For many, working from home is the dream. But those who do it note it comes with a few significant drawbacks. For one, it’s all too easy to let your suddenly sedentary lifestyle get the best of you, making you lethargic, uninspired, or downright inactive.
Combatting this takes a lot of effort, but once you get into the swing of things, it does get easier. Here are some tips for staying active while working a sedentary job. [Read more…]
Leaving corporate life to strike it out on your own as a freelancer can be scary for many reasons. Among them, the lack of benefits a typical employer provides. What do we mean by benefits? Pretty much the basics: health insurance, a 401k, and paid vacation time.
When you work for yourself, you’re more than your own boss. You’re your own company; and as that company’s most valuable employee, aren’t you entitled to be taken care of? This begs the question: who has your back? The answer, as you may have guessed, is you. Make sure you plan ahead and set yourself up for the future. This is no flight of fancy, it’s potentially your long-term career; something you may be doing until the day you retire.
Here are some tips for giving yourself the same kind of benefits you’d get while working for a major corporation. [Read more…]
Working at home is great, but it comes with a major drawback: it’s easy to start feeling isolated if you never get the chance to leave the house. It’s quite a dilemma. You love being a freelance writer for all the opportunities and freedom it provides, but sometimes you feel like you’ve been shackled to your desk for weeks.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get out there, amidst all the action, and then come home and write about it? Here’s the good news: it’s entirely possible, if you find a freelancing gig that’s local to your community.
Blogging professionally is one of the most rewarding careers out there. You can make a good living without trudging yourself to an office each day, counting down the hours until you can finally go home. But working independently comes with a few risk factors. Those who can do it have probably already beaten the writer’s public enemy number one: procrastination. But there’s more to worry about than distractions and writer’s block. All too often, writers can get so engrossed in their work that they forget to take care of themselves.
Without the work / home divide, it can be easy to neglect your health, or even your sanity. Here are five essential tips for staying healthy and keeping your mind sharp while working at home. [Read more…]
On April 25, tragedy struck Nepal as a 7.8-magnitude earthquake destroyed residences and buildings (including the UNESCO Word Heritage sites) in Kathmandu and took the lives of around 5,000 civilians (and counting). The earthquake is the most devastating natural calamity that hit Nepal since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1934.
Relief efforts from all over the world are underway but frustration is boiling in some parts of Nepal who have yet to receive the assistance they badly need.
If you wish to help your Nepali brothers and sisters, below are links to online media outlets pointing to trustworthy organizations collecting donation or the victims of the earthquake:
Before sending out your donation, read this post at NPR first to understand how your donation is received and processed by these organizations.
While these are the steps that you can take in order to lend a helping hand to those in need, the question now remain: what I can do to help as a blogger?
If you are an authoritative blogger with a sizable readership and clout to influence your audience, you can use these to make an effort and increase the assistance to the victims of the earthquakes. Here’s what you can do:
Certain industries find blogging more advantageous than others; and while blogging isn’t for everyone, it can definitely be valuable for every IT specialist. Take a look at some of the following reasons and you’ll likely agree. [Read more…]
Andrew Sullivan, blogging pioneer and Blogger-in-Chief at The Daily Dish, retired from blogging in the ‘near future’.
One of blogging’s most unique voices, Sullivan has been sharing his conservative political views since 2000.
He has written newsworthy posts throughout his 15 years as a blogger. He admitted to being wrong about the Iraq war and shared his thoughts about marriage equality, live-blogging about the Green Revolution for a month in 2009, and wrote a lot about Barack Obama.
He also formed a bond with his readers that he was able to share the politics of his own life – getting married to his husband, getting his green card, and getting his heart broken when Dusty passed away.
It is this kind of relationship forged with readers that makes Sullivan a legend in his own right.
A lot of people may not be familiar with Sullivan, but people who matter in his field do. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Noah Smith, and other luminaries in the political blogging world have acknowledged and paid respects to Sullivan’s departure.
As a guy who has never heard of Sullivan prior to writing this interview, I do not want to undersell his accomplishments of inspiring a wave of socially and politically conscious bloggers and entertaining the intellectual readers. That said, I would like to refer you to this wonderful piece by Tyler Cowen who provides a succinct but effective retrospective of Sullivan’s blogging career.
Heavy traffic in real life may be a bane to a commuter’s everyday life, but when you’re running a website, it’s gold. Having internet users visit your website is a really good thing, but for your website to be effective, the traffic needs to be looking for what you have to offer. They should be seeking the product or service of your website, be it a legitimate business or a simple blog site. Driving relevant traffic to your website can be done through effective marketing, and here are ways on how to quarry this valuable resource:
As a blogger, you’re always challenged to post new content frequently. That leads to another challenge: coming up with new topics that will interest your readers and, in turn, be shared. There’s now an amazing freemium tool that can make this task easier than ever before and it’s called BuzzSumo.
At its simplest, BuzzSumo is a way to see what kind of content is shared the most, while learning about the key influencers in the industry you write about. When BuzzSumo pulls this information and aggregates it for you, you’ll then be able to view how many shares a piece of content has received across all the major social media sites. Since the goal of any of your posts might be to go viral, this is a great tool to use to see what people are reading and sharing. Plus, it can serve to inspire you in a variety of ways too. [Read more…]
Do you want your blog content to go viral? Sure you do. Accumulating more readers, views, and shares is the ultimate goal of a blogger, after all. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that your content will spread – on a massive scale or just in general – but there are steps you can take to boost your odds.
First of all, if you’re trying to reach lots of eyeballs through spammy or dubious methods, stop. As a blogger, you need to be dedicated to creating booming content, stuff that your particular audience will love and be inspired to share. Yes, slapdash content can work to gather initial views, but they do no favors for overall shareability.
