A fellow blogger alluded to this recently, and I wanted to talk a little more about the psychological phenomenon called social proof, and how it applies to blogging. First off, what is social proof? It’s a cognitive bias that means when we’re in a situation where the action we should take is ambiguous, we tend …
Social Proof and Blogging: Why People Care Who Likes You Read More »
WordPress gives us the option of picking one or more categories for blog posts (or it will just pick the default for you), and you can also use tags. But what exactly are tags and categories, and how should we be using them? Let’s chat about that. Categories Categories form part of the structure of …
How Do You Use Tags and Categories on Your Blog? Read More »
Every so often I see bloggers expressing some apprehension about stepping out of their blogging niche, so I thought it was worth chatting about. The business-focused blogs If the main purpose is to make money, niche matters. According to blogging guru Brandon Gaille, the blogging niches that make the most money are (in descending order) …
While we’re mostly interested in the human visitors to our blogs, it can be fascinating to see what some of the non-human visitors are getting up to, including an assortment of bad bots. What a 404 error is Before we get to the main part of this post, I need to quickly explain what a …
I suspect we’ve all got them—those nagging little blogging insecurities that chatter at you from the back of your mind every once in a while (or more regularly). While we probably all have them, none of us talk about them. After all, they’re not the kind of thing that’s very pretty. But maybe we should …
A fellow blogger recently shared this Youtube video. The video is about supporting someone who is grieving, but it’s a powerful message about validation in general, which is what inspired this post. Many of us have chosen to blog because there are difficult experiences that we’re dealing with. We look for various things out of …
