering effort. Similarly, if you’re blogging (or want to blog) but need to make a business case to your boss, this is a pretty effective presentation.

I learned the hard way yesterday that something had gone wrong with the generally well-behaved Bad Behavior plugin. Bad Behavior is a very neat idea: it blocks many automated spammers from even seeing your blog, let alone leaving spam comments. However, when Bad Behavior wouldn’t let me into my own WordPress admin panel, yeah, that was a pretty good clue that something was up.

Then I couldn’t get into a client blog I was working on. Then I couldn’t get into another of my blogs. In each case, I manually “whitelisted” my IP address in order to get into the admin panel and disable the plugin. Not the end of the world but not very convenient, either.

Naturally, I checked the plugin’s homepage. Nothing. Fortunately, I checked it again this morning and found that a fixed version of the plugin has been released. The cause of the problem was a simple mistake, the kind any developer can make (and the kind we all pray we’ll somehow miraculously avoid!), and the solution is simply to upgrade your plugin.

If you are currently locked out of your admin panel, just upgrade the plugin via FTP (or have your web developer do it) and you should be back in business.

I’m a little behind on my blog reading (perpetually), but I just read Brian Clark’s latest post, The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration. Brian makes some great points about getting inspiration from magazine headlines (and by the way, the more you are able to “cross-pollinate” with other media, disciplines, etc., the more successful you’ll be in general). He pulls his examples from Cosmopolitan Magazine.

The post is worth reading for its instructive value, but more than that, if you write a post using a variation of a headline he mentioned, he’ll link back to the post. Sounds like a winner of an idea: not only will he help inspire you, but you can get a little extra traffic out of the deal, too.