Pssst!  I have the ultimate blog-writing secret:

Do you think you can handle it?  Are you alert?  Ready to be amazed?  Can you guess what I’m about to write?  Read the next line and digest it for 3 seconds:

Microsoft is buying CNN.

 Okay, HOLD ON!  The above is NOT true….but….let me ask you: [Read more]

Quick!  Visualize:

Are you ready?  Are you anxious?  Can you guess what I’m about to write?

Smoke Signals!  In a Tornado!

Are you seeing them in your mind yet?

Are they effective?

Or are they immediately dissolved by the raging winds that physical hit them the instant they’re released?

Tell me now…is the information you offer in your blog  presented the same way?

Hmmmmm?  Well if so….

[Read more]

Watch out Easter Bunny - There’s a new Hare-raising VeggieTail in town!

Oh, the looks of excitement in children’s eyes as their fevered imagination conjures up visions of:

• Chocolate eggs!
• Chocolate bunnies!
• Marshmallow Peeps!
• Crunchy stalks of broccoli!

Hey wait a sec, who said anything about Crunchy stalks of broccoli?  Well, keep this hush-hush to yourself…but the Easter bunny has a new hiney-kicking rival in town: [Read more]

Today I received the question in my email:

Dear Owlbert,

How many articles do you need as a basis for your blog when you start it, are these in categories?

Signed,

Eager Blogger

Here’s the short answer: 

a number between 1 and 3,243.

Here’s the longer answer: 

Nothing ever sprang into being in the multitudes.

In other words, [Read more]

Do you want to blog a write the right way?

Wait a sec; that bit of New Grammar shouldn’t have gotten by my eagle eye.  Let me rephrase the question:

Do you want to write a blog correctly the first time?

No, wait, it’s still not quite there….

I GOTS IT!

<ahem>

Do you want to write correctly a blog….the first time?

Well?  Do you?  But immediately after that [Read more]

Yesterday I had regaled you with tales about my search for the perfect diet and fitness blogging domain name, and closed with a reference to http://thesaurus.reference.com/ .  Let me now explain a bit about how I choose domain names…and how you can apply these techniques to your own particular niche.

First off, great domain names imbue at least one of the 5 following characteristics:

• They are memorable.    Perhaps it’s a catchy name, a slogan, a riff off of a common phrase.  For example, let’s say that you blog about refurbishing paintings and portraits - do you think people would forget the domain name [Read more]
  

Yesterday I had the profound pleasure of reading DailyBlogTips’ Check how Search Engines see your website.  A long-time SEO enthusiast, I used to focus upon this concept years and years ago (anyone remember when Infoseek would index your site in real time back in 1996?).

The years passed and writing SEO-optimized content became second nature to me.    And over the past few months at my FabFitMom Journal (I lost 45 pounds during 2007 and wrote quite a lot of content; it’s now retired and I post my personal insights over at BarbaraLing.com), I found that I could easily get into the first page of SERPs (search engine results) for just about any keyword I wanted that was related to my niche. 

Well!  With that as an intro, let me dive into the DailyBlogTips article.  They refer to [Read more]

Tip of the Hat Alert!

I’d like to publicly thank the DailyBlogTips site for their excellent posting of Check How Search Engines See Your Website.  

I had always known about the SEO Browser (the topic of that post), but haven’t used it in ages.  After dealing with my coffeemaker dying an agonizing death early this morning (okay, I turned it on and it laughed at me), I was in the mood [Read more]

You’ve probably seen Wordpress blogs over at Wordpress.com or Blogger blogs over at Blogger.com but have you also seen blogs at specific domain names as well?  Well, okay, that’s probably like saying, you’ve probably seen a car in a parking lot and a car on the parkway but have you also seen them (gasp!) in a driveway as well?

Tons and tons of sites nowadays are being built with Wordpress - the blog IS the tool the owner uses to build their site.  Sure, you’ve probably seen:

• Problogger.net
• AnyWired.com
• BlogHerald.com

But did you know sites like:

• Kelson Consulting
• Gross & Associates
• New Orleans Food Co-op
• Leslie Lawton, Unique Handcrafted Jewelry

are powered by Wordpress as well? 

The reason why I wanted [Read more]

My mom is always fond of telling me, if anything is going to happen to anyone, it generally happens to my daughter.

My oh my, was she ever right. 

For the past few weeks, I’ve been in a frenzy of work, creating new wordpress blogs, tying up loose ends, and generally wreaking havoc and mayhem in my sanity.  Now, this by itself isn’t really news (the cutting edge of parallel processing has been my home ever since I was a sysadmin at AT&T), but it DOES lend itself to rather unique, ahem, opportunities for [Read more]