PureBlogging

Like most writers, I like to spend a lot of time reading about how to write. There’s lots of really useful information out there, and it’s a better way to rationalize procrastination than playing Chain Factor or watching Mythbusters reruns. Here are a few of the best resources I’ve found on my travels around the Web — some of them have actually helped me, and I hope to integrate those that haven’t into my writing as soon as I become a more responsible and productive person. Which should happen any day now.

10 Benefits of Rising Early from Zen Habits. Technically this isn’t specifically about writing, but it has helped me to become an early riser, which has helped my writing and overall productivity dramatically. Whenever I wake up late, I always end up working late into the night — which means getting to bed late, which means the cycle starts all over again.

10 Steps to Creating the Habit of Writing from Write to Done. I particularly like the “No Exceptions” rule — again, I find when I fall out of the writing habit, it’s very hard to get back into it.

The Greatest Sales Letter of All Time from Copyblogger. I could easily place the entirety of Copyblogger’s material on here and be done with it, but that would cross the line from “lazy” to “really pathetically lazy,” and I’m not quite there yet. A great example of writing that achieves its goal with absolutely no fat or prevarication.

Ten Timeless Creative Writing Techniques, again from Copyblogger. At the risk of inching closer to that “really pathetically lazy” label, I offer this as well. The information in this post helped me turn half-decent ad copy into something that I’m really pleased with.

How to Rewrite from Justine Larbalestier. Justine, a real, honest-to-goodness fantasy writer, tells the hard truth about the revision process. Spoiler alert: It ain’t easy.

Title Tags: First Impressions at the Search Engines from Flyte Web Marketing. This post isn’t big on details, but it really helped me to understand the importance of title tags in selling Web copy.

How to Write and Use Description Meta Tags on Your Web Pages from Zero Million. The page is a little ad-heavy, but this is a really great tutorial for writing great, concise meta descriptions. The first piece of advice (”Write Like a Journalist”) was the best for me (but that may be because I used to be a journalist).

Is the Net Good for Writers? from 10 Zen Monkeys. Long article. Good read. Quite a bit of insight from a wide variety of writers, Web entrepreneurs, publishing professionals and overall geeks.

How to Write Faster, Better and Easier from Pick the Brain. When I first read this post, I hated it. “Duh!” I thought. “Who doesn’t know this stuff?” Then I realized that while I knew the information presented here, I rarely practiced it. A good reminder of what a good writing process entails.

Live and Write from Ask MetaFilter. Some great advice in the comments here. Particularly good is the final comment about dream writing vs. lucrative writing.

10+ Unusual Ways to Make Easy Money on the Internet if You Love Writing from NicheGeek. Some of these are a bit on the skeezy side (”Social Bookmark Whoring?”), but it certainly got my creative muscles pumping.

The Complete Nobody’s Guide to Writing Query Letters by Lynn Flewelling. I dread writing query letters. It almost makes me thankful I don’t have a finished novel under my belt. But this tutorial is thorough, and gentle on the first-timer.

An Introduction to Journal Writing from D*I*Y Planner. This post really helped me get over my self-consciousness when it comes to journal writing. I used to get upset if every entry wasn’t Chatwin-quality. Not any more.

Hack Your Way Out of Writer’s Block from 43 Folders. I’ve used each of these suggestions at least once. The Brian Eno reference is also cool.

Lost in Your Own Writing? from JCM Enterprises. Good advice overall here. Also, it references one of the two best dramas currently on network TV. The other one is Battlestar Galactica. No arguments please.

50 Tools That Can Improve Your Writing Skills from Dumb Little Man. All 50 tips are from the Poynter Institute, one of the most respected journalistic institutions in the nation. Many of these are technical rather than conceptual, so I’d wager this is the most useful item on this list. That’s why I finished with it.

It happens.

That great idea for a post you thought of as you were out driving, running errands?

Gone!

When inspiration pings, you are usually in one of three places:

• You can’t write (like driving in a car or walking down the street).
• You’re nowhere near a computer or the web (waiting in line at the grocery store, morning routine in your bathroom).
• You’re in front of the computer but you’re right in the middle of something else (like, I dunno, work).

Here are three ways to capture those fleeting ideas so we can act on them later and write those killer blog posts:

When you can’t write at all, speak: get a digital voice recorder or send voicemail messages to yourself. Digital voice recorders are better because you can speak for long periods of time.

When there is no computer or web access to be found, a fantastic low-tech solution is to use a notebook. I use a Moleskine Notebook, which are built like tanks and have a ribbon to bookmark your place and an interior pocket. Make sure you have a pen, too, like a space pen, that’s small enough to carry everywhere and that always works.

When you’re in front of the computer but in the middle of something else, you can’t take the time or suffer the interruption to log into your blog. Instead, use Google Notebook. Then get the awesome Google Notebook Firefox extension. I use this all the time to quickly capture Ideas as I work on the computer.

Three is a lovely number, but this list could perhaps be four, or six, or twelve. How do you capture your blog post ideas before they slip away?

It’s been a long, jet-lag-filled post-holiday week here in the House of Kev, so my post this week will be devoid of the usual top-flight content-creation advice and Algonquin-Roundtable-worthy bon mots. Instead I’m going to point you to a potential moneymaking resource that I could see myself using someday. Mostly I’m curious to see what you all think of it.

It’s called WordHugger, and as I mentioned in my title, it’s not dissimilar to Squidoo, in that it allows users to create pages centered around specific topics. It bears one fairly major difference, however — it’s a paid service.

Collin LaHay, WordHugger’s developer, markets the site as a method of investing via microlending — he even offers a money-back guarantee. A page costs $60 for ten years; each page revolves around a single word, like Wikipedia or dating, and uses can do whatever they like with them — add clickthroughs or affiliate links, or fill them with random and seemingly useless information.

Overall LaHay seems pretty knowledgeable when it comes to SEO and online revenue streams; his blog is full of useful information, and one of his most recent posts, titled “Top Ten Reasons This Post Will Be Popular on Digg,” recently took the top spot on, well, Digg. So clearly this is a guy who’s got his head in the right place when it comes to monetizing and marketing.

What I’m having trouble figuring out is why anyone would choose WordHugger over Squidoo; the best reason I can come up with is altruism, since half of the profits from WordHugger go to Kiva, a nonprofit organization that offers microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries (LaHay claims the other half goes to pay off his student loans).  I think that’s a great idea, but will it take off among an audience of Web-based entrepreneurs? My own dim view of human nature makes me wonder.

LaHay also recently introduced a new site called rssHugger, which is similar in scope. We’ll talk about that next week.

I never thought that anything could replace my favourite offline blog editor, Scribefire, once known as Performancing for Firefox. It was easy to use and it worked. I’ve tried others, such as Qumana, but I never really fell in love with that. Now I’ve found a blog editor that I really like - Windows Live Writer.

One of the reasons I like it is that the compose window is like writing in MS Word, which makes it easy to use. If you prefer to write in raw HTML, you can do that too. It’s also got a couple of other modes, which allow you to see exactly how a post will look on your blog. I tend to stick to the normal mode, which makes it easy for me to apply heading code and add links.

Adding my blog was simple and works better than in any other blog editor I’ve tried. You just select the type of blog, input your blog’s address, and your username and password and it’s added. Couldn’t be simpler. Then you start writing.

Once you’ve written a post, you can add images, tables, tags, videos and maps through a handy menu on the right. It’s laid out like a Windows folder, so the interface feels familiar. So far, I’ve only used tags, and it allows me to add Technorati tags easily. I haven’t figured out how to distinguish between the Technorati tags and those that lead to content on my own blog, though.

Publishing works like a dream. You can select categories (which are imported from your blog) and choose a publishing date. You can even publish the post as a draft for later editing. I tend to save my drafts locally, which means they remain available for me to see on the right hand menu. You can also open previous posts on your blog for editing.

This blog editor seems to have everything I need. I can quote, put numbered or bulleted lists and insert media from three different places (an icon menu, a drop down menu and a sidebar menu). I can spell check and I can have both live and in-program previews.

One thing I’d like to see with this program is a way to back up all my previous posts, which Qumana offers. However, at least I can access the posts I edit with Live Writer, as well as the previous posts on my blog. This is an early review, as I’ve only used the program for a week or so. I plan to add logins for the other places where I post and do a more thorough trial. Verdict to date: so far, so good. What’s your experience been with this editor?

Stats! Don’t you just love ‘em? I know I do and ever since starting my first blog I’ve been addicted to checking my stats. In fact, I had to wean myself off checking them several times a day, and have now narrowed my stats packages to just four. Here they are.

Getting Clicky

By far the most useful is Clicky, which I can now install on a Wordpress blog as a plugin. If you’ve been using Performancing’s new stats package, you should know that it’s a rebranded version of Clicky. I love Clicky because it looks good and it’s easy to get all the info I really need from the dashboard, which is customizable. It’s easy to see where visitors came from, what they clicked on, who’s linking to you and much more. One of my favourite tools is the Spy view, which gives you real time stats. I also like the feature that allows you to link IPs to identity. I’ve reviewed Clicky in more detail here.

Google Analytics

You can’t talk analytics without considering Google’s own tool, which I also use. However, I find it most useful for checking my stats once a month for trends. I usually compare the month just past against the one before to see how things have changed. I like to see what’s gained in popularity, where my best traffic sources are and how my other promotional activities have contributed to increasing blog traffic. There’s also a lot more that I don’t use, such as goals tracking, but it’s there if you need it.

Buzz! 103 Bees

I only use 103Bees on one of my blogs and it’s a different kind of stats package. This makes it easy for me to see where search engine, social and paid traffic is coming from. It’s also useful because it tracks the questions and keywords that people ask in finding the site. I find it the easiest way to get an overview of this aspect of my site, and it works better for me than similar functions in the other stats packages. What I like about this is the ability to create To Do lists out of the questions, which makes it easy to identify future blog topics.

Feedburner

Although I look at Feedburner’s own stats, a new tool has made it even easier to make some sense of these. It’s BlogPerfume’s free online feed analysis tool. Just type in the address of your Feedburner feed and you get a selection of useful stats, including how your subscribers have grown, the number of hits, views and clicks, the potential ad value of your blog (this was slightly below other predictions, but it’s a new tool) and the predicted growth of your blog. I’ve also been able to find out which are the best and worst readership days on my blog.

Putting It All Together

So, how do I use all of these together to make me a better blogger? 103Bees tells me what people are using to find my blog, so that I can use these same phrases to generate new content. It also helps me to identify the posts that are popular with the social bookmarking sites. The Feed Analysis tool helps me track how the blog is doing and think about where it’s going. Clicky allows me to keep on top of daily reactions to my blog through links and email, while Analytics gives me a useful overview. I’ve noticed that the Clicky and Analytics numbers don’t always match up, but with these four tools I feel I have a good handle on managing my blog. What are your favourite stats packages and why?

Shareaholic is a new Firefox extension that simplifies the process of submitting a web page to your favorite bookmarking sites.

Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re viewing to digg, del.icio.us, facebook, google bookmarks, magnolia, reddit, stumbleupon and twitter. If you prefer, you can also e-mail the web page to a friend.

The ability to easily submit web pages is handy but I think the most useful feature of Shareaholic is its ability to track bookmark submissions in real time. You can see if an URL has already been submitted, how many times it has been saved on del.icio.us, how many times it’s been dugg, and how many comments it has received.

Bonus feature: Also find out how popular the page you’re on really is. Track real-time statistics from digg and del.icio.us.

If you do a lot of bookmarking and sharing this might be a handy little tool to try out.