Blog Exercises: Become Your Own Fan Blogger

Fan blogging is one of the most challenging types of blogging. Fan blogging is blogging about a celebrity, television show, movie, sports team, sports player, criminals, or other groupie subject. Today’s blog exercise examines the art of fan blogging and how to learn from fan blogging to create your own fan club around your blog. […]

WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records

Working on developing a core of WordPress classes for Clark College and preparing for the next “Introduction to WordPress” college course in a couple weeks, I’ve put together some statistics on WordPress you might find helpful – and stunning. WordPress continues to break records set by others, but more often lately, break records set by […]

How Much Do You Charge for Web Dev/Design Services?

As part of an ongoing annual survey for the social media industry, Mark Collier offers this year’s “How Much Does Social Media Cost Companies in 2012?” report on our industry. This is a significant survey and mostly matches the ones coming out of the WordPress 2011 State of the Word survey from self-employed respondents, WooTheme’s […]

Campaign 2011: Prove It!

Every year I create a personal campaign. It’s my own personal soap box that I stand on throughout the year to make a point. In the past I tackled copyright issues, freedom of speech, breaking global language barriers on the web, creativity, education, and more. You helped me spread the word and slowly, the world […]

Stories of Our Journeys: The First Step Begins With You

One of the projects I am most proud of being a part of is the brand new Stories of Our Journeys produced by Bitwire Media as part of the Making My Life Network. Working with the incredible Kym Huynh, Stories of Our Journeys is a dream come true. Two years ago, Kym and I talked […]

The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Copyrights for You and Your Content Sources

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone I know I just recommended aggregating news stories from sources outside of your blog in my series on The Art of the Fan-Based Blog, and that search engines were your friend. They are. However, I cannot stress this enough, be extremely mindful of every single word or […]

Blog Resources: Researching the Research, Finding the Facts, and Seeking Supporting Evidence

As part of my ongoing series on blog resources, covering the many online resources I use to help me blog, you can tell that I don’t deal with rumors or guesses. I like facts. I don’t mind a few estimates, but I like being right when I make a claim or statement, so I work […]

Blogging Resources and Sources to Help You Blog

As a blogger and professional editorial and technical writer, I have collected a variety of online resources and references to help me write, blog, and work. The following are a list of Internet resources, sources, references, guides, and tools that help me with my basic blog writing research and publishing. I use these resources to […]

Where Do You Go For Your Blog Research and References?

I needed to know the dimensions of a US quarter compared to the Euro coins. Where should I go? Hmm, maybe I’ll hop in the car and drive to the library to dig through the shelves for coin collecting books. Nah. Maybe I’ll drive over to that coin and stamp collecting shop I saw over […]

Can The DMCA Be Used Against You If Someone Doesn’t Like What You Blog?

According to the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Contract Watch, public features are misusing the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is designed to protect copyrights on the web. The announcement references a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation press release about a suit brought against a defendant which used the DMCA to request […]

Akismet: All Our Comment Spam Fighting Eggs in One Basket

Recently, Blog Herald’s Abe Olandres wrote “Are We Betting Our Blogs on Akismet?” and he’s right. Most of us running WordPress practically rely on Akismet to combat spam and according to its overall stats, 93% of all comments are spam (the real figures would be a bit higher than that). Today alone, there are close […]

Feed Stats Spike: Feedburner and Google Reader Strikes

Before you get too excited when you check your feed stats, whether you are on a WordPress or a non-WordPress blog, including WordPress.com blogs, don’t get too excited. Reports are flooding the blogosphere as people check their feed stats and think “Wow! I’m suddenly popular.” Calm down. It’s not true. Feedburner’s has started reporting how […]

Monitoring Your Blog’s Topics and Industry

Cameron Olthuis of Pronet Advertising has a list of 10 things you should be monitoring, a great step-by-step list of the things within your industry you should be monitoring and instructions on how to monitor them. The list is excellent. In brief: Company Name Company URL/Domain Public facing figures (key people) Product names Product URL/Domains […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Most Popular Articles on Lorelle on WordPress

As you’ve looked back with me over the past year’s worth of over 800 articles, can you possibly guess which article was consistently number one on my blog? Was it an article about how to design WordPress Themes? How to improve your blogging? How to make lots of money with your blogging? Nope. Was it […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blog Writing

Writing up the one year anniversary review of articles I’ve written about searching and search engines, I ran across this interesting bit I wrote in “How Google Ranks Websites”: Spelling is still important. Not that Google’s patented page ranking process includes a spell checker – words that are not recognized get dumped. If misspelled keywords […]