The Best of The Week [TWBOTW]
In a week where my RSS subscriptions have been dominated by news and commentary from SXSW I figured this was going to be a difficult TBOTW to put together, in actual fact it’s been very easy as there is still some fantastic content being produced by the ’smaller’ name blogs while all the big guys are at SXSW.
So here’s this weeks The Best of The Week!
11 Must Have Firefox Extensions by Shoemoney - as a Firefox user I’m always looking out for good extensions that will speed up my workflow, there’s a couple of ‘must haves’ in this list.
and why not follow that up with another software one, and I know there’s a fair number of Mac users reading this blog last time I checked Google Analytics
5 Amazing Mac Apps for Getting Things Done by Zen Habits - The ideal for anyone interested in Getting Things Done (more on GTD, and more)– or just being productive and organized, for that matter — is to be able to quickly add things to your to-do lists without interrupting your work; to be able to see what you need to do right now, without worrying about everything else; to be able to organize stuff without too much work.
The Blog Entrepreneur brought us this interesting article on Why Most Bloggers Will Never Succeed at Blogging - You don’t have to spend very much time surfing the blogosphere to deduce that a number of blogs get started and are posted on for a week or two, maybe even a few months, but then go dormant. Another bit of evidence is the sheer number of domains that are available for auction via GoDaddy or the various forums.
Seopher had some interesting things to say in his article on How to get success by authoring multiple blogs that I found pretty interesting as someone who is getting into authoring multiple blogs (I’m With The Band, Medical News Stat!, A Business is Born, Fat Stacks of Cash).
and on the topic of search engine marketing (SEO) Stoney over at Search Engine Guide gave us some insight that I think a lot of people would find useful in his article titled Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First
and still on the topic of SEO check out the article on Daily Blog Tips with the tip on how you can Check How Search Engines See Your Website which you should bookmark as a valuable resource any time you do any changes to your website’s SEO! was quietly suprised on how this website shows up.
Last but not least check out Chris G’s Free eBook on Personal Branding written by Ted Demopoulos, why go out and pay a bunch of bucks for quality information you can get for nix, and it is quality information.
Anyway, those are some of the best articles to hit my RSS Reader this week. Hopefully there’s something amongst this lot which will help you out in the future, be sure to Digg and / or Stumble it for future reference, maybe even Subscribe to my RSS feed so that you get this delivered to you each week.
Till next week, Matt
I’m With The Band - header & background
Last week I re-did the I’m With The Band theme as we just partnered up with the local street press Reverb and needed to setup an area on the front page where people could download the latest edition of Reverb. When I did this theme change I had to mockup a quick header logo until I had the time to sit down and make a new logo / header.
The other thing we want to change up the I’m With The Band website is the colour scheme and the background as well. I’ve spent several hours on the Colour Lovers website checking out various colour palettes to try and get some inspiration, so far I’ve narrowed it down to about 10 different schemes…..arrghh. I think once I have the header logo design completed it might be a little easier to lock the colour scheme down.
Here’s a few websites that I find invaluable when it comes to colour scheming, web designs, logos and headers;
> Colour Lovers - a big database of user submitted colour combinations
> Vecteezy - user submitted vectors, free to download
> Brusheezy - Vecteezy’s sister site for photoshop and illustrator brushes
> Faveup - a gallery of cool website designs, logo designs, and flash designs
> CSS Tux - similar to Faveup, but dedicated to CSS designed websites
> iStockPhoto - a stock photo, vector, flash, and video website where you can buy different elements to construct your design
Anyway, I better actually get to work on this header / logo design instead of just sitting here talking about it. I’ll keep you posted on the I’m With The Band project as it progresses.
Cheers, Matt
Ch ch ch changes!
As of today you’ll find a number of changes happening here at Mathew Packer dot com.
The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m working on a new theme, and call me insane but I’m going to be working on it live! No one in their right mind would work on their website live while it was still getting hits, and normally I wouldn’t as I wouldn’t want to negatively effect the advertising click potential of the site, however I’m willing to work on it this was as I don’t care about the advertising clicks on here as I’m ditching the advertising!
So as you just read the second big change is getting rid of the advertising on this website. As of about 2 weeks ago my subscriber count has risen from 20 people per day up to 75 per day, this is a pretty huge increase but my click rate on the advertisements has not risen at all. This has lead me to the conclusion that people actually enjoy what I write enough to actually subscribe to the RSS so I figure I would do everyone a favour and serve the site sans advertising.
Over the Christmas period last year I was all about ‘making money online’. Pretty well every post was about some form of revenue generation and blah blah blah, it’s all a bunch of ‘me too’ content that was being said by every second blogger out there. Looking back now I can clearly see that I was just jumping aboard the copycat express with everyone other sucker out there.
A month or so ago I started supplementing my MMO articles with real life articles, the couple of recipes I’ve posted bring in more traffic than any other ‘insert big affiliate marketing website name here’ article that I was writing as has the Lite n Easy Diet progress articles that I’ve written. This is the direction I now want to take my blog in.
From here on out I’ll be writing various posts on things that are happening in my life, around home, around work, etc. I’ve got plenty going on with all the happenings at I’m With The Band, launching the new targeted pain relief device Pain Gone, getting my ‘how to start a business’ website together at A Business Is Born, the medical news website that I’m helping work out with Medical News, Stat! , and I’ve even had a few emails from people in the last week asking me if I could develop blog themes for their websites as they saw me advertising myself as Freelance Matt.
All these changes are effective immediately! As soon as I hit the ‘Publish’ button I’ll get started on the theme changes, it’s going to look a little different around here sometime in the next minute or so..
Oh and for those of you who are still interested in Making Money Online, and Making Money Blogging, I’ll still publish the odd article about how I’m doing this as I’m concentrating my advertising and what not on the other websites I own, I may even still publish income reports……
Cheers, Matt
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