I have no idea how to pick the blog niche that’s going to make you rich. It’s been trial and error for me - I’ll pick two topics I think should perform about equally, and one will far outshine the other.
That said, maybe I can point you to something that’ll help you come up with [...]

I have no idea how to pick the blog niche that’s going to make you rich. It’s been trial and error for me - I’ll pick two topics I think should perform about equally, and one will far outshine the other.

That said, maybe I can point you to something that’ll help you come up with your next niche, or at least get you researching ones you’ve never seen before.

There’s an awesome WordPress plugin to make the search on your site work better. You can choose to have it include comments, pages, and metadata in the results. You just install it, activate it, select your options in the options panel, and that’s it. No tweaking of templates.
There’s also the Google option, which I went [...]

There’s an awesome WordPress plugin to make the search on your site work better. You can choose to have it include comments, pages, and metadata in the results. You just install it, activate it, select your options in the options panel, and that’s it. No tweaking of templates.

There’s also the Google option, which I went with on this site and a couple of others for web-savvy people. But some of my sites are for less technical visitors, and I’m afraid that Google box will confuse them.

I know, I keep listing new widgets and plugins I’ve found to encourage people to socially bookmark your site. But people keep making newer better ones. So blame them, not me.
AddThis works a lot like AddtoAny, in that everything’s off your site, not taking time to load, not taking up a ton of space in [...]

I know, I keep listing new widgets and plugins I’ve found to encourage people to socially bookmark your site. But people keep making newer better ones. So blame them, not me.

AddThis works a lot like AddtoAny, in that everything’s off your site, not taking time to load, not taking up a ton of space in your sidebar and so on. Except it’s way cooler, because it has that hella sexy little button you now see in the right sidebar.

Plus, there’s a WordPress plugin version that plonks it at the bottom of every post for you, with no changes to your theme.

45n5 made me think this morning: am I monetizing my site every way possible?
From his list, here’s what jumped out at me:
• Is your footer taking up space or making you money?
…oh! I could stick ads in it. Now to figure out which kinds for which sites.
Do you have an adsense search [...]

45n5 made me think this morning: am I monetizing my site every way possible?

From his list, here’s what jumped out at me:

• Is your footer taking up space or making you money?

…oh! I could stick ads in it. Now to figure out which kinds for which sites.

Do you have an adsense search box on each site? (or a site search that is monetized?)

You can do that? Well, I guess just because I hate AdSense ads doesn’t mean I should’ve ignored other products they were offering all this time. Must go check that out.

Did you check your stats lately and see if there are any errors?

Urgh. I do check my stats, and then I don’t know quite what I’m looking for. I find 404’s to pages I never created (but they’re not hacker spam pages, either, so where are these links coming from?). This is something I need to get educated about.

Go check out the list and see what you might be missing.

Espyder is a great source for free ebooks. Lots of stuff for webmasters, developers, and just people who use computers at work (I found an Excel guide that had some time-saving tips).
Go crazy!

Espyder is a great source for free ebooks. Lots of stuff for webmasters, developers, and just people who use computers at work (I found an Excel guide that had some time-saving tips).

Go crazy!

With the advent of Web 2.0 and approximately 15,000 new “social bookmark”, “clip” and Twitter-style services popping up every month, is blogging becoming, like, so 2006?
The overall impact of Web 2.0 is healthy, but blogging has matured and it’s peaked - just as we and others have suspected.
If true, it’s not that surprising. Web [...]

With the advent of Web 2.0 and approximately 15,000 new “social bookmark”, “clip” and Twitter-style services popping up every month, is blogging becoming, like, so 2006?

The overall impact of Web 2.0 is healthy, but blogging has matured and it’s peaked - just as we and others have suspected.

If true, it’s not that surprising. Web technology is developing at an astounding speed, and the very definition of what online is for, what we want from it, what we’d do with it if we had the technology, is shifting on a seasonal basis.

And yet, as some commentators in that thread point out:

That’s likely one element, but don’t you think people are starting to realize that quantity of posts isn’t the only measure of a good blog and starting to adjust their approach to posting accordingly?

And this one, which I think hits the spot:

To say blogging has peaked ‘could be’ a little premature to call. Maybe we need to re-define exactly what a blog is?

If I post my regular thoughts on a social network, how is that different than blogging? If I vlog on youtube everyday, is that not blogging?

Blogging has not peaked, it’s just morphed into something else and taken on a different form (and will continue to do so) from the original concept of a blog.

What is the fundamental concept of blogging? Is it the social interaction? Or does someone using WordPress to run a site full of affiliate products or an SEO business count as a blogger?

Personally, I think of it as social networking. By that definition, social networking - which includes but isn’t limited to blogs - is blooming like crazy and spreading like pollen. What does this mean to people trying to earn something online? Depends how you’re going about it. If you’re building social sites, you might want to explore options aside from blogging (or not, if blogging’s working for you - and let’s face it, people keep developing WordPress plugins to take advantage of every new-fangled social site). If you’re just building monetized sites, it’s hard to say whether the social sites are going to help you there. I don’t think people go to MySpace to shop for tires. Then again, what do I know?