How to Identify Blog Comment Spam

Whether you run a niche blog, a personal blog, or a professional freelance writer blog targeting clients, you’re bound to come up against blog comment spam at some point or another. If you open your site to comments, this is simply a reality you have to deal with. That doesn’t mean dealing with the comment spam problem has to be difficult. Yet I frequently read blogs

10 Reasons Your Guest Post Pitches Get Ignored

Every week I receive dozens of guest post pitches across all of my blogs, and it’s not uncommon for that to creep over 100 in a week (and those are just the ones making it past my inbox filters; imagine how many bigger blogs must have to sort through). Yet I respond to less than 10% of those pitches. Even fewer result in guest posts

How to Use Books (and Amazon) to Find Great Blog Post Ideas

When you work on your blog’s editorial calendar (or even a more general list of blog post ideas), do you ever feel stuck? While there are plenty of headline template lists and blog post idea lists available, and I’ve even provided some here, sometimes you just don’t know what to write about. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It happens to me too.

Quick Tip for Bloggers: Use Notepad ++

I was contacted several days ago by a fellow freelance writer and blogger. He was having problems on his WordPress site where his theme was no longer compatible with the WordPress core. It caused elements of his site to disappear. Another colleague pointed him in my direction, and thankfully I was able to find a patch. The problem? The patch was for a different version of

Quick Tip: Stop Manually Inserting Ads Into Blog Posts

If you run a blog as an income stream, chances are that you’ve at least tried to earn some advertising revenue. But managing ads on your blog can involve a big time investment. Fortunately you don’t have to manually insert ad code in every blog post. Occasionally this makes sense, like when you want to insert an affiliate ad that’s relevant only to a specific post. But

Quick Tip: Keep Blog Post Ideas Coming by Writing a Series

Recently we looked at eight blog post ideas you can fall back on if you suddenly aren’t sure what to write about on your blog. Today I have another tip along those lines — something you can do on a regular basis to make idea generation a bit easier. This week’s quick tip for bloggers is to write post series rather than relying solely on

Quick Tip: Add Inline Tweets to Your WordPress Posts

Have you seen bloggers feature tweetable quotes in their posts? If they’re using one of the more popular plugins, they probably look like pull quotes. Unfortunately there isn’t much variation in design, and blogs using this feature have all started having their tweetable quotes look alike. That’s why I previously showed you how you can add your own tweetable quotes, without a plugin, and with any design

Quick Tip: Add Static Content to Your Blog’s Homepage

Last week I suggested adding your latest blog content to your writer website’s homepage. That might make this week’s quick tip sound a little strange. But this one is for bloggers: Consider adding static content to your blog’s homepage. In last week’s post we were looking at freelance writer websites and author websites, where the blog is an add-on and static homepages are the norm.

Quick Tip: Protect Your Personal Information When Registering a Domain Name

Spam sucks. So does physical junk mail. And I get a crap-ton of it on a regular basis (that’s the official measurement scale for junk mail, really). Here’s why I get so much more garbage than my family and friends: I registered a domain name. Actually, I’ve registered hundreds of them over the years, but all it takes is one to let the spammers get your scent.

Quick Tip: Create Custom WordPress Sidebars for Categories or Pages

Many bloggers set up a single sidebar and then include that sidebar on every page of their blogs. But what happens if you have categories that would benefit from different sidebar content, or pages on your blog where you’d like a custom sidebar? Maybe you want to place hand-picked affiliate ads, or you want to promote different books on different sections of your blog. Whatever