The Written Word

Hey.  I was just reading your blog and I got so bored that it actually hurt my head. It was so bad that it made Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 2,000 page epic about a whale, look like an exciting children’s fairytale. In fact, I’d rather be hanging out with Chuck Noland, Tom Hanks’ character from Castaway, trapped on a deserted island with nobody to talk to except for a volleyball named Wilson. After reading your…

If you’ve been around the internet for any period of time then you’ve probably heard it repeated: Content is King.  In fact, many of us have heard it so many times that it probably sounds redundant.  Yet there are so many people who still don’t get it…or if they do they don’t put it into practice. The adage has been around since the dawn of blogging: Content is King. And it’s true.  Content is king….

As bloggers, one of the worst setbacks that we can face is the daunting task of coming up with and developing topics about which we can write. Corporations spend millions of dollars a year on research and development so that they can come up with the products and services that will sell.  You probably don’t have millions of dollars to put into this task, but you do need to find a way to develop new…

Most websites about creating successful blogs seem to cover a wide variety of topics.  Each day I find articles about connecting with other bloggers, setting up link exchanges, building page rank, using social media, and marketing your blog. And yet, even though I hear bloggers seemingly shouting out from the housetops that content is king, I still find very few articles about content.  If content is king then why do bloggers focus on everything except…

A while back, I read about a high school art teacher that decided to do an experiment to determine the most effective method of teaching her students to become sculptors. She divided her class evenly into two groups.  She provided both groups with an unlimited supply of resources and gave the groups two different goals. She told the first group that their goal was to create the most beautiful vase they could come up with. …

One of the very first posts that I published on Site Sketch 101 was titled “14 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic.” Within days that article had received dozens of twits and quickly began to rise in page hits. I felt that it was quite successful considering the fact that this site was only days old when it was published and that I had very few followers and subscribers at that point. In that article…