Content Creation • @maheshone

30 Things I Absolutely Hate About Your Blog

@maheshoneFebruary 11, 2018By

Whenever I visit a blog that I haven't come across before, I try to find out how different it is from others or what makes it interesting. Not just that. I also notice things that I don't like in it. Your blog might be very popular. But it wouldn't stop me from finding things I don't like. I can't stop myself from doing it. Over the past few months I started curating such a list in my Evernote and I'm sharing it here. And I believe most of them can be fixed (if you think it must be fixed) as none of them is technical in nature (if it's a technical problem then it's you who created it). But hey, it's just my personal view and hence there's a good chance that you would disagree with me --- with some or all of them. :D

Don't Miss: 30 Things I Absolutely Love About Your Blog

101 Things After Starting A WordPress Blog

@maheshoneFebruary 11, 2018By

maheshone

101 Things After Starting A WordPress Blog

You can’t start a WordPress blog in 10 minutes. And you can’t start one in 10 hours either. You know why? Because it takes countless hours to customize WordPress and get things done and make things look like the way you want (unless you are a WordPress geek). And hey, I didn’t even count the time required to actually create content. That’s the real purpose of a blog, right? First things first. I'm going to assume that you have already purchased a domain name, web hosting plan, and have installed WordPress (either manually or automatically via your web hosting control panel). If not, you should. ;) So, I have just installed WordPress at http://www.minterest.in (a demo WordPress site that I have temporarily created to write this very blog post). And the idea is to reverse engineer Minterest (this blog) --- by installing and customizing the WordPress theme and the set of WordPress plugins that I'm using on this blog. However, there are few limitations as the demo site doesn't have (real) content. I have tried to replicate as many things as possible from this blog on the demo site so that both look identical.

Don't Miss: 27 Things Before Starting A WordPress Blog

27 Things Before Starting A WordPress Blog

@maheshoneFebruary 11, 2018By

maheshone

Image Credit: Flickr

So you want to be a blogger? That's great! Blogging is simple and fun but not easy. Definitely not easy. Even though you can set up a WordPress blog in less than 10 minutes, it takes countless hours of focus and patience to make things look the way you want. When I wrote the blog post You Can't START A Blog In 10 Minutes. Period., I not only wanted to highlight that it's not easy to start a blog but also wished to create a series of posts to list everything you need to take care of while starting a new WordPress blog. First things first. What's your story? Why do you want to start a blog? Over the years, I have noticed that almost all full-time bloggers have published a "How To Start A Blog In 10 Minutes" kind of tutorial and they make the entire process sound so simple. Since starting a blog seems easy, almost everyone today wants to have a blog without really thinking about its purpose. In reality, it doesn't work that way. So before you do anything else, think about why you want to start a blog. (Do I see you putting on your thinking cap? :))

Don't Miss: How To Start A WordPress Blog (Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners)

Over 30 Handpicked Social Media (And Web 2.0) Sites To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

@maheshoneFebruary 11, 2018By

maheshone

Social Media websites can drive insanely great traffic to your blog if you have a good social media marketing strategy. But it can drive fair amount of traffic if you just submit blog posts regularly to your social media profiles.

Social media traffic is as important as organic traffic from search engines as we can’t rely on Google alone. They continue to push algorithmic updates like Panda, Penguin and who knows the next could be Giraffe.

It means that we must diversify the way we get traffic. I’m going to list the top social media and other websites that you shouldn’t ignore or must use as part of your social media marketing strategy.

I’m NOT going to list all the stupid social media or the so called web 2.0 sites out there as I’m going to focus only on sites that can drive traffic to our websites in one way or the other and not for building backlinks.

Though the traffic quality of social media can’t be matched with that of organic traffic, it is still important. It helps us to keep the bounce rate low which is assumed to be one of the many ranking signals used by Google.

Don't Miss: The Social Media Handbook — 101+ Resources, Tips, Guides & Tools

The Best Dictation (Voice To Text) Software Is Here (And It’s Free!)

@maheshoneFebruary 10, 2018By

maheshone

I'm a desktop kind of person who almost always prefer a computer over a phone --- unless I'm away from my desk. I have already mentioned on several blog posts that I take a lot of time to create a blog post --- from researching to writing to editing to formatting. And that's why I'm always trying to find a way to streamline my content creation process --- to make it more consistent, stress-free, and efficient. Obviously, the biggest task involved in publishing a blog post is actually the writing process itself. Once the first draft gets done, the rest happens like magic!

Don't Miss: The Fantastic Ten Tools (Free) To Skyrocket Your Productivity

Over the past several months/years, I tried several dictation or voice to text software --- including the super-popular Dragon Speech Recognition Software (but I tried it several years back) --- and nothing really worked for me. Not anymore!

Meet "Voice typing..." On Google Docs

I was an active Google Docs user until few months back and then almost stopped using it. A couple of weeks back I noticed that Google introduced "Voice typing..." to Google Docs. However, it's not supported in its iOS (on iPhone and iPad) apps, yet.

Over 71 Ways To Repurpose Your Content Over And Over Again

@maheshoneFebruary 1, 2018By

maheshone

First Published: November 17, 2016; Last Updated: Thursday, February 1, 2018.

You know, you should really repurpose your content. But the disclosure is that I haven't started it yet. I first came to know about repurposing content when Darren published How to Repurpose Your Content [and Why You Should Do It!]. However, I wasn't that interested as I didn't have plenty of blog posts on my blog then. Even today, I have less than 300 published blog posts but I realize that it's time to diversify the traffic sources. First things first. What is content repurposing? Content repurposing is all about extending the life of your original content (blog posts in most cases) by leveraging more mediums. Submitting a blog post to a dozen of social networks or updating/republishing one of your archived blog post is not exactly repurposing. It’s just sharing and resharing. Repurposing is done by taking an existing blog post (or content) and using it to create something else on another medium (in an easy to consume way) thereby reaching an audience who wouldn’t have found your content otherwise. That is, it involves reusing your own content to serve a different audience or the same audience in a different way. The good thing about content repurposing is that you are actually getting more traffic by creating less content — as these mediums are already known to have millions of active users.

How I Increased My Organic Traffic By 500% In 10 Months (And Doubled Them In A Year)

@maheshoneJanuary 31, 2018By

maheshone

First Published: March 3, 2015; Last Updated: Wednesday, January 31, 2018.

Blogging is one of the most powerful modern marketing medium out there. The only problem is --- you cannot expect overnight success. Why? Because it's a marathon and not just a sprint! So, always go term!

"I've worked in marketing since 1987 and nothing I have used, studied or witnessed, comes close to the marketing power of an effective blog. Period." --- Jim Connolly

When I compiled the blog marketing resources I mentioned that I do not have a blog promotion strategy. Still, I wanted to share my blogging strategy with you and realized that it's better to publish a new blog post. So, that's how I come up with this topic and it's all about how I increased my organic traffic from 250 to 1,500 to 3,000 without spending a penny.

Don't Miss: 10 Blogging Years. 10 Blogging Lessons. 10 Blogging Tips.

30 Things I Absolutely Hate About Your Blog

101 Things After Starting A WordPress Blog

27 Things Before Starting A WordPress Blog

The Best Dictation (Voice To Text) Software Is Here (And It’s Free!)

Meet "Voice typing..." On Google Docs

How I Increased My Organic Traffic By 500% In 10 Months (And Doubled Them In A Year)

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