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Skelliewag.org

A unique blog about creating content your readers will love. Written for bloggers, webmasters, freelancers and anyone else who publishes on the web.

Be the Best, Be DiscoveredSeptember 25

Photo by bestfor.

I’ve been thinking about some of the important lessons I learned in the very early days of my engagement with the web, back when only an obscure few knew what blogging was, and before blogs like ProBlogger existed. There were no websites (at least none that I found) to tell you how to build popular sites, or how to make money online. Those who had done it probably weren’t sure exactly how they’d done it, but were pleasantly surprised and pleased none-the-less.

As you may have read on my About page, I’ve been creating web content for about nine years now. The first site I ever created was hosted on Yahoo! GeoCities and featured lime-green text on an image background (completely unreadable). There was no medium for interaction on the site. I hadn’t discovered stat counters yet, so I also couldn’t tell if anyone ever visited it. I certainly never promoted it, though I think I would have if I’d known how. The focus of the site was on writing lessons for beginner writers. I–someone who has never published a novel, or received any accolades for her fiction writing–was the guru. In reality, I was just excited about what I was learning about writing fiction at the time. I was as much a beginner as the imagined peop

Transforming Your Blog Into Really Big BusinessSeptember 11

Photo by wannes deprez / ony one.

The idea of blogging as a source of passive income has always seemed a little off to me (and others). In fact, I’d suggest that most bloggers earning significant money from blogging devote as much time to it as a part-time or full-time job. That’s not as close as we can get, though: passive income should be just that, passive, meaning income for no hands-on work, or income that is hugely disproportionate to the hands-on work required.

If you’re writing blog posts each week, moderating comments, answering email and trying to propel your content forward on social media, you’re not earning passive income. You’re still exchanging time for money.

I’m also skeptical about people who claim to earn passive income from dozens of small niche, SEO and AdSense optimized blogs. Despite some question marks about the value being provided to visitors, I’m also not sure this is passive income, either. Most of those maintaining dozens of these blogs do seem to spend a lot of time on them! Darren Rowse has said it can be a full-time job and more.

The precedent

The above scenarios show blogg

Number + Adjective + Contents: What Happens When a Formula Dies?August 27

Photo by Freeparking.

Posts based on the Number + Adjective + Contents headline formula are probably the most popular form of web content we’ve ever seen. For every one person who loathes them there are one-hundred people who are enchanted by them. For reasons that others have previously explored, this kind of content pushes all the right psychological buttons.

The formula isn’t a secret weapon known only to an elite set of maverick writers. Anyone who reads blogs or uses social media gets it: that the formula is very much in fashion. Blogs that have never used it before are now tapping into spikes of social media traffic with its help. Writers who can stick to the formula are highly sought-after and increasingly well-paid. Blogs that use the formula well are growing at a rapid rate (and so are some that don’t, but I’ll get to that later). The formula works.

But for how long? Trends reach a saturation point and then begin a decline. If the formula hasn’t reached saturation point yet, it must be heading towards it. In this post, I want to talk about what comes after the death of this trend.

One of the best articles I’ve read recently was Derek Sivers (founder of

How to Develop an Efficient Post FrequencyAugust 27

Photo by Oskay.

One question every blog about blogging covers at one point or another is: how much should you post? I’ve yet to see anyone come to a firm conclusion about this, so I’d like to try.

In truth, some post frequencies are wasteful and others are efficient. This depends on two factors: the size of your readership and the frequency of your posts.

If your blog is receiving a few hundred visitors a day, it can be wasteful to post too much. For a post to gain traction on social media and start to spread through word of mouth it requires a certain amount of exposure.

By posting too frequently you may be taking the post out of the limelight and replacing it with another before the necessary amount of exposure can be reached.

Assuming that you have enough time to produce as much content as you would like, the ideal post frequency for a small readership blog is probably once every two days. (In reality, if you can’t sustain quality content at this frequency then your ideal frequency would be as regularly as you can manage while maintaining peak quality).

A well-trafficked blog is the opposite. Once you’re receiving more than 1,000 visitors a day, it’s wasteful not to post every day (once again, assuming an ideal situation where you have the means to do so). This is

Six Lessons I Could Only Learn by Letting My Blog GoAugust 26

Photo by Freeparking.

It was a little painful to read Darren Rowse’s series of posts on letting your blog go. It hit a nerve with me for reasons that are probably self-evident: in the last four months there have only been eight new posts at Skelliewag. In this post I want to explain some of the important lessons I learned by letting my blog go, and how these lessons will help me approach the future.

Reflecting on that time I’ve realized that there are always deeper reasons for letting a blog go than ‘I don’t have the time’. I’ve learned that the way you use your time reveals your true priorities, even if they aren’t the priorities you acknowledge.

This article is, surprisingly, a positive one. It doesn’t benefit anyone for me to make excuses for my own personal situation, but I’m sure some of you are going through a similar phase and struggling to keep your blog regularly updated. Maybe you’ll see yourself in some of the lessons I learned.

1. You should allow your blog to evolve to match the challenges you set yourself.

One of the most important things every blogger should do when preparing to launch their first (or second, or third) blog is to decide on what yo