Quote-Hunting: How to Improve Your Writing and Your Life

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By Janice Hunter of  Sharing the Journey

Big claim. How on earth can capturing quotes in a notebook improve our lives? I’m guessing you’re a book lover as well as a wordsmith. Or an avid reader of other people’s blogs? If we use our skills as quote-hunters with integrity, we can sharpen our writing and invite presence, openness, connection, focus and inspiration into everything we do.

Being open to inspiration and guidance

As a writer, you should have a sticky soul; the act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I never go out without a pen, a notebook and a book to read. When I read a book with a ‘quotebook’ and a pen handy, it’s a signal I send to myself and to the universe. Read more »

How to Make Your Site go Viral on Twitter

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By Marko Saric of  How to Make My Blog

Twitter is a growing platform where bloggers can increase their site traffic and exposure by finding, getting in touch and providing value to people interested in their content and services. Twitter helps establish a link between you and your audience and should be a very important part of your online branding and marketing strategy.

Build a followers base

Concentrate on building a large number of followers. The more people that follow you and know what you are about, the more clicks and visits you will get to your site.

Track down twitterers that are interested in your field by using Twellow. Search for relevant keywords or go into the relevant directory and get a list of interested twitterers. Rank according to “followers count” to see the power users in your field. Read more »

How Blogging Led to a Career Without Limits

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A guest post from Sean Platt of Writer Dad

As a professional writer, my job is to saturate my days with words and ideas, filling screen or page with sentences designed to inspire. When I first started blogging I actually wondered how I would possibly manage to produce a fresh topic every day of the week. It’s now seven months later and I’m writing on around ten topics per day as my words are sprinkled from dot coms to dot infos all across the Internet.

The amazing thing about blogging, besides the instant access to a global population, is the inordinate amount of writing you must do just to keep your blog in orbit. Before starting Writer Dad, I wrote for only myself, my thoughts merely spun into sentences from within the desert of my own mind.

I sat, wrote,  and pondered. Then I wrote some more.

Blogging is different. Writing for a blog means there’s a ticking clock always behind you. Within a month of my first post, the mood had changed to something more along the lines of: write, ponder, publish, repeat.

It isn’t just about writing the posts. Being an active blogger means you also have comments to answer, an inbox to sort through, and a reader full of other people’s thoughts to meditate and possibly remark upon. Thought fuels further thinking. A few months into Writer Dad and I realized how deep the well ran.

Our brains will keep on giving. So long as we’re willing to feed our creativity, and give our muse her rest when needed, there is no shortage to what we will see return. By the second month I had found my flow. By the third month I was almost on auto pilot, writing now taking the tone of conversation rather than the labor of construction.

At first I started to craft content for sites outside my own, then I began to help friends and colleagues polish copy. By the end of the year, I realized I was effectively writing five or six articles (minimum) day in day out across an unbelievably wide spectrum of topics.

Just like a freelance writer.

Ghostwriter Dad was born.  I swept the floors and opened shop. The same tools I had been using to effectively blog seven days a week had provided me with a razor sharp toolset to deal with anything that fell on my plate Monday through Friday without ever having to feel the flutter of failure.

Lawnmowers, DUI, graphic design, vacation rentals, pet grooming, and bar-b-que grills. Those are literally the first six subjects that bounced into my brain when I decided to list just a few of the subjects I’ve been asked to write across the last couple of weeks.

If you can speak, you can write. If you can write, you can blog. If you can blog, you might be able to blog yourself into a steady career living as a freelance writer.

Sean Platt is a fantastic father and a gifted ghostwriter who also tweets.

Shattering the Myth of Blog Niches: How to Grow a Huge Readership


Get a bigger slice of the pie by differentiating yourself.

By Leo Babauta

One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers is to find a niche that you can dominate — the smaller the niche, the better, because all of the bigger niches are already dominated by bigger blogs.

This advice is fine if you’re trying to sell a product to a specific group of potential customers, but if you’re trying to grow a blog with as big a readership as possible, I think niche blogging is dead wrong.

Instead, go for as wide an audience as possible — but find something that will differentiate yourself from others. That’s how you can tap into the biggest possible readership. Read more »

What Chewing Gum Does to Your Hair or How to Write Sticky

By Mary Jaksch

Have you ever had chewing gum stuck in your hair?
It’s memorable, isn’t it?

It certainly was a memorable for my little friend Inge and her mum. Inge and I were playmates at preschool. She had beautiful, long, platinum-blond hair. Her mum was proud of how beautiful her little princess looked. Until something unfortunate happened. Read more »