Looking Back into the Past — 20 of my Favorite Articles on Blogussion

Let’s go back in time a lit­tle bit here. 152 posts ago, 2,528 com­ments back, to Decem­ber 11^th, 2008. All that time ago Blo­gus­sion was noth­ing that it is today. Today, it is a blog full of great blog con­tent, some great fea­tures, and best of all — an amaz­ing com­mu­nity of com­men­ta­tors, guest posters, and loyal readers.

I want to go over with you guys some of the best stuff here at Blo­gus­sion that has been posted here all that time ago. A lot of our best arti­cles are deeply buried in the 11 pages of blog posts we have here. Some of them aren’t get­ting the atten­tion they deserve I feel, so I want to bring 20 of those great posts up front to you today.

1. Map­ping out a new blog: Choos­ing a great theme and some killer plugins

Hun­dreds of blogs are made every­day. There are the blog­gers who take time to pre­pare a blog by doing things like plan­ning out a mar­ket­ing strat­egy, writ­ing posts for the future, and find­ing all plu­g­ins. Then there are blog­gers who do not take those impor­tant steps. A suc­cess­ful blog will take more than 5 min­utes of plan­ning. Whether it be 5 hours, 5 weeks, or 5 months. 5 min­utes just won’t cut it. […]

2. Why Google’s new fav­i­con gets more atten­tion than your blog

As I’m sure you have noticed, Google has got­ten a new fav­i­con. It has got­ten a lot of atten­tion on the web, and even TechCrunch wrote a post about it. How is it that a stu­pid lit­tle thing such as a new fav­i­con can spark so much dis­cus­sion through­out the web? And why isn’t it that your blog is get­ting talked about on big blogs like TechCrunch? […]

3. Envy who­ever you want, it won’t make you them

I see it almost every day: peo­ple who want to be a bet­ter, more suc­cess­ful blog­ger. I know I want to be a bet­ter blog­ger too. But I am unlike many blog­gers out there; I under­stand the costs and time it takes to become a bet­ter blog­ger. Unfor­tu­nately, peo­ple are all talk and no work and will get noth­ing accom­plished. I hear blog­ging being described as sim­ply “upload your plat­form, add a theme, start writ­ing con­tent, and you’re all set!” which is 100% wrong. […]

4. How to host the per­fect interview?

Where ever your field of exper­tise may lay, once you estab­lish a respectable pro­file – all eyes will be on you. This ‘state­ment’ can­not be any more truth­ful than in the world of blog­ging as we see big time blog­gers like Dar­ren Rowse and Shoe­Money, along with sev­eral oth­ers dom­i­nat­ing the blog­ging niche. Every­one vis­its their sites just as much as every­one reads their con­tent. You prob­a­bly think­ing if there was only a way to stream some of their read­ers on your blog? […]

5. 10 ways to find post inspi­ra­tion with­out even leav­ing your blog

Find­ing inspi­ra­tion for blog posts can be a tedious task. Whether you fol­low the ulti­mate writer’s block tip or fol­low our other , you can still find it hard to come up with inspi­ra­tion for any blog posts. Sure, you can go out­side, or work out in an attempt to clear your mind. But hon­estly, how many peo­ple can say they actu­ally do that? It gets sug­gested over and over again but you know you prob­a­bly won’t […]

6. How would you like 59 Awe­some Ajax Scripts?

The unspo­ken beauty of run­ning a web­site is the power it gives you. The power to pro­voke a thought or ini­ti­ate change or maybe just give you a peace of mind. Blog­ging has made this ever-so pos­si­ble with unbe­liev­able ease. You can make your web­site heart-felt or winter-cold all depend­ing on your choice of visual themes, images and user interactivity. […]

7. Blog Design: Mak­ing the most out of your footer space

The footer (the very end of your blog) is a very impor­tant place of infor­ma­tion on your blog. Your footer can hold a vari­ety of infor­ma­tion, such as copy­rights, links, ads, and a lot of other stuff. The footer is also impor­tant SEO wise for a lot of rea­sons. Rea­sons I will cover in this post. The point of this arti­cle is to help you ana­lyze your footer and make the best out of it. […]

8. Why Are ‘Pri­vate Ad Sales’ Bet­ter Than ‘Google Adsense?’

With the ever-increasing con­cerns on the global eco­nomic cri­sis, everyone’s feel­ing their fair-share of pain. On a per­sonal level; I don’t even get pocket money any­more. That’s both from my par­ents and Mr. Google. Ever since the global eco­nomic slump, there has been a non-stop stream of com­plaints that are tainted with earn­ings plum­met­ing and adver­tis­ers zip­ping up their pockets. […]

9. Con­for­mity and Blog­ging In It’s Sim­plest Form

One thing I have been think­ing a lot about lately are blog­ging trends. You know, what’s “hot” and what’s “not”. It’s always puz­zled me to see that so many blog­gers take other people’s advice so seri­ously that they do exactly as they’re told to do. So many blogs today defeat the con­cept of what a blog really is. In my opin­ion, just because you install the needed soft­ware for a blog […]

10. Prepar­ing Your­self For Blog­ging: Offline & Online Strate­gies Part II

So peo­ple say that stay­ing in front of your com­puter for too long is bad for your con­cen­tra­tion. While I believe that to be true, there are some things on your com­puter you can do that aren’t so bad at all for your think­ing. Always keep in mind, you should limit your­self to how you pre­pare your­self online, because regard­less of what you do I still find that […]

11. 5 Exper­i­men­tal Writ­ing Habits you may want to try

Every blog­ger has a dif­fer­ent writ­ing style. That’s what makes every blog unique from the other — a dif­fer­ent author with a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and style of writ­ing. How­ever, there is one thing that many blog­gers share and do the same. All blog­gers have their own writ­ing habits, and some may have the same habit as another. Just keep in mind, habits, and styles are different. […]

12. How I Real­ized Ban­ner Ads are Harm­ful to my Community

The first thing I did when I logged into Blo­gus­sion after return­ing from my vaca­tion was take down the 125×125 ban­ner ads on our side­bar. All paid for ads had expired, and all that was left was a few affil­i­ate ban­ners and an “Adver­tise Here” ban­ner. So, with that being said I would like to present you with a list that will actu­ally have an affect on you when it comes to writ­ing new blog posts. […]

13. Track­ing Your SEO Performance

When we talk about Search Engine Opti­miza­tion today, pretty much every­body has a gross idea of what it is all about. When you ask those peo­ple how do they eval­u­ate and track the per­for­mance of their work, the log­i­cal answer is through look­ing at their Search Engine Rank­ing Posi­tion (SERP). Actu­ally, beyond look­ing at your SERP progress, there are 8 vital points for you to study in detail for the well being of your site and real objec­tive opti­miza­tion of your pages. […]

14. 5 Funny Things Blog­gers Do To Make Their Blog Look More “Official”

I just want to point out 5 things I notice other blog­gers do on their blog (I even do one or two of them). It’s basi­cally all of those things we do with­out even real­iz­ing it to make our­selves look more trust­wor­thy to our read­ers. I find them funny, so here it goes. 1. Refer­ring to them­selves as “we” instead of “I” or “me” This may not be the case for some blog­gers who have multi-authored blogs, but I read a lot […]

15. 404 Error — “Page Not Found” doesn’t mean “For­get I Exist”

Believe it or not 404 error pages are a very impor­tant part of your web­site. Just because it’s (hope­fully) the least viewed page on your blog doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be paid atten­tion to. The rea­son why it is so impor­tant is because it serves as a gate­way for lost and mis­guided users on your blog. You should always work your hard­est to never let a user […]

16. The “Holy Trin­ity” of SEO

It’s so sim­ple, just three sim­ple meth­ods — it’s a won­der every­one doesn’t do it! Search Engine Opti­miza­tion is one of the most effec­tive meth­ods of gain­ing higher SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) — yet so many devel­op­ers neglect the basics and only a hand­ful uti­lize it. The tech­niques used by web-masters and blog­gers alike today range from sim­ple “BOLD” texts to black-hat mar­ket­ing. Today, main­tain­ing an online com­mu­nity and writ­ing con­tent for your read­ers is eas­ier than ever. […]

17. Inter­view­ing Alex + Janith: Our answers to the list of 50 ques­tions to ask your­self as a blogger

Just over a week ago, Alex pub­lished a post with a series of ques­tions enti­tled “50 Self-Reflecting Ques­tions To Ask Your­self As A Blog­ger”. They were unbe­liev­ably thought out ques­tions and really makes you think about your sta­tus and habits as a blogger. […]

18. Do You Uti­lize Tags On Your Posts?

One of the most under-rated fea­tures of Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMS) is the user-friendliness that comes stan­dard. Many sys­tems with the likes of Word­Press and Google’s Blog­ger make it as sim­ple as pos­si­ble for a surfer to launch a blog and start post­ing pretty much any­thing. Like any­thing else in life, when we get some­thing eas­ily — it is usu­ally accom­pa­nied by lazi­ness. Many blog­gers (includ­ing me at times) […]

19. What does it mean to really con­nect with your readers?

Many peo­ple in the blo­gos­phere nowa­days fail to really con­nect with their read­ers. Sure, you reply to com­ments on your blog and you respond to emails (if you even get either of the two). But is that all there is to really cre­at­ing a steady user base? And on that note, recur­ring readers/visitors? I have cov­ered so much in my arti­cles that to have a good, dis­cus­sion filled com­ments area is […]

20. Guar­an­teed Bad Search Engine Rank­ing in 7 Steps

If what you do right in SEO is extremely impor­tant, know that what you do wrong is equally impor­tant when it comes to affect­ing your search engine rank­ing posi­tion. I spend most of my time teach­ing peo­ple what they should do to imple­ment proper SEO, and what I real­ized is that there’s a lack of knowl­edge from these peo­ple as what is bad SEO. Unless you get rid of your bad SEO habits, no matter […]

But the Posts Don’t Stop There!

There are 132 other amaz­ing arti­cles here at Blo­gus­sion that you should totally check out. The 20 above are just my favorites out of every post here so far, and I want all of those posts up there to be rec­og­nized, read for the first time, and even have some of them re-read!

What’s your favorite post up there?

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