One of the largest mental hurdles to maintaining a consistent business blog is coming up with a topic week after week.  It is easy to trap yourself with an artificial need for novelty instead of sticking to your strengths.  But if you’re really unsure of your ability to come up with relevant topics, the following strategies help.
1. Follow the News
Whether you listen to the radio while you commute or read an industry magazine on the weekends, make sure you keep abreast of current events.  The modern online reader is interested in relevant commentary.

Look for the stories that interest you as …

According to CNN the tech elite are struggling to define Google+.  This seems very odd to me, as the premise of Google+ is very straightforward: it is a social media platform that allows you to control where your message goes.

What makes this a radical concept is that no one else is doing it (well, no one aside from Diaspora, but I’ll get to that later).

The problem that CNN’s experts have run into is that they’re trying to define Google+ in terms of other social media platforms.  …

One of our clients recently approached us with an interesting problem. The email edition of their newsletter was too long. Readers who were interested in the side stories were giving up rather than reading or even scrolling past the lead story and subscribers who were interested in old articles would have to search issue by issue.

What the client needed was a website which would index and continue stories that began in their newsletter.

Enter WordPress.

WordPress.com is one of most popular blogging sites in the United States, and with some custom programming, it’s open source counterpart becomes …

LinkedIn, Pandora, Groupon, and Zynga are all big names on the modern web, and each has filed with the SEC to hold an IPO. But who are these giants? What do they do, and where do their profits come from.

www.linkedin.com

LinkedIn is the social network for business professionals. When users join they create a profile that summarizes their experiences and accomplishments. According to the LinkedIn website, it has more than 80 million members spread throughout 200 countries. However, unlike most social media platforms, members must know each other or …

When you write up your postings for whatever social media networking sites you frequent, please consider:
Rules apply.
Grammar, spelling, and sentence structure all matter. How closely you wish to follow these rules depends on the image you wish to convey. Or, to say that the other way around, however you express yourself will convey an image. If you want to appear at all professional, stick to good grammar, correct spelling and as few exclamation points as possible.
Be consistent with personal pronouns.
You can use I or you can use we. Just pick one and stick with it. Let’s say your Facebook page …

Like it or not, practical jokes have been a long-standing part of the US Halloween tradition. While you cannot TP a website, other gags have gained traction as a way to “pull one over” on online visitors.
Screamers
A screamer is a variation on the classic “cat scare” from film and television. At first glance a screamer will appear to be a normal video or picture accompanied by some text prompting you to pay close attention, or possibly turn up your sound. Then, without warning, the screen will switch to a monstrosity or a face contorted in terror as your speakers “scream” …

Looking for original artwork, but don’t have an in-house designer?  DeviantArt (dA) is definitely a good place to start.

Since 2000, dA has been providing an interactive community for artists of all sorts.  The includes the following key features:

• a categorized and searchable gallery of artwork
• feedback space for every work of art in the gallery
• e-commerce interface for artists ready for digital sales

Admittedly, not every artist is prepared to sell their work over the internet, but this does not have to be a dead end.  The deviantArt gallery also includes contact information for the contributing artists, giving you the …

Last week I started building a glossary of acronyms essential to understanding the modern internet.  Links to that article are interspersed amid five new acronyms to help you master the web.
Yet More Acronyms to Rule the Web
API - Application Programming Interface
An API is a set of standards used by one program so that it can interact with another without having to reveal what goes on inside. It’s sort of like a postal address for computer programs. So long as you properly format the address on the envelope, your letter will reach the desired destination, even if you do …

One of the major benefits of Social Media is how it can significantly improve search engine rankings—if done with SEO in mind.

I have been reading “Social Media for Business—101 Ways to Grow Your Business without Wasting Your Time” and came across a handy table with a list of which social media content gets indexed by search engines and which does not.

It’s important to know what content gets indexed and also to realize that this might change… what gets indexed today might not get indexed tomorrow and vice versa.

Here’s the list from the book (which was published in August …

Nowadays information comes at us in a flood. Multiple TV stations run news 24-7, Twitter provides an unending stream of two line summaries of the universe, and no matter what topic interests you, there will never be a dearth of relevant blogs bringing out yet more stats and figures.

Sometimes it would be nice of somebody would just stop and take the time to take all this data that our ever expanding infosphere has made available, and turn it into something understandable.

Worry not: relief is in sight!

Designers and data analysts from around the web have been finding ways to fit …