Today many people have the mindset of globalization and trying to captivate the entire world as their audience. When you are just starting off its good to have such big aspirations but by thinking like this, you may be overlooking one of the most powerful niche’s right at your fingertips. Your local community.

Before you start to think about scaling your blog you should know what makes you the best and why will people prefer to come to your site vs. a competitor. Sure you may be an exceptional writer with new and fresh ideas, but are you better than the Wall-Street Journal? Probably not.

I started to think about this after reading this article on Mashable:How To Launch Your Own Indie Journalism Site. In summary its about how recently laid off workers have started their own niche news blogs and becoming very well known.

So could I compete with the Wall-Street Journal…No, but it did get me thinking. In my local area there is a Big 10 school and only one official local news source. After checking out all of online local authorities I realized that me and 2 other people could absolutely crush all the competition in this area. Not just the news, but in almost any niche. Mostly because there is 0 competition.

Click Here to See 6 Reasons For Blogging Local

When you first begin your blog, starting with the very first idea that you may want to create a blog, there are a number of obstacles you will come across. Usually the idea or inspiration comes first, and then comes thoughts of layout and design. So after a month of back and forth setting up the perfectly thought out theme weighing all your choices, you can now sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. However this is actually point where you will encounter the most difficult part of blogging. Finding your style. When you have no traffic its almost impossible to know what the masses of people expect from you.

Your first few rounds of blog posts kind of feel like open mic night at a local pub. You most likely have been working on some material up in your head for some time now, but until this day you’ve never actually said it out loud for people to hear.

The key to this is for better or worse to just put everything you’ve got out there then sit back and watch the people react. In the beginning I found myself going from one extreme to the other, trying to appeal to a variety of readers. However the more I tried to get the attention of everyone, the more I succeeded in gaining the attention of no one.

Click here to keep reading

This is a common story, but comforting to know that I’m not the only one. Originally posted at Bloggusion.com

In this post, Megan Hurley from FindingBenjamin.com talks about the future we all want for our blogs, and how we can take baby steps to achieving a happy future.

At some point in his or her life, almost everyone will land a minimum wage job. This is especially common for young adults who are looking for something to supplement their busy school schedules.

These jobs, like working at a fast food joint, restaurant, or in my case as a barista in a cafe, can be a good way to generate that much needed spending cash. Remember, though, you only have that cash because you are most likely still living under Mom and Dad’s roof, and therefore still have them to pay your big expenses. What happens when you’re done with school, looking for a “grown-up” job, and want to get away from Mom and Dad?

When I graduated from college this past spring, I thought that increasing my hours at the cafe to full-time would be all I needed to cover rent, bills, and car expenses—and still have some left-over cash—until I could land a great job that actually had something to do with my degree. I will be the first to admit that I’ve led a fairly sheltered life. Even I am surprised at how naive I was!
Click here to keep reading

From time to time there are those whose sufferings can be taken no longer. For these people they resort to a new form of digital revolution, the “Social Network Call to Arms”. The past few months I’ve witnessed countless instances of people using their network connections to accomplish many tasks. Take this story by New York Times Technology Blogger, David Poque.

He could no longer suffer the injustice of having to wait for the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions messages that play before each persons voicemail. Poque claims that the customers are paying for it.

These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.
(more…)

We spend alot of time thinking about how to write the best content, get more traffic, or earn more money from my blog.  However, its important not to let the security of your blog get pushed down to the last thing on your list of things to do.  Here is a list of quick easy tasks that will give you a slight advantage against would be evil doers. These Security tips are pretty important so I’ve made the headlines nice and big to make sure you can read them very clearly.

(more…)

It’s been 32 days since I first started on my blogging journey. In the beginning I literally knew nothing about blogging. In the time span of just one month I’ve been able to accomplish many of the goals I set out to achieve.

Lets take a look back at the first 30 days and recap some of my mistakes and successes.

Traffic and Tactics
The first week was probably the worst feeling, I was unsure of what direction to take the blog and I was struggling to get between 1-3 visitors everyday. I just kept posting and started to branch out my network to similar blogs and forums where people might find my content interesting. My goal was doubling my traffic each week.
(more…)

Every expert in blogging or internet marketing says that its important you don’t just focus all of your time and energy on one blog, or one niche. By having multiple pages going at the same time is gives you an opportunity to cast a wider net and reach more different people. It’s possible that one kind of site will be much more successful than the previous one. I’ve also heard from a number of people that blogging about a number of different topics can help to keep things fun and interesting for you. When one topic becomes boring to you, just hop on over to your other site.
(more…)