I recently left a comment on the blog of my friend Terence Chang, that I feel is worthy of further exploration. It discusses a common phenomenon that seems to be a danger to many bloggers and which I’ve come to call the curse of the blogger.

No, it’s not the syndrome of bloggers running out of steam at the six month mark and giving up, just before their blog starts moving. In fact, it’s the opposite: bloggers diversifing and trying to do too much.

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This is just a quick post to warn the borderline spammers that leave comments here: If you just leave keywords in the name field, I’ll remove the link! You must use the KeywordLuv syntax: yourname@your keywords. (more…)

Regular readers will have noticed that posts have been pretty sparse over the last couple of months. For those wondering about the reason, we recently moved from China to Australia. This has been a big move for us and has meant that I’ve had almost no time for blogging.

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I’ve been pretty quiet for the last couple of weeks, mainly due to offline endeavours. However, I did find time to finish off a new WordPress plugin called LocalCurrency, that allows you to show currency values to your readers in their local currency.

For example: If a post contains 10 yuan, a user from Australia will see 10 yuan (AUD$1.53), while a US user will see 10 yuan (USD$1.39). (more…)

Happy Chinese New Year! The arrival of the Chinese New Year seems like a good time to announce my new blog at jobsinchina.com. Primarily a blog, for now, JobsInChina will cover issues related to living and working in China. (more…)

Today is Australia Day, a national holiday celebrating our fine country, and an appropriate time for me to talk about a new community for Australian bloggers: Aussie Bloggers. (more…)

In my last post, I talked about Adsense Smart Pricing and how blogs can avoid it by only showing ads to search engine visitors.

One option for WordPress is the Who Sees Ads plugin, which has the ability to do this. I prefer the Shylock Adsense plugin for the reasons given in my last post: automatic placement of ads; no need to enter placeholder in each post; easy to move ads from, say, top right to top left, etc.

The problem with Shylock Adsense is that although it can show ads on old posts only (mostly search engine traffic), there is no option to show ads only to search engine traffic. I really wanted this functionality, so I added a few lines of code to the plugin to enable it. In this post I explain how to do it. (more…)

In my last post, I mentioned the danger Adsense Smart Pricing poses to blogs. Blogs are particularly vulnerable because most blogs don’t work well with Adsense. In this post, I examine the issue further and look at a couple of potential solutions for WordPress users – but there’s a twist in the tale. (more…)

Adsense – some love it, some hate it. It doesn’t work for all sites, but there’s no denying that on the right site, it can make a lot of money.

Most beginners don’t understand what type of site it works well on. They slap Adsense on their blog and expect the cash to come rolling in. Of course, it doesn’t. Why? Because Adsense doesn’t work well on their type of site.

In this article, I explain the underlying principle of Adsense and look at the attributes of sites that are successful with Adsense. (more…)

I’ve just read Michael Martine’s free ebook, How to Start a Business Blog.

I don’t buy ebooks. I normally don’t even read free ones. Mostly that’s because I don’t have much time. Its also because while most ebooks are decent, very few are great and some are just a waste of space.

How to Start a Business Blog is one of the few really worth reading. (more…)