31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Over at Problogger, Darren Rowse has started up another 31 Days to a Better Blog. (He does this twice a year.) It’s a neat little “bootcamp” for bloggers looking to overhaul their sites and increase readership. I’ve signed up for it myself, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.
Here’s how the program works:
Each [...]

Monday Links

Welcome back to work, everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend–my husband and I found a house! So it’s been a bit of a hectic weekend for us.
We’ve got some fun web-centric links today:

On April 1, the Conflicker.C worm will activate and potentially cause havoc worldwide. Cover your butt by backing [...]

Advertising in the Wild: Bad Ad Placement

Today’s Advertising in the Wild, coming to us from Fail Blog, reminds us that even the best marketing messages will fail if pitched to the wrong audience:

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Design NY 2009

Just a heads up: The 2009 issue of DesignNY, for which Karen Marley and I both wrote approximately 47 million articles, has just hit newsstands. Design NY is a Western NY-focused home design “resource guide” (read: 135 pages of gorgeous, drool-worthy homes and more design ideas than you’d ever use in one lifetime), and it’s [...]

Review: CopyDoodles

Recently, I bought a copy of Copydoodles, a collection of images and fonts designed to “ugly up” your marketing material. The idea is to make it appear as if you had been reading your sales letters/postcards/whatever, and you just couldn’t contain yourself any longer, and you had to scribble down some notes in the margin [...]

House Hunting and Home Offices

Over the past few weeks, my husband and I have been shopping for our first house. It’s a strange experience, checking out someone else’s home:  tromping around the hardwoods, opening up all the closets and cabinets, mentally criticizing all the owner’s design choices. It’s kinda fun, but it also makes me a little uncomfortable, like [...]

Monday Links

It’s Monday, which means I’ve scoured the Internet for the previous week’s best in writing, marketing and PR. We have a little bit of everything today:

From ProBlogger: 20 Types of Blog Posts (to combat “Blogger’s Block”)
Via Michael Stelzner: New Research on How Readers Use White Papers
The 14 Types of Twitter Personalities–Which one are you?
From Duct [...]

Advertising in the Wild:

This week’s example of terrible advertising comes to us from the Consumerist, which points out this lowdown dirty tactic from Integrity (hah) Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Las Vegas:

From the article:

My wife went into a Wal-Mart the other day and when she came out of the store she found a note that was left on her [...]

A Queue of 21 Commonly Misused Words

Saw an interesting conversation on GWJ today: Is the correct noun to describe a line of people “cue”, “queue”, or both?
Answer: “Queue”. A “cue” is a sign or signal to begin a specific action, while a “queue” is a waiting line of people or objects. They are not interchangable. (Sorry, Julian!)
It’s important to use your [...]

5 Steps to Help You Write Faster

No matter how far out the deadline, there’s never enough time. 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week–that’s all you get. You can’t do anything about it except to write faster.
Easier said than done, of course. It’s not like you can just will yourself to write faster… right?
Well, maybe you can.
When I [...]