Posts Tagged With: advice
· April 28, 2008 at 5:31 am · Desktop, Writing Advice
First off, thank you for the positive feedback on the latest eBook release of mine I told you about a few days ago. Always appreciate the feedback and thoughts on the project. One question I have gotten a lot thus far is, what did I use to create it? Well, as many of you know I pride myself on being a low budget guy… so why pay money when I can get this done for free? I created the entire eBook using Open Office and this video I found on YouTube for pointers.
Who says this Internet thing isn’t a great learning device? This made it easy to pick up pointers on how to link inside of the document, and then how to export to PDF and secure the document up some so that it could not be edited. I would suggest anybody bookmark this video and play it again if you ever want to get into the basics of digital publishing yourself.
· April 11, 2008 at 10:43 am · Interviews
One of the popular blogs out there that I really enjoy a lot is CyberNet. They always have fresh content, good reviews and reminds me of a younger and more influential Lockergnome.com. The minds behind the project - Ryan and Ashley are brilliant at what they do and have had a lot of success along the way. Then it came to me, who better to ask for advice about taking your blog to the next level than them? E-mails were sent, virtual handshakes were made and a conversation was had…
When did you know it was time to really put your all into CyberNet and try to do your best at making some money with it? Was it your goal from day one or was it something that you decided to do later on down the road?
Ryan: Our goal from day one wasn’t to make money; CyberNet was originally started as a hobby. Our goal was to do our best and put our all into it, and to write great content and tutorials that you wouldn’t find on many other sites out there. I guess you could say we were focused on quality and not quantity. We were actually surprised at the time it took to maintain a site with quality articles and we realized if we wanted to continue to provide the content, we had to find a way to make money with it. It wasn’t until about a year ago that Ashley and I both started working on CyberNet full-time.
Out of all of the money making methods out there today, which has been the most and least successful for you thus far?
Read the rest of this entry »
· November 16, 2007 at 5:58 am · Web Development
Everybody and their grandmother have at least seen one of those semi-anoying Apple “Why I switched” advertisements before. It usually shows some drab person standing in front of a pale background blabbering on about why PC’s sucked till they found the joy of Apple computers.Well, I recently switched, but it wasn’t from my trusty HP Pavilion to a Mac, oh no. I recently jumped into the world of Cascading Style Sheets, or better known as CSS.
Do not get me wrong, I have been working with HTML codding for the past five or six years. Doing each layout on each page manually, calling up the font colors sizes and text over and over again became tedious at best.
The bad thing about plain old HTML codding is that you end up with really large file sizes for your web pages. Larger file sizes lead to slower download times, which leads to unhappy visitors for your web site. Learning about CSS will help you reduce the clutter.
To start, lets define CSS. A Cascading Style Sheet is a string of data or code that sits internally or externally on your server that will tell your pages how to format certain parts of your website. Read the rest of this entry »
· September 11, 2007 at 5:00 am · Writing Advice
I am often asked by business owners, entrepreneurs, consultants, coaches and others for copywriting tips. Here are my top six:
1. It is actually about them, not you.
Don’t write for yourself, your college professor or your next-door neighbor. It’s not about your style, your preferences or your own “voice.” It’s not even about what you like or want. It’s about the audience, the product/ service and, ultimately, about selling.
2. Be eye-friendly.
Nothing tires the eyes like big blocks of endless black and white text. So include bullets, sun-heads, questions, sidebars and headlines to break your copy into manageable, scannable chunks. Read the rest of this entry »
· August 31, 2007 at 9:04 am · Writing Advice
It seems like these days when I go check out my feed reader to do some reading from my favorite news sources and blogs - there are a lot of posts you can spot that were written just for the sake of trying to bait the social bookmarking and ranking sites for popularity’s sake.
I am not sure this is the best writing practice. Why? Well after you get success with it once, you try it again and again. After a while, all you have left are a lot of wasted hours that you could have spent doing something more creative.
Sure it seems like a lot of these links that you see on digg, delicious, and others seem to come with a pre-packaged and sure fire way to make it to the top. There is a lot to be said for creativity as well though. Just because you wrote one “top 50 Firefox extensions you can use under water” post does not mean that every top 50 post you write will be just as popular.
You also need to worry about offending your current audience as well. New readers are grand, but if you can’t keep them they might start to look elsewhere. Take for example Mashable.com.
I used to really love reading Pete’s web site but the last few weeks it has been nothing but top ten, twenty and thirty lists. I am sure he’s gotten a lot of incoming links from the social bookmarking places but as a reader - I am bored, and I am sure I am not alone.
So don’t write to become popular - become popular because of what you write.
· August 1, 2007 at 7:04 am · Hot Web Topics, Web Development
Every so often I get an e-mail from a web host who is running a blog and they tell me they have run out of “blog-like” things to say. “Hogwash!” I yell back at them. Ok, so I have never actually used that word exactly - but you get my point. If all else fails, promote yourself.
Yes, corporate blogs and bloggers should be more egotistical and talk more about themselves when there is nothing else left to say.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
1. Tell the story of how you came to be. Have you told your rags to riches story yet? Let people how the company started up and how it has grown since then.
2. Pitch one of your products and let me know how real people can make use of it. Don’t pitch it to me as a salesman, give it to me as a person to person conversation and win me over on why it might be for me or somebody that I might know.
3. Who are you? You might also do a type of “profile” post where you tell people more about the folks behind the scene. Let me know who worker number 1,356 is and why he is so important to the day to day business. (and if he’s not, time to give him the pink slip!)
As you can see, when talking about one’s self you could really go on and on. Have any other suggestions as far as ideas go for more corporate writing spot on the Web?
