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Top 10 Things to Consider When Designing Your Blog

I’m taking a mini-vacation this weekend so I’m going to keep this kind of short, but I wanted to do a follow up post to Wednesday’s Blog Redesign Exercise.

In that post, I shared 3 different blog designs iterations that a fellow blogger, Vik Tantry, had done for a design overhaul he’s doing for his blog. The SPI community didn’t hesitate to share their opinions (yay for comments!) and I’m sure Vik and everyone else following along has learned a lot about what works, and what doesn’t.

Here are my top 10 takeaways from reading the comments. These are things to consider when designing or redesigning your own blog in the future: Click to continue…

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Blog Redesign Exercise: What Do You Think?

Designing a blog from scratch is very difficult, which is why we have things like WordPress’s theme library and WooThemes to help us start blogging right away.

Re-designing a blog, however, can be even more difficult – and scary too. Especially if you’ve been stuck with the same design since the beginning and have grown any kind of audience. More than likely, if you’re at this point with your blog you know that you need to change things to grow, but what exactly those things are can be sort of a mystery. Change the wrong thingsor take away a feature that a lot of people use, and you’re bound to fly with some turbulence. Click to continue…

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An Underrated Skill That All Bloggers Should Have and I Would Like To Teach

Blogger Skills I’m not even going to beat around the bush with this one. One skill that all bloggers should possess is Graphic Creation and Manipulation – or as some like to call it, “Photoshop skills” (although the term “Photoshop” is actually just the name of one piece of software where graphic creation and manipulation can be done).

It’s a very underrated skill in the blogging world and one that I’m lucky enough to have because I used to use Photoshop every single day when I was working my 9 to 5 job at an architecture firm. It’s probably the most important thing I learned while working 9 to 5 that I apply in almost all of my online businesses today. That and, of course, living the 9 to 5 lifestyle and understanding that I enjoy the lifestyle I live now much better. Click to continue…

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Drive Like They’re Crazy. Blog Like They’re Lazy

When I first started learning how to drive, my Dad gave me a piece of advice to help me stay safe on the road and become a good driver:

“Drive like everyone else on the road is crazy”, he said.

Although I know there are mostly safe drivers on the road (unlike this guy), by adopting this mindset I learned how to stay alert and be aware of other vehicles on the road next to me.

Thanks Dad!

Now, here’s a piece of advice I’m going to give you to help you think about how to become a better blogger:

“Blog like everyone else is lazy.” Click to continue…

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Are You Optimizing Your 404 Page? Yes, Your 404 Page.

When you visit a non-existent URL on a website, you’ll often come face to face with an error similar to the following:

“Oops! We couldn’t find what you were looking for.”

or…

“Page not found.”

What you’re actually seeing when you come across this error is the “404 Page”, which is a page that your browser goes to when the page you were looking for was – well – not found.

Common reasons for landing on a 404 page include:

A misplaced letter or misspelled word in the URL when typing manually into the browser’s address bar.
A misplaced letter or misspelled word in an existing link.
The link or URL is typed correctly, but the page just no longer exists (aka. broken link)
A redirection error.

Whatever the path may be, when people land on your 404 Page they will most likely exit your site.

It’s sad, but true. People are spoiled, especially when it comes to searching and surfing online, so when they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for – it’s on to the next thing like there’s no tomorrow.

However, there are things we can do as website owners, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to decrease the chances of people leaving our sites when they do reach a 404 Page, which I’ll outline for you below. Click to continue…

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How to Not Be a Newbie Blogger When You’re a Newbie Blogger

newbie Blogging = survival of the fittest.

It’s seriously a jungle out there, and for newly hatched blogs, it’s even harder to survive.

But, there are a number of things you can do right away as a “hatchling” to immediately gain ground “in the wild” and transform yourself from a newbie, to what may seem like a seasoned pro.

Below is a list of things (big and small) that you can do as a newbie, so you don’t stand out as a newbie. Click to continue…

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Content Without Design is Dumb

Content is King.

You’ve probably heard this statement before. If not, Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia) illustrates the idea of “Content is King” as:

“…without original and desirable content…any media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors.”

You can have the best-designed, coolest, most functional website around, but without good content, your website (or eBook, course, podcast, video production, etc.) is pretty much useless.

However, please don’t misunderstand the idea here. Design, or presentation is still absolutely necessary.

Design without content is useless, but content without design is dumb.

In other words: design matters. Click to continue…

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The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Newsletter

At the beginning of the year, I started a newsletter here on SPI and used an eBook I wrote, eBooks the $mart Way, as a free gift to help generate more leads. Three months later, I now have over 2,250 people signed up for the newsletter and it averages about 30 new subscribers a day.

I have no previous email list to compare these numbers with, so I can’t say for sure whether those are stellar numbers, or just average – but either way I’m very happy with the results and would love to share with you how it’s all done, especially for you beginners out there who have been emailing me non-stop about it. I apologize I’ve waited this long to write this post. Click to continue…

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What You Ought to Know About Screenshots

A screenshot is a snapshot of something you see on your computer screen. If you’re doing any kind of online business or blog, more than likely you’re going to want to use a screenshot for some reason.

I use screenshots a lot. You can see a number of them in my last post, where I took screenshots of my statistics from Google Analytics to support the information in my post. Whenever someone emails me and asks me how to do something, I often take a screenshot of the process and drag that into the email itself.

If you have a virtual assistant, and you want to make sure they do whatever it is you want them to do correctly, there’s no better way than to have them visually see a step by step snapshot of exactly where they are supposed to go and what their supposed to click. Click to continue…

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The Smart Passive Income Blog Makeover and eBook!

New online Well – it’s finally here! The *NEW* Smart Passive Income Blog!

I’m happy to begin the new year with a fresh and clean look to the blog. Less clutter, more room in the main content area, and a touched up logo, along with some new features that I’ll quickly point out for you:

New Archive: Before, the archive was basically a huge list of every single post I’ve done, and that’s it. Now, it’s more organized and divided into dates, categories and tags, so you can easily navigate through my older but still useful content.
New Podcasts Section: Here, you’ll get a list of all of the podcasts episodes I’ve recorded. There aren’t any there yet, but I do have a few recorded already. I’d like to get a few more done before I go live on iTunes. I can’t wait!
New “How-To Videos”: This is an awesome gallery (thanks to the TubePress plugin), that compiles all of the YouTube how-to videos I’ve done. Now, you don’t need to go to YouTube to watch the videos that you need to get stuff done.
The “Did You Know” Bar: If you look below the navigation menu, there’s a little “Did You Know” section where I’ll just put in a small little fact about me (or whatever) every couple of days. Just thought this might add a little bit of fun to the blog
Smaller Subscriber Area: If you watched my video that explained what I was going to change in the new redesign, I pointed out how my old subscriber area was taking up way too much space. I think I was taking up a 300×400 pixel chunk of real estate for what I can do in that little bar you see at the top.
Tabbed Area: On the right hand side, below the Opt-In Box for the eBook (which I’ll talk more about in a sec), I’ve organized the hottest posts (the posts that have had the most views in the last week), the most popular posts (the posts with the most comments), and the top commenters (names and links to those who have commented the most each month). Before, all of this information was crowding the left hand side of my blog, but now, it’s compact and neatly organized.

There are a few other improvements that I made that aren’t as significant as the ones I mentioned above, so I’ll leave you to come across them as you look around.

My New eBook Guide!

ebooks-the-smart-way As most of you know, I’ve been working on my eBook guide for the last couple of months. I’m proud to say that it’s finished, and it rocks! I’ve actually never spent so much time on any eBook I’ve ever written, so I’m really happy that I can give you this hardcore, quality eBook for free. I’ve already gotten some really nice comments about it already, since it actually went up yesterday. I look forward to hearing what you think too.

Trying to find a name for it gave me a major headache, but thanks to all of you, I was able to come up with something that I think fits perfectly with this blog. It’s called eBooks the $mart Way – A Complete Guide to Publishing, Marketing, and Automating a Killer eBook. You can see a 3D representation of it here.

Thank you all for your eBook title suggestions. I would especially like to thank Ms. Freeman for her idea to use “$mart”, which matches my logo and has become sort of the image of my “brand”, so that works perfectly. I’d also like to thank Dominique Goh, for her suggestion of the word “Killer”, which I really liked. And lastly, I’d like to thank Henri for helping me realize that I had most of the tagline figured out already. The three people that I just mentioned will receive a free copy of the new 4-Hour Work Week. I will email you within the next day or two to get your info.

If you’d like to get your free copy of my ebook guide, and also get exclusive online business and blogging tips in my weekly newsletter (with stuff you can’t find on the blog), please fill out the form in the sidebar at the top of this site or directly below.

Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy! Here’s to an awesome year!

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