On the other side I can’t deny and be ungrateful to the fact that there are thousands of other blogs that have a much smaller loyal following than mine. While as you can see from the Feedburner screenshot above, the rise of RSS subscribers to Inspiration Bit has been nice and steady, and with the exception of a couple of months this Spring, the numbers are continuously growing. This progress is far more significant than the actual feed count, especially given the fact that I spend much less time blogging this year than I did a year ago.

So how can bloggers increase their RSS subscription, what tips can I share with the readers? I think before finding the keys to the HOW question, it’s more important to answer the WHY and WHAT questions about RSS.

WHY

Unfortunately in a crazy race after more traffic, more subscribers, more comments many forget that bigger is not necessarily better. How many of the Top 100 blogs on Technorati list do you read on a regular basis? There are only a couple of them in my feed reader, only a dozen of them that I occasionally visit and read, another dozen that I’ve heard about but have no interest in reading, while the rest will remain unknown and unvisited for probably forever.

So why is it so pivotal to you to build your blog’s RSS feed count to thousands of subscribers, and is it that paramount to you at all? Is it the fame you are after, or the money making aspect of the blog is the one pushing you for more subscribers? Whatever it is don’t let the obsession over numbers take over the quality and the value of your posts and writing.

WHAT

What are the benefits of having a large number of subscribers, what impact does it have on a blog?

Obviously the high feed count is a great promotional tool for your blog. But with the larger audience your responsibility as a blogger grows as well. Are you ready to take on more roles and be that authority in your field of blogging? It’s very easy to fall into the trap of following the footsteps of other blogs in your quest to achieve the popularity and numbers that you crave, but is it the right path for you? Do you have what it takes (time, energy, commitment, big pool of ideas, knowledge) to stand out in the crowd, attracting new readers and keeping the existing ones happy?

HOW

By answering those questions you’ll be able to come up with your own strategies for building a solid readership around your blog. Study the tactics of your favourite blogs. Try them out on yours. See what works for you, what felt right for you?

One of the more popular and sure-fire methods to get more incoming links, comments, popularity with social networks and new readers nowadays is to publish ginormous lists of links on a certain topic. Certainly you can try that out yourself as well, but make sure you’ll follow it up with some quality original content. After all how many blogs can we handle that “smash” us with loads of links to follow and pictures to look at?

Another successful method that helps you to attract more business through your blog and gain authority in your niche is to share your business experience and knowledge with the readers, write about things you’ve learned, take them through your business processes.

The best strategy is to stop obsessing about the numbers and instead be committed to your blog’s success, be sincere and passionate what you write about. Be it the love of type or photography, the knowledge of graphic applications, the field of your study.

Ask yourself the question: “Would I subscribe to a blog like mine?”. If you’re brutally honest with yourself and your answer is yes, chances are other people would find it interesting enough to subscribe too. And so what if it takes you longer than for some other bloggers to build your loyal readership? The word of mouth, the link love and the loyalty of your readers will do the magic of spreading the word about your amazing blog. All you need to worry about is to keeping up the great work, being unique and genuine.

As for Inspiration Bit, while I do still check the feed count as soon as I turn on my computer, I’m not letting myself to be preoccupied with the numbers. I have big plans for this blog and when the time comes I’ll be ready to take it to the next level and be comfortable with the larger audience and increased responsibility.

What about you? How does your RSS saga look like?

The better approach would be to find out what’s the maximum allowable width for an image to fit nicely in your content area, and set/resize your images to that width. For example, on Inspiration Bit the safe width is 400px, so I try to set my images 400 px wide. There are cases though, when you don’t want or can’t end up with such a long image, then it’s best to set it to half or third of the maximum width and then align those images to the left or right of the content, letting the words to flow nicely and wrap around the image. Randa Clay has put together a very helpful tutorial on how to style images and how to align them with CSS. Finally, if you’re showcasing series of thumbnails, then set up multiples of them in rows of the same height, and equal widths.

Of course you can also let your imagination fly and come up with unusual ways to present your images. A BriefMessage, for examples, features a big image not only as a main element of each post, but the entire site as well. Displaying post’s metadata on top of the image seamlessly integrates the pictures with the overall design of the site. Jason Santa Maria aligned a huge image, 495 x 863 px to the left of the content on his recently re-designed site.

As part of my meticulous design series, I now present you with eight different ways to style images in your site.

1. CSS Drop Shadows

Ads Of The World is a site that’s all about visuals, so it’s not surprising that it pays attention to how the images are presented to viewers. All images here are wrapped in a frame with a drop shadow at the bottom. There is an extensive tutorial on A List Apart that teaches how to add flexible CSS drop shadows to your images. Ads Of The World has done it a bit differently: 3×3 px shadow.gif is tiled horisontally, and applied to the A tag, while the image itself is styled with borders, background colour and padding. Notice how the colours change when you mouseover the image.

.node-image .image a {
background:transparent url(images/shadow.gif) repeat-x;
}

.node-image .image img {
background:#E4EEF7;
border-color:#D9D9D9;
border-style:solid;
border-width:0pt 1px;
padding:12px;
}
.node-image .content a:hover img {
background:#FFE8CC;
}

2. Background image

SimpleBits approach is very simple yet effective and expandable: it’s using a tiled background image and padded picture. SimpleBits’ choice of the background image is hardly noticeable, looking more like a solid colour, however it doesn’t mean that you can’t experiment with more daring images to be used as a background.

div.photo img {
background:#E0E0D5 url(../img/bitstream/noise-earth.gif) repeat;
padding:1em;
width:49em;
}

3. background+border-top/bottom+padding

Nitram+nunca has come up with an interesting touch with its presentation of images: it’s displaying only the top and bottom borders in addition to the background colour and padding around the image. Different colours for the two borders make the pictures look embossed to the site.

.main .entry img {
background:#D9CFBD;
border-bottom:1px solid #FEFEFD;
border-top:1px solid #C9C5B3;
padding:5px 6px 6px;
}

4. Decorative Image Captions

DesignIntellection initiates a new way in using image captions with a semi-transparent layer at the top of the image. First of all, the DIV container with the class “post-image” is set with a position: relative, which allows an absolute positioning with the “title-date” span inside that DIV.

.post-image {
position: relative;
}

.post-image span.title-date {
background:transparent url(images/tnsp-black-65.png) repeat scroll 0pt 50%;
color:#FFFFFF;
font: 11px/16px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
margin:5px 0pt 0pt;
padding:5px 10px 5px 74px;
position:absolute;
left:0pt;
top:0pt;
}

#main .post-image p img {
border:5px solid #E7E2DF;
}

5. Dashed borders

Image styling on Antiphrasis is not at all complicated, but combined with a few delicate details it looks very effective. The images itself are simply padded with a dashed border, but because the majority of pictures there are transparent PNGs, they look very impressive, especially when you mouseover them and the background “flashes” at you with a different colour and the light dashed border turns orange and solid.

.article-img {
border:1px dashed #9EA8A8;
padding:10px;
}

.article-img-link:hover img {
background-color:#506262;
border:1px solid #F07800;
}

Cameron Moll also uses a dashed border on his site, with no frills — just a padded image on a white background.

.picC {
background:#FFFFFF;
border:1px dashed #999999;
padding:4px;
}

6. Book-like image captions

Kyle is using various techniques to style different kinds of images on Warpspire: featured post image is prominently displayed in the site’s header; some images in the posts have no accompanying captions, while others appear with book-like captions.

.figure {
background:#F5F5F5;
border:1px solid #DDDDDD;
line-height:0pt;
margin:19px 0pt 1em;
padding:2px;
text-align:center;
}

.figure small {
background:#DDDDDD;
color:#666666;
display:block;
font-size:10px;
line-height:12px;
margin:2px 0pt 0pt;
padding:5px 7px;
text-align:left;
}

You can get inspired by more images with captions over at Elements Of Design.

7. Images with Fixed Backgrounds

If you can prepare and always resize your images with the same width, you could apply a fixed fancy background image underneath. CarnivaleDuVin, for example, is showcasing the images in an ornate frame.

.entry img.hdr {
background:transparent url(../images/hdr-img.jpg) no-repeat;
margin:-8px 0pt 0pt -12px;
padding:24px 25px;
}

The Ernest Hemingway Collection on the other hand is featuring pictures framed like photos with shadows.

Recently Nick La posted a comprehensive tutorial on how to style images with CSS and set them within some very impressive frames.

8. Digital Image Editing

You can also go with a completely different route and style your images not with CSS but in any digital editing image software that you can get your hands on.

Jacob Caas cleverly crops all main post images in a shape of a pencil, similar to the one in his logo. John Boardley beautifully decorates the images on iLoveTypography with white on black captions.

Looking at all those original ideas helped me to choose how I would be styling images on Inspiration Bit after the re-design. Have you seen some other interesting ways in formatting images on the Web?

Ever since I started thinking of going solo (even before putting it down in writing), I was collecting various ideas for effective integration of my design business with my blog. To give you an update, in less than two months I’ll be running my small design studio full time, so I need to be thoroughly prepared for that.

There are many designers who managed to successfully establish an online business presence and gain authority and clients from all over the world. And what is a better way to learn than from the pros? I’ve interviewed six prominent designers to get the insider info on how to effectively blend blogging with business.

Essential puzzle pieces for business promotion online

Choosing the right name for the business is probably one of the hardest decisions we have to make. Do we use our own name for the business and blog or come up with a different one? And what if we already have a blog, but only later decide to promote our services online – do we just add our portfolio to the existing blog, or start a new one?

Aaron Russel recently launched a new blog/site to promote his freelance work rather than using his existing blog. “miLienzo.com was never intended as a platform from which build my freelance activities — it was only ever intended as my geeky experiment into the world of blogging”, explains Aaron. “Whilst miLienzo.com has become a successful blog in its own right, it kind of serves no purpose and a lot of my posts tend to be a bit random or personal — it’s certainly not optimised as a ’selling’ blog. With the new site, rather than just opening up and writing what I feel, I think to myself ‘what do I want to achieve?’ and I construct posts based on that objective. It’s all just a bit more strategic and serious.”

Of course, the most important piece that every designer needs to add to his site is Portfolio. Prospective clients must know what are we capable of. However, there are a few other things that should be taken into a consideration as well when constructing your business presence online.

“Feature selected work in blog posts, talking about different aspects and challenges of the project. Add testimonials to the sidebar. Thumbnails of recent work in the sidebar are a nice idea too”, suggests Randa Clay, who successfully juggles her design career with blogging and motherhood.

David Airey, the blogger whose name is quickly becoming synonymous with Logo Designer, cleverly included Hire Me and Testimonials pages to his blog. “Portfolios are great for showing the work you’ve done in the past, but for future projects, establishing trust and gathering project details are of great importance”, cautions David. “My ‘hire’ page includes a logo design questionnaire that starts every new project on the right foot. My ‘testimonials’ page puts a public face on those client quotes that are all too often fake in appearance.”

Many businesses started to recognize a great potential in blogs that allow them to add something very important to their web sites that was lacking before. Tara from a popular Graphicdesignblog quickly noticed that and advises others to follow her steps: “What is useful about a blog, for prospective clients, is that not only do they get to see your work but they get to see a slice of your personality — from both how you write and how you respond to comments. I like to show my design case studies now and then as this shows my thinking process to clients. By showing how I work from my own initial sketches (generally not shown to the client) to concepts, to final design prospective clients can get a feel for how their design project would progress. This is especially useful for clients who don’t generally commission design”.

Another useful tip that designers who blog can adopt is to have a business “frontpage” for their site as a starting point instead of the recent blog post. Check out Aaron’s new site as a great example of this approach, who calls his homepage a ’shop window’:”I’ve dedicated the homepage to selling my services. The design tries to funnel visitors through a path of targeted content and ultimately to my client questionnaire contact form. Blogs are great for slowly building an ‘authority’ and positioning yourself as an expert, but ultimately if someone who has never heard of you is searching for your services and lands on your site through an organic search result, they will want to land on a page outlining what you do and why they should hire you, not your latest blog post.”

Blogging is perfect not only for established designers but for students as well. It is probably the quickest and least risky way to try out some freelancing on a side while you’re still studying your craft. Jacob Cass from Just Creative Design can serve as a role model here. In just a few months this design student from Australia has already built a name for himself not only as a creative young designer but also a prolific blogger with a high traffic blog and over a dozen of memorable guest blogging appearances on several prominent blogs.

“I blog about my design process and teach others what I have learnt”, shares Jacob, “I also have a hire me and portfolio pages. I recently added a testimonials page to show what others think about working with me, which is another great way to gain trust in your new potential clients. To narrow it down to just one point: you should practice what you preach.” On the other hand Jacob admits that “there are so many different ways to promote yourself and each does it in their own different ways so what may work for me may not work for someone else.”

Jon Tan, a respected designer who is well-known for his superb eye for Typography and as an avid supporter of web standards, gives an excellent summary of what are the better ways of promoting one’s design services via his/her blog: “I think it depends on context, audience persona, and business objectives but in a nutshell: Share your knowledge to be employed to implement it.”

How to build a skillful and imposing portfolio

Having an impressive portfolio will definitely boost your credibility and demand as a designer, but what if we were too busy working or studying full time and haven’t had a chance to score that many interesting projects that we could proudly display in our portfolio section?

“Do some pro-bono work, or just make up some dummy companies and design for them and put those items in your portfolio”, recommends Randa Clay, “Title the portfolio that is available something like ‘Samples of My Work’, even if it’s everything you’ve ever done. This is not meant to be a deceptive step, but there’s no reason to advertise the fact that you have a limited body of work.”

David Airey is another supporter of pro-bono work: “Patience is key, and I’d highly recommend pro-bono work for those with ‘thin’ portfolios. Contacting local non-profit organisations and offering your services is great for a number of reasons. It builds confidence, creates local business contacts, offers real-world experience (including valuable feedback), and should also be for a worthy cause.”

Students-designers should definitely check out Jacob’s portfolio to see how he integrated his personal works with the real-world examples. “You should always try to build up your portfolio”, encourages Jacob, though he recognizes that “there are a number of problems behind doing this (i.e. no computer skills, cash problems, etc.)”, so he wrote an article on where to get paid design work for students.

How to differentiate feasible clients from impractical ones?

The first question that comes to mind when getting a business inquiry is how do you decide whether someone who approaches you with a potential design work is a viable and committed client. Everyone has his/her own tactics in spotting when something or someone is too good to be true. Often it’s only a matter of time and experience when we learn how to turn down an offer that we don’t feel too good about.

You might follow Jacob’s advise: “You never know for sure so you should treat all clients with the same respect and then you will start to build a relationship up with them. Ever heard of the 80/20 rule? 80% of your work will come from 20% of your clients.”

For David it’s a simple matter of clients doing their research before contacting him: “Addressing me by my name is a great start. You’d be surprised how many emails I receive that sound cold and abrasive. It’s a common courtesy to start an email with ‘Hello David’ (or something similar). It’s not like my name is hidden away. It’s easy to differentiate a hastily written email from a professional one, and if someone rushes through what they’re saying, chances are good they want a cheap and fast identity design.”

First impression can definitely predict the outcome of an inquiry, as well as the transparency of those who request a quote on a project that we’ve never heard about before.

“It’s easy to get frustrated and bogged down trying to work with people who are not good clients. I rely heavily on the way that they first communicate with me, as well as who referred them to me”, observes Randa, “For example, when I get an e-mail from someone calling themselves ‘Slider’ simply saying, ‘I need a blog design- what do you charge?’, it does not give me the impression they will be a good client to work with. Someone who is likely to be a good client will have a ‘real’ name, communicate their needs well, and have at least a general idea of what they’re looking for in a design. A good client will also not balk at the idea of paying a percentage of the design fee up front. This demonstrates that they are committed to me as a designer and that they understand the value of a designer’s time.”

So looks like we’ve established the two key components that every client should have: they should know our real name, and they ought to sign the email with their own real name, as well as the name and the nature of their business. What else?

Tara takes the initial communication one step further: “When I get asked to quote a design job via my blog I generally send back a list of a few questions about their requirements. Some people don’t bother responding to the questions. If they aren’t prepared to spend the time answering a few questions it’s not worth pursuing. I will sometimes also ask if they have a budget to try and cut out people who want a $50 logo. Once I have the information I need I send a quote to the potential client and have been lucky that the new clients I have made from my blog have been good to work with and pay on time.”

Having a ready to be sent client questionnaire on your site is a quicker alternative to speed up the process of filtering the clients and getting the right and complete list of project requirements in the first place. This is an approach that makes Aaron’s life of a designer much easier: “By asking potential clients to complete a questionnaire form you will automatically filter a fair amount of these less committed clients, but other than that it’s down to intuition. To be honest I think it’s fairly easy to spot the genuine enquiries, but what is less easy is to act on your gut instinct and say ‘thanks but no thanks’ – especially so if you are going through a baron patch when the temptation to take on any work is strong.”

#1 tip for the efficient integration of blogging with business?

I’ve asked my interviewees to give their best tips on effective blogging with business in mind. “Practice what you preach”, eloquently put Jacob.

Once you decided on using your blog as another marketing tool for your business, try not to neglect it and update as much as possible. “The benefit of this is that Google loves Wordpress blogs and your site will come out higher in searches”, discloses Tara, “My blog is currently number 2 for Google UK for the term ‘graphic design’ which is something I would never have achieved with a basic website.” Now this is definitely something to be proud about, isn’t it?

“Blogging does consume huge amounts of time”, admits Aaron, “No matter how organised you are, by committing to write a blog you are committing to many hours of work a week. When you add it up this can amount to half a working day to even an entire working day. However, blogging can be a very powerful marketing/publicity tool and best of all it doesn’t really cost anything. Therefore as busy freelancers juggling several projects at once, we need to accept the value of blogging and with that accept the time commitments. Put time aside to strategically think about what your next week’s posts will be, dedicate time to write and proof your articles, and publish them to a schedule.”

Giving a “face” to your business is a strategy that proved to be successful for many designers. “People like to work with people they feel they know and like”, reveals Randa, “Put your picture on your blog, either on your front page or ‘about me’ page. Be personable and likable in your post writing. Use your blog to network with and get to know other designers and potential clients.”

It can never be stressed enough that networking to business is like water to fish — your business can’t survive without networking.

On the other hand, don’t make your business blog too personal. “Keep it relevant”, cautions David, “That’s not to say you shouldn’t add some personality to your blog, but if your business is design, don’t write articles about the local council’s new sewage policy (unless they’ve created a swanky new logo).” From myself I would add that having a good sense of humour can never hurt your business, but only enhance it.

An important concept in any business is to adopt whatever works for you the best. Sometimes narrowing down and focusing on specific services will make you stand out in the competitive world of designers. At first David Airey was offering a broad range of services, but then decided to focus on “logo / identity design”, and that’s when he became a sought after graphic designer. When I asked him whether or not he would advise others to follow his path, he gave an honest answer: “The truth is, logo design is what I enjoy most, so it makes sense to narrow my focus. Advice for others? Do what you love, and put all your effort into it. Spreading yourself thin can lead to project outcomes that undersell your true skills.”

For students-designers Jacob gives this advice: “I know a few student design bloggers, however they post more of just their work, which really doesn’t provide anything for the person reading it, it is mere an eye candy. If you provide your readers with more, such as your design process or some tips or how you went about doing things, then this provides them with something they can learn from.” To see his advice in action check out Jacob’s post on Font Flags Specimen Sheets. By turning this article into a resource, he got it ranked #1 on Google for “font specimen sheet” keywords.

Designer challenges

As in every profession designers face lots of challenges. The best thing that can happen is we learn from our mistakes (and hopefully others as well), the worse case scenario is we keep doing them over and over again until one day we get wiser.

For Jon Tan the most challenging things in design & blogging are “Time, learning and the last 10%: Our business moves so quickly, and covers such broad and deep areas of expertise; Finding time to research and write in depth, as opposed to a quick skim of the blogosphere and a bookmark or two, is a problem. I often read material that is not well researched, but audience-hunting or link bait. Properly researched material is a joy, but takes time to absorb, and publish. Our business is 80% science and 20% art. There are a lot of articles published that concentrate on the art, but I’d love to have more time to study the science, and add to it myself. The last 10% refers to polish. In combination with time spent researching and prototyping where the best ideas are born, the last 10% is where they truly come to life. That, and the final 10% is the art, and require more time and serenity of thought than is often available.”

“Trying to get an accurate brief from a client” is one of the most challenging tasks for Tara. “Some clients are great and provide lots of information, others are incredibly vague (even if you send them a questionnaire) and give you very little idea what they want.” Another hard decision to make for Tara, as well as many other designers, including myself, is providing the right quote: “sometimes it’s really hard to judge how long creative work will take, you don’t want to charge too much but also don’t want to undersell yourself.”

It almost became a common problem for every designer: we’re so busy working on client projects and dealing with various business-related tasks on a daily basis, that we hardly find time for our own sites and projects. So many times I’ve witnessed the fact that a successful designer has scrambled to find time only for his/her own web site to have only one page with coming-soon-here-are-my-contact-details info.

“Finding time to work on my own projects” is a challenge for David as well. “I enjoy working with clients, but I don’t intend to do it forever. Ultimately I want to set up some projects that bring in passive income, but I have a way to go yet. Sometimes I just have to tell prospective clients I’m too busy, in which case I’d refer them to another designer.”

Aaron confesses that “new challenges present themselves all the time”. “From a freelancer point of view, one month the challenge might be finding where the next piece of work is going to come from, whereas the next month the challenge is organising your workload due to the sheer volume of work. Then from a designer point of view there are practical challenges like learning new applications, technologies and skills, or often the challenge is wondering where your inspiration has gone and combating self doubt.”

So how should we overcome those difficulties on a daily basis? “All these challenges are dealt with by being adaptable and believing in yourself”, convinced Aaron. “Being a freelance designer requires the wearing of many hats, and to be successful at whatever you do for a living requires a confident and assured approach to your work.”

Over to you, my readers, now – what tips do you have for others about some of the ways that you personally found working in building your online business presence?

Nowadays you don’t have to be a graphic designer to have a need in manipulating images. Whether you have a website, or a blog to upload images to you, at least, need a quick way to resize the images to fit your site’s layout. But not everyone can afford or know how to work with Photoshop, or even download and install one of the popular free graphic applications like Gimp. What if I told you that you can not only resize but touch up your images online within a comfort of your browser?

Picnik

My colleague, Jennifer, told us today about this cool Firefox extension that lets you edit any image in a free online image editor called Picnik. I immediately got it installed, and set to try it out.

Turns out that you can integrate Picnic not only with Firefox but also with Internet Explorer. You can go to Picnik Tools and download the needed extension for your browser.

Afterwards you can simply right-click on an image in the browser and edit it in Picnik, then save it and upload to your site. The cool thing is that it also works as a standalone online application, that can be easily integrated with your Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket accounts.

It takes a bit of time to load that image the first time, but then everything runs very smoothly. You can manipulate not only the online images but the local ones from your computer as well.

Here’s what you can do with Picnik:

• Under PHOTOS section you can get images from your computer, from a website by providing a URL to the image, by performing a Yahoo or Flickr search, you can even edit photos taken by your WebCam, access your Facebook and Picasa photos.
• Under EDIT section you can Rotate, Crop, Resize your images, or tune their Exposure, Colors, Sharpen or fix the Red-Eye.
• Under CREATE section you can add some Basic Image Effects like converting them to Black&White, Sepia, creating a Vignette. You can even add a text to your images with some Basic fonts, add shapes, do some touch-ups, and enclose them into some basic frames.
• You can also get access to more advanced features (more effects, more fonts and frames to choose from) for $24.95 per year.
• Under Save & Share section you can either save the final results to your computer (supported formats are JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PDF, Tiff), or send it by email, even email to your website (if applicable), or store to your Flickr account.

So here you go. Now you have no excuse of not sprucing your blogs with some photos or screenshots in a size that won’t break the layout of your site.

While playing with Picnik I’ve discovered some other similar online image editing applications and I’m planning on doing a review on all of them in a near future. Let me know what you think of Picnik and whether you know of any other handy online image manipulators.

Today I want to share with you eight phenomenal blogs whose authors managed to uncover a smarter way to blog.

Reading and watching these blogs’ progress and gain in popularity make me question myself as a blogger, the purposefulness and usefulness of my blog. They make my inner voice loud and clear: “Vivien, if you don’t smarten up and start paying more attention to your blog, one day soon you’ll wake up to only a few dozens of RSS readers of your blog, who’d stay with you only because they’re your friends and won’t have a heart to unsubscribe”. (oh, yeah, smarty pants… will you be the one taking care of my family, work and clients then?… but then there are others who have jobs and families, and somehow they do manage to find time for everything, so I guess it’s time for me to stop making the excuses and learn, learn from others, from those who found the smarter ways to blog.)

1. Become part of the blogiverse before launching your own blog

If only I could turn back the time when I started this blog, I would do exactly what Lauren Marie did before launching her very informative blog CreativeCurio. She made a name for herself by actively commenting and participating in discussions on various blogs before starting blogging herself. It looked like she was everywhere, showing up on many blogs as one of the Top Commentators. She also appeared as a guest writer on a couple of blogs, including Inspiration Bit. After only a few months she already made many friends among bloggers and everybody was impatiently waiting for Lauren to launch her own graphic design blog. So from the very first post on CreativeCurio she already had a big and loyal following. Lauren continues her lively participation on other blogs and she never ceases to amaze me with her knowledge and valuable posts on CreativeCurio.

2. Explore and be active with Social Networks

This is definitely something that I have yet to work on – my social networks. I do have accounts on digg, del.icio.us, flickr, facebook, reddit and a few others, but I never quite managed to study and use them more efficiently and incorporate to my blogging life. Brian Auer however has cleverly integrated his social networking skills with blogging strategies and turned his photography blog Epic Edits Weblog into a successful site, always sharing with his readers what are his favourite photography blogs, which Flickr photographers does he admire and brings his readers together to work on various interesting photography projects that are immediately dugg to Digg’s front page.

3. Get a clone and guest write on as many popular blogs as you can

This newcomer to the blogging scene has already managed to blow me off my seat. Skellie has launched her blog Skelliewag only in July 2007, but she already has over 1100 RSS subscribers who can’t get enough of her practical posts. Her biggest achievement though is that she’s already a regular contributor on such popular blogs like Problogger, Copyblogger, DailyBlogTips, Zen Habits, NorthxEast and several others. Skellie, could you please share with us where did you order a clone for yourself, how do you manage to be here, there and everywhere?

4. Blog for business

With today’s obsession of many bloggers to blog for money, blogs that are cleverly used to attract more business are slowly but surely securing their place in the modern business model. David Airey is a perfect example of how a graphic designer can not only find time to host a successful blog but also use it to attract more clients for his expanding business. David has certainly refined the art of advertising his design skills and portfolio by making it helpful for thousands of his readers. His tips on the creative process behind designing a logo for clients have become somewhat legendary.

5. Convey your passion to the readers

Try searching for the term “typography” on Google, and you’ll get more than 26 million results, but the link #7 would be the one and only typography site that will turn you into a Typoholic and add you to the list of over 5000 RSS Typenuts on iLoveTypography.com. John Boardley has achieved something that many bloggers can only dream of. In only a couple of months he became one of the most authoritative figures in his niche, he’s a sought after blogger whom many high ranked bloggers can’t wait to guest write on their blogs. What was so different about John’s blog? After all it wasn’t a totally unique idea, there are many typography sites online. His mind-blowing success is another proof that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel to make your mark in life, just be passionate and know how to transcend your fascination with your favourite subjects onto others.

6. Pick a catchy and familiar name with a twist for your blog and be proactive

Many bloggers desperately want to become a problogger and learn all the tricks and tips from PROs on how to monetize their blogs and make it as big as Darren himself. There were many who are preaching that content is everything, that it’s a king you have to worship. Then comes this young guy, Michael Martin, and starts convincing everyone that “Content is King of course, but does the King get the attention he deserves when draped in ragged garments?”. First he comments on LOTS of blogs, then he finally launches his own blog, with an oh, so familiar title, but adds his own twist to it and calls it ProBlog Design, where he talks how to professionally address the design of our blogs. Afterwards he pitches several articles to the ProBlogger himself and the rest is history. He launched his blog in August 2007, received his first comment from none other but Liz Strauss, and is listed on blogrolls of several famous sites including Smashing Magazine.

7. Hire professional writers for your blog

Freelancing has never been as popular as it is now. There’s lots of information online on this subject, yet there hasn’t been one dedicated site with helpful articles directed at freelancers until FreelanceSwitch was launched in April 2007. One of the blog’s founders was Collis Ta’eed who at that time was running a personal blog, but later converted it into a popular blog about blogging NorthxEast, that was put up for auction in September on SitePoint and was sold for a whopping $8,200 on October 5, 2007. FreelanceSwitch has seven Regular Writers and eleven Casual Contributors, so keeping up with daily posts is not a problem at all. They also started a Job Board for Freelancers, a Forum, and recently published a book, A Complete How To Guide to Freelance. Looks like FreelanceSwitch doesn’t need to see a light at the end of the tunnel, the entire tunnel is brightly lit for them.

8. Start posting daily tips

Just please, no more tips on blogging – Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips had that idea first and turned it into a successful blogging empire in less than a year. Now he doesn’t have to blog daily anymore, he’s got all those guest writers who are happy to write for his blog. But since Daniel is such a hard working guy, he started another blog, this time with DailyWritingTips, although it’s only half as popular as its predecessor. I guess bloggers don’t really like to spend much time on improving their grammar. So if you want to follow Daniel’s steps to success, then be proactive and launch DailyDesignTips (you know what? just out of curiousity I checked this domain and it’s available, so sorry folks, but I just purchased it. when will I have time to do anything with it, that’s another story) or DailyFoodTips or DailyBusinessTips – you got the idea :-)

So here you go, do you have any other smarter ways to blog?
A couple of things that I noticed with those blogs is that some of them hit it really big with their huge one hundred one or ten lists in the very beginning of their blogging career, like 101 Essential Freelancing Resources, or 110 Resources For Creative Minds, or 101 Blog Tips I learned in 2006.
And guess what was the #101 tip on Daniel’s list? Right – “create a 101 list” :-)

Another thing is that most of those bloggers are very down to earth and answer to most if not all readers’ comments. So good luck to all of you. I’m definitely learning a lot from all those bloggers. Now if I could only get rid of this terrible cold of mine and learn how to squeeze 36 hours into a 24 hours day, then I would have a better chance to try out some of the things I’ve learned in practice.

Now, without further ado, let me pass the torch to the great Simonne herself and find out what she has to say about optimizing your blog for search engines, and how you and I can capitalize on some lucrative keyword phrases that land many new readers on our blogs and how can we actually make them stay.

Blog SEO

by Simonne

Do you remember Middle Age barons, with all those crests representing their family?
Your blog is like one of those crests. Your online symbol, standing out for your values and beliefs, it tells the world your story. I’m not talking here about your splogs (which many of us have tried at least once in our blogging life). I’m talking about your main blog, your flagship site, the one you want to turn into an authority in its niche.

I’m going to say something obviously stupid now: for people to read your blog, they first have to be aware it exists. Do you know how do people find your blog? Most of your readers would probably fall under one of the following categories:

1. You (Who doesn’t read his/her blog again every now and then? I surely do, and I think others do it too)
2. Feed subscribers
3. Loyal readers who bookmarked it, or know the address and type it directly in their browser
4. Readers of other blogs that linked to yours
5. People who received a link to one of your posts from their friends
6. People who spend a big slice of their life on Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and other similar sites, looking for news in the online world
7. People who use search engines

Look at your statistics: can you tell what percentage of your visits come from each of these categories?

What do you communicate to each category? Do you fulfill their expectations?

• For # 1, you should know better.
• For # 2-6, supposing that all people who link to you and who spread the word about your blog understood what it is about, you do fulfill your audience’s expectation. If you have a good site usability, then you can say you offer these readers a useful and pleasant experience.
• What about category # 7? Do you know what those people are looking for when they bump into your blog?

There are several ways to check the keywords which bring visitors to your blog, such as Google Analytics, or 103bees, or Statcounter (all of them are free).
If you use a tracking program, go check your stats now. Do you like what you see? Maybe you rank first for keywords you’ve never thought. If almost all searches are for things you’ve never written about, maybe you should give it a little thought.

What’s the use of being number one on the search engines results pages for “Thai recipes” when your blog is about making money online? Supposing I’m an ordinary person looking for Thai cooking recipes and I find this site of yours, which tells me that the recipe of my online success is to sign up with I-don’t-know-which Thai
advertising network. I’ve wasted my time. What if in the same situation, your blog is about cooking in the Thai style? You’ve just made me a happy reader. I’d bookmark your site, because I cook every day.

There was this saying which I liked very much, although I don’t remember who said it first: “luck is when preparation meets opportunity“. Paraphrasing it, I would say SEO is preparing your site for the opportunity of getting loyal readers.

There’s been a lot of talk around the topic of how to handle blogs SEO. While bloggers rely less and less on search traffic, and try to either develop their teaching skills or to build authority sites, yet a minimum of SEO applied to your site can attract a significant bunch of targeted readers, without becoming painful or time-consuming for you.

This is an easy blog SEO guide for bloggers who don’t want or don’t have the time to learn what it takes to become an expert in SEO:

1. Titles:

   as titles are the most important element of on-page optimization, make sure they contain words that people may type in to find your post. SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin may be helpful, as it allows defining custom title tags. (Note: the title tag can be different from your post’s title; it is the text that appears in the most upper part of your browser, and for the Wordpress default installs, it displays the name of the blog, followed by the name of the post. This is not OK from SEO standpoint, because it may lead to search engines considering many of your pages as duplicates, and put them into supplemental results)

2. Permalinks:

   include in them the most relevant words for each post. If you don’t like the automatic permalink given by Wordpress, you can edit it manually, in your Write New Post screen, under the Post Slug box (in the right sidebar of the post editor). It’s better to have static, rather then dynamic permalinks, and you may want to change their structure from /month/day/postname to category/postname. Please make sure you backup your blog before attempting changes in the permalinks structure, as it is very easy to mess up
   everything.

3. Internal link anchors:

   when you link to your older posts, make sure you define the link on those words which are the most significant for that old post. However, links should be informative and not misleading. Don’t forget here that you can use the Related Posts plugin to improve internal linking across your blog.

Leaving aside the permalinks structure (which I have chosen to leave it like it was when I started my blog, after repeated trial-error sequences), paying attention at these details is not very time consuming, while the results in terms of targeted traffic attraction can be very satisfying.

As an example, my blog accomodates an average of 13000 monthly visitors, about 43% of them coming from organic search. This means that, depending on my SEO skills, I can make 6000 people happy or sad because they landed on my blog, every month.

Additional tip: when choosing a representative keyword phrase for your post, check it with freekeywords.wordtracker.com, maybe you’ll discover a similar phrase which has a bigger search volume (why not maximize your results, if you invest so much time in your blog after all?)

Last, but not least, what do you do if you spot in your long tail that you rank well for an interesting phrase? Let’s say one of your thought provoking posts ranks 7th in Google for “thought provoking questions” and you like the idea that people find your blog for this search query. Let’s see how we can get more natural traffic for this phrase:

1. We can link to that post from other articles on the same blog, using the anchor text “thought provoking questions” (you’ve just seen this implemented in this very article). This will increase the number of links pointing to the post in question, and it will also display under it trackbacks of the new posts, with small excerpts, which will most probably contain the anchor phrase. This should be enough to move it at least one-two positions up on the search engine results page.
2. We can slightly adjust the post title, so instead of “8 Pulsating Thought Provoking Questions From Blogiverse”, we could have “8 Thought Provoking Questions From Blogiverse” or even better, “8 Thought Provoking Questions”. The idea is that the keyphrase we want to rank better for should be ideally at the beginning of the title. The title should contain as little additional words as possible, thus increasing the weight of the keyphrase within the title. If after we see Google indexed the change, we don’t rank better, we try other variant, until we get promoted.
3. If we really like that particular keyphrase, why not including it on every post, like for example, by replacing “Please leave your comments here” with “Thought provoking comments”. Be careful, though, not to mislead your readers, because you might not like the thought you’ve just provoked in them ;)

Do you consider SEO for your blog? Which is your best blog SEO tip you’d like to share with us? If you are not sure, check out what kind of SEO you are, and come back to tell us your result.

What is the one common thing that all web site and blog owners hate? You're right - Spam. We all use Contact or Comment forms to interact with the site's visitors, but ending up as perfect targets for spammers to annoy the heck out of us.

There are different ways to fight the spam, some are helpful, others not. One of the popular methods is to use a CAPTHA, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
However to make captchas efficient they have to be very hard to read by generating an image of a few random letters, using colours, distorted letters. Why? Because there are already several scripts used by spam bots that can OCR simple captchas in no time. The problem with this method is that many use captchas that even humans have a hard time recognizing, which is very frustrating.

Other methods include an addition of a simple skill-testing question that only humans can answer. I used this method myself on this blog, asking people about the number of letters in the word "inspiration". The problem with this one is sometimes even humans make mistakes answering these questions (simply due to not paying much attention to them) and often losing the entire comment when clicking back to correct the answer, which is very exasperating.

When browsing some Russian websites (one of the benefits of being multilingual) I stumbled upon one very interesting article: Antispam with no Captcha, which talked about a very different method of dealing with spam. I've decided to try it out, tested it on Inspiration Bit and now highly recommend you to do the same.

The idea behind this method is that most spam bots are trying to fill out every field in your forms. So what we can do is trick the bots by adding a couple of new fields to the form, but hiding them from our readers with the CSS code "display:none". And then validate them in PHP (or any other server-side programming language you use to validate the forms). If those fake hidden fields (hidden by CSS, not input type=hidden in HTML) get filled and contain some data, then we're getting a response from a bot, so we block it by rejecting the form submission, since humans can't see those fields and leave them blank.

However, those bot scripts are getting smart with it and very appropriately fill out only fields titled "email", "comments" and other titles that we usually use in our contact and comment forms. So it is important to use not just any name but the real-sounding names for our fake fields and use fake-sounding names for our "real" fields. When I've added a field, titled "email2" and hid it with CSS, it did reduce my spam, but I was still getting a few spams a day. So then I've left fields "email" and "comments" for spam bots to fill and hid them from humans, and created "ibitletter" and "ibitmsg" for the actual email and comment fields for humans in my comment form. This worked like a charm - no more than 3 spams a day.

To compare: without any spam prevention methods on my blog Akismet was catching up to 30-40 spams a day, with my skill-test question, it was reduced to 5-8 spams a day. With altering the comments form by adding the fake fields to trick the bots, the spam on my blog was further reduced to 2-3 spams a day. That's quite an improvement, don't you think so? The fact that I'm still getting some spam most probably indicates that those comments were filled out manually.

So here are my steps:

Update the HTML part of the code in your comments.php file by going to Dashboard->Presentation->Theme Editor (erase the comments in your code, I've used them here just to make it more clear for you what is where):

Add the following CSS code to your styles.css file:

Open and edit the PHP code in your wp-comments-post.php file (it's located in the root folder of your website):

So give it a try and let me know how it worked for you.

Update: I just found another helpful article that talks about a similar alternative to fighting spam, this one is using a so-called The Invisible Captcha Mechanism (ICM). Definitely worth checking that one out.

The community of readers plays an essential role in shaping up a blog. It often gives the blog a direction it never had before, it makes the blogger to be responsible for the quality and the content of the articles posted on the site. Many bloggers confess that they draw inspiration from their readers.

So how do you create a community that will inspire you, how do you build lasting relationships with your readers that can evolve into something bigger than a formal blogger-reader connection?

1. Get To Know Your Readers

I was going through the archives on my blog, trying to determine when did I start getting all those insightful comments and regular readers of Inspiration Bit. As soon as I started getting some interaction on my blog (within the first couple weeks of blogging), I immediately wanted to know more about my readers and connect with them. There are many different ways to do so, you don't have to do them all at once, or with every reader, find the way that you feel comfortable with and go for it:

• write a post and ask your readers to tell a little bit about themselves
• Spend more than just a few seconds on your commentor's website
• Comment on your new reader's site after moderating his/her first comment on your blog. You may not become their regular reader, but that first connection, a simple Hello, can be very important.
• Send an email, with something more than a 'Thank you' note. Perhaps, ask some questions about their site or the topics that they cover, or compliment on their site's layout.
• No matter what you choose to learn more about your readers, be absolutely sincere with them in your comments, your posts, your emails. Remember, if you can sense a fake tone in your words and actions, they can "smell" it too.

2. Engage Your Readers

You don't have to do it with every article you write, but from time to time pose questions to your readers, ask their opinion about the topics you write about, engage them into conversations. Sometimes readers are too shy to comment, but you can encourage them to do so with your sincere questions and interest in their opinion.

It should be a common sense by now, that you should try your best to reply to as many comments on your blog, as you can. Don't you like when other bloggers reply to your comments? It's that simple: treat your readers the way you want and like to be treated as a reader.

However, don't just reply to your readers' comments with a plain Thank you. They've already initiated a conversation by expressing their opinion on your post's subject matter. Carry on with that conversation, interact with them.

3. Accept and even invite a constructive criticism

You can't expect everyone to agree with you, your likes or dislikes. Sometimes you would get some not-so-flattering comments. You can agree or disagree with your readers, but never insult nor attack them personally. You can argue with what has been said, but not who said it.

4. Be confident, but Be humble

You must be confident in your skills (blogging, writing, designing, coding), be convincing about the topics you write about, but don't be obnoxious. You might be expert in one field, but fail in others, don't assume that you know everything there is to know about topics you specialize in. Don't think that readers owe you their comments or time simply because you spend time writing for them, perhaps teaching them. Don't preach your readers, but guide them.

Be humble. There's no need in drilling into your readers how smart or funny you are, they can judge themselves.

5. Show your human side

Don't be afraid to show your human side. We are all still humans in this limitless blogiverse, not some blogorobots. If you have doubts in anything, feel free to ask your readers for help or advice.

Do not hesitate to show your funny side, but don't try being funny either. Everyone appreciates a good sense of humour if you have one. Inject a bit of humour not only to your articles but to the comments you leave on other blogs. One of my readers started reading my blogs and later became my friend because he found my comments on his blog amusing, and he emailed me personally to thank for not being afraid to add some humour to my comments.

6. Give back to your readers

Everyone loves contests and competitions. When I participated in the Reader Appreciation Week organized by RA Project I had no idea what a hard work it is to run different contests every day of the week, but how much fun it is for everyone, especially for your readers. Don't limit your interaction with readers only to contests. Organize competitions, launch group writing projects. Everyone wins in the end, there are no losers when people are getting together to share their experience, compete and take on challenges.

I'm entering this post to Daniel's group writing project. If I win, I'll monetize my next group writing project as well, and share the money with you all. However, there is still time left to participate in my group writing project: Time Management. What you'll get is something that money can't buy - time management tips from real life gurus.

Talk about your readers in your posts, link to your readers' sites. Introduce your loyal readers to regular visitors of your site, promote their sites, their projects. Contribute to the discussions on your readers' blogs. If the Internet is a network of computers, the blogiverse is the network of people. By building your network, you'll be expanding your blog's community.

7. Inspire Your Readers

You don't have to name your blog Inspiration Bit to inspire your readers. Inspire them with your writing, excite them with your topics, motivate them with your conversations, talk about what inspires you and share your excitement with them.

8. Be irresistible

I remember back in school there was this guy in my class who had the most contagious laughter I've ever heard in my life. You just couldn't resist him when he was laughing out loud, he would make you not just smile, but laugh with him.

That's the secret ingredient in the successful recipe for building a loyal following - be irresistible, find what makes you enticing and different, what is your magnet in luring people to you. Make your readers to want more from you - more stories, more humour, more arguments, more help, more of You.

I've probably missed out on some other important pieces in the relationships puzzle, but I'll let my readers to fill in for me. What do you think are the essential blocks in building lasting relationships with your blog's readers?

Since about the middle of the twentieth century our society became obsessed with headlines. They are everywhere: on the magazine covers, newspapers, most of the news stations start their program with headlines. If you want a story to get noticed it has to be announced pompously in all its glory.

In blogiverse writing arresting eye-catching headlines is beyond obsession, it's a matter of life or death of your article. If you're not yet convinced about it, then 7 Compelling Reasons Why Your Headlines Need To LEAP Off The Page will surely make you think more than twice before you hit that Publish button again.

So what's the secret formula to writing captivating headlines? You'd think that after reading all those how-to guides from gurus like Copyblogger and Modern Life we should be all PROs by now. But we're still getting glued to another article on how to write headlines and search Google for answers and feverishly click on articles like How to write headlines even a corpse would read.

Then there's also that nagging question on everybody's mind: Do you write your headlines first and the article follows or should you come up with the title later or at the end? Check out the discussions on David Airey's blog on Do you start or end with a headline. As you can see you shouldn't just follow Brian Clark's advice to Always Write Your Headline First, but apply it to your particular case. If you're dawned with a perfect headline before writing the actual article, then of course, go ahead and use it. But never miss the chance of going back and re-evaluating your initial title before finalizing it.

Among those comments Aaron's point stood out in my memory:

In the media headlines are normally written after the article. That’s not to say that the journalist won't write with a headline in mind and put a headline to their work, but as soon as it gets to the editor the headline will be reviewed and probably rewritten by someone else.

Very often I start my articles with a title, save it in my drafts and get back to it later, completing into a full article. On a few rare occasions do I stick with the original title, usually it evolves based on the actual content and the direction my article ended up taking afterwards. Take this post for example - here's the evolution of my headline:

• Untitled (how do you come up with titles, after you finish the post, before you start, or in-between? How would you title this post?)
• How To Come Up With Eye-Catching Titles
• Writing Headlines That Catch Your Eyes
• Secret Formula To Writing Headlines That Catch Your Eyes

How would you title this post?

Just like in programming there are two completely opposite approaches in writing the code: top-down and bottom-up, each one comes with its own advantages and drawbacks, and depending on the task you chose one or another or come up with a mixed solution.

The Secret Formula

So what's the secret formula of success in writing mesmerizing headlines that stand out among millions of other headlines. Well, the secret is in the title of this post: Writing Headlines That Catch YOUR Eyes. Your own eyes, not search engines, not your readers, not diggers, but your OWN eyes. Why? Because YOU are using search engines to find certain answers, YOU too are reading hundreds of blogs in your RSS, YOU too click on only catchy headlines on Digg or other blogs. How do YOU make your choice on which article is worth reading, which headline has caught your attention? What do you base your decisions on? Who's brainwashed and trained better than YOU are on how the eye-catching headlines look like? Who knows your blog's audience better than you?

So go ahead, read what others teach you about writing magnetic headlines, learn from pros, magazine covers, newspapers, but in the end YOU will be the one making the final decision on what would be the best headline for your article. And to help you with that, here's a handy list of things to keep in mind:

1. Try coming up with several variations for your headline
2. Search Google for some keywords in your headline and compare the resulting titles with your own. Which one of your variations would stand out in those search results?
3. Go to Digg and scan the popular articles. Would YOU notice your headline there?
4. Launch your RSS reader and compare your headline with hundreds of other blog headlines. Would your headline invite YOU to click on it?
5. Enroll some help from your family or friends: ask them to look at your headline variations and pick the one that catches their attention without knowing what the article is about.
6. Get away from your article and headlines for awhile and come back later, look at your title variations once again as a stranger and pick the one that catches YOUR eyes.
7. If YOU don't find any of your headline variations attractive enough, trust your gut feeling and re-write the title until YOU are happy with it
8. Practice does wonders, so don't despair if you didn't get the perfect title for your article this time, next time will be much easier and better.

What's your secret formula to writing eye-catching headlines?

We're staying in a cabin on one of the small Gulf Islands, overlooking Pacific ocean with a semi-private beach. I feel like a celebrity, blessed to be spending my vacation in such a spectacular place like this. Every morning the tidewater recedes far back to the ocean, baring the vast shore land, filled with oysters (hence the name of this place - Oyster Bay). It's an incredible feeling to be walking the bottom of the ocean, carefully avoiding to step on starfish, little crabs and live oysters, collecting stunning seashells and knowing that in a few hours the tide would come in again, slowly filling the bay with smoky waters.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to complete any of my drafts before leaving for vacation, but fortunately, I've discovered a pretty little store on the island, that offers an internet access. So I'm saving this draft and will publish it when I get online.

What I've realized while staying on this island is that being unplugged for some time is actually good for you. Don't dread leaving the online world for a while, but embrace it, make the most out of it. Of course, the best approach to take is just take it easy and forget about work. But if you are already addicted to your blog (like me), then here's how to recharge your creative fluids, revitalize your writing style, enhance your blogging topics and enrich your ideas with 8 simple ways by going Unplugged:

1. A better way to read your RSS feeds

Google Reader is becoming the most poplar RSS aggregator, however it's unreachable when you have no internet access. If you own a laptop and took it with you to the offline world, use Thunderbird Mail to subscribe to your favourite RSS feeds. Before going on vacation, I've added half of my RSS feeds to my Thunderbird and now can browse and read them, just like any other email in my inbox.
If you don't have a laptop or didn't take it with you, then print out the long posts from your favourite blogs, staple, take with you on vacation and read them later like a newspaper.

I've already got several ideas for my future posts from reading those articles in my RSS reader.

2. Read like our ancestors and we did in pre-internet times.

You can't help but notice how lazy and spoiled we became because of all those perks that come with Web and TV. We hardly have time to read books or magazines, really "read" and not scan like we usually do when reading blogs or news sites. I used to be quite a bookworm in the pre-internet era, reading one-two new books every week. Now I hardly even have time to read a book a month. Most of the things I need I can find online, other things I read in newspapers or magazines. I almost forgot what it feels like to read fiction - stories and novels written by gifted writers, real writers, not the wannabe-writer bloggers ;-)

Guess what? By reading those masters of the written word, you may be able to borrow a few trick of trades and implement them into your own writing. Those books could also inspire you to come up with something for your blogs.

One of such books has already inspired me to come up with a new regular feature for my blog. I'll start it once I get back from my vacation, next week.

3. Brainstorm for future posts

Darren Rowse wrote a very useful article on how to Plan Your Next Week’s Posting Schedule, where he shared some valuable lessons from his own early blogging days on how he and his blogs benefited from becoming a Planner after being an Impulsive Blogger. What could be a better opportunity for you to brainstorm some ideas for your future posts while being unplugged. With or without a laptop, write down your thoughts, plan some topics you'd like to discuss on your blog. By changing the scenery, you'll have more chances to come up with something interesting and fresh for your future posts.

So hopefully, after this vacation I too will mature enough for becoming a blogger who plans rather than being a sporadic one.

4. Relax, be inspired and memorize.

The best thing about being unplugged and on vacation is having no outside distractions like Web surfing, emails, phone calls (considering that you've actually warned everyone not to be bothered with calls unless it's a real crisis). So relax - collect shells, go hiking, camping, kayaking, or simply lay in a hammock and drink your favourite spirit, while not forgetting the old wisdom - "In Vino Veritas - The Truth is in Wine". Memorize or write down that truth and later get back to it when you're stuck in a writer's block or searching for that unique inspirational post for your blog.

5. Give your blog a facelift

Now it's the best time to grant a little or a big makeover for your blog. If you just want to spruce it up a little bit by paying attention to all those little details that usually get overlooked on so many blogs (including this one), then either work on them by installing a local copy of your blog on your laptop and tweaking the code or graphics, or simply sketch your ideas on a paper and implement them when you're back. If you're up to giving your blog a complete re-design, then go for it - sketch your design ideas while laying on the beach, or drinking beer and watching the sunset. If you have time, digitally re-create those sketches in your favourite graphics software, or present them later to your designer.

I've started sketching a new theme for Inspiration Bit. How it will turn out only time will tell and your feedback :-)

6. Become a guest

I already agreed with a few fellow bloggers to guest write for their blogs, but I haven't yet had a chance to do so either due to lack of time or lack of ideas for my guest posts. If you're in the same situation as I am, or if you didn't actually think about guest writing on other blogs, now it's the time to come up with some ideas for guest posts or create a list of blogs you'd like to guest blog for and start drafting the email proposals to their authors.

7. Connect with your loyal readers or fellow bloggers

I keep most of my blog's comment email notifications in my inbox. This way I always have an access to my loyal readers' email addresses. However, unfortunately, I don't always have time to connect with them on a more personal level, other than commenting on their respective blogs once in a blue moon. It is very important for a blogger to be in touch with his/her blog readers who take time to post their comments, share their thoughts, give their feedback or express a disagreement. Wouldn't you feel good if another blogger whose site your frequent will all of sudden send you a friendly email? Why wouldn't you give back and send a quick thank-you or a how-do-you-do email and take your relationship to the next level?

If you're a loyal fan of Inspiration Bit, expect an email from me in a near future :-)

8. Spend quality time with your family

And last but certainly not least, spend uninterrupted time with your loved ones or friends who inadvertently suffer from your blogging hobby. I could've said more here, but I won't - my daughter woke up and needs my undivided attention. So I pay you adieu and continue enjoying my vacation unplugged.

How do you spend your time unplugged? What is your ideal way to spend vacation?