How To Mix Blogging And Working Successfully

Warning: people blogging! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a well-known fact that many bloggers have to juggle working at a full-time job and writing a blog*, and they often complain that their work encroaches on their blogging time, and vice versa. Both activities are very time consuming, and nosy co-workers and managers can make it very difficult to dedicate even a few hours of your workday to blogging. Remember, while blogging and working are both important, your company probably has other employees to move the work forward, but there is no one else to write your blog for you. However, the importance of keeping your job cannot be underestimated either: it helps you pay for your internet and therefore for blogging, provides blog fodder and hundreds of potential blog followers in your co-workers. Here are some tips on how to blog yet make it seem like you’re working.

• Make sure to factor in blog-related deadlines along with your work-related deadlines. Add blog deadlines to your Outlook calendar as well. When planning how long your work-related projects will take, always factor in 6-10 hours of blogging time every day, and allow an extra day in case your post gets Freshly Pressed and you have to respond to hundreds of comments. (In the unlikely event that your post doesn’t get Freshly Pressed, you can always troll Freshly Pressed posts of other bloggers.)

• Write comments in the Outlook E-mail messages rather than in the comments sections of the blogs where you plan to comment, and return to the blog to paste the completed comment. Not only you are actually blogging, but you also create an appearance of passionately typing a work-related e-mail. However, make sure that you don’t click on “send”, unless you’re absolutely sure that your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts.

• If your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts, ask him/her to follow your blog. Didn’t s/he ask you to cc: him/her on all important stuff? And isn’t your blog important to you?

• When your co-workers ask you to do something, agree to help on the condition that they follow your blog. Yes, they may complain to HR, but you can use this opportunity to convert your HR representative into your loyal follower.

• Hint for Twitter users: Adding a #work hashtag automatically makes any tweet work-related.

• When making a PowerPoint presentation for a team meeting, “accidentally” slip your latest and greatest post into the presentation. Let attendees read it in full before you “notice” the “mistake”. After the meeting, log out of your WordPress account and refresh the blog post page as many times as there were people at meeting: unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t count the PowerPoint views, and you probably want your stats page to reflect the accurate count of blog post views.

• Spend a lot of time on your Stats page. It looks very professional at a cursory view, and if anyone asks, you can always explain that it’s a new productivity metric. Well, it is! It measures how productive your blog readers are: if you see a lot of views and comments, they are not very productive.

• For your blog, pick a theme that most closely resembles the screen view of an application you have to use for work. There is a reason WordPress carries so many blog themes and even lets you customize them.

* Note that some people claim to juggle a full-time job, a blog, and raising multiple kids. However, that is physically impossible and we will not even discuss it here.

How to Write The Greatest How-To Post

This post was originally published on Speaker7 last May, and since I’m all about the earth, I am recycling it. 

People want to know things. Simply typing “How to” into Google generates interesting queries like “How to make head cheese,” “How to last longer in bed” and “How to breed a rainbow dragon.” Interestingly no one has created the query “how to teach a rainbow dragon to make head cheese while lasting longer in bed.” That doesn’t mean they don’t want to know.

In fact, I would like to know…er…I mean, my friend Friend, no, not Friend. . .uh. . . Plate, Plate Fork, would like to know. If anyone has any idea how to make that work, please write a how-to post on it. You will learn how to make it the greatest after reading this.

So how do you write the greatest how-to post? It’s surprisingly easy! Just follow these steps:

1.  Place your fingers on the home row of your keyboard. Type “How To. . .” except don’t use ellipses, fill it in with something like How To Smell a Wine Cork Without Looking Like an Idiot or How To Wrestle in Jello Without Getting Diabetes.
2. Brine the pig head overnight.
3. Go to sleep. Do not stay up and watch the Ab Rocket Twister infomercial. I can go from flab to fab in just five minutes? I might need to stay up. No, no, I should go to sleep.
4. Wake up. Drain and rinse the pig head. Place the head into a big pot, fill with chicken stock. Log onto your blog. Type something under your How To. . . headline. You didn’t change the ellipses yet? Change the ellipses into something like How To Change Ellipses into Words. Okay now write something underneath it. It should be something amazing.
5. Skim the fat as needed. After a few hours, pick off the edible meat from the tongue, nose and ears. Cover it with plastic wrap.
6. Throw up quietly into a bucket.
7. Mix the meat with parsley and other flavorings like MSG and barf.
8. Go back into your blog, write something even more amazing than the last thing you wrote. Like, make it super amazing.
9. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
10. Go to sleep. Don’t stay up to watch Blue-Eyed Butcher on Lifetime.
11. Remove the plastic wrap and serve with pickles.

If you followed all the steps, your greatest how-to post should look like this:

source: Wikipedia

Whatever you do, do not eat this.

How to Tell if Your New Followers Are Real or Not.

You may have noticed an uptick in new followers recently. This may have led to such thinking like:

“I have finally arrived.”

“That book deal is just around the corner.”

“Maybe I don’t need that job that pays all the bills?”

This is erroneous thinking–except in my case. Seriously, you should see the number of followers I have now, and I haven’t even written anything. People are really starting to get into what I’m writing, or in this instance, not writing. I have arrived, world!

But let’s get back to you. Your new followers. There’s a good chance they are not real. How can you tell?

This is why this blog exists, and why you’re following it, like all those other real followers who began following in the last few weeks. Follow these steps to determine if you’ve found a new loyal reader or soul-crushing robot bent on your complete annhilation.

1. The Blog Name

Sometimes you can determine real from fake simply by looking at the name of your new follower. Does it appear to have multiple consonants and strange characters like Zzzz*23ÖΦ¢zzzz? As far as I am aware, that is not the name of a human being. There are parents out there who live to give their children a unique (or you-neek) name so their children can forever be haunted by mispronounciations. For instance, I have seen this spelling for Jane: “Gn♥.” But Zzzz*23ÖΦ¢zzzz has yet to catch on.

Well then, you may be thinking: “Could my latest reader be a cat that has its own blog?”

Possibly, but cats are normally unreliable followers, and it’s best to avoid their overtures of friendship. Don’t kid yourself, if a cat has a blog, it wants something from you.

So what if your new follower has an actual name like my most recent follower: onlinedegreeonlinedegrees? I am suspecting that this may be some woman in her mid-40s writing about her personal journey toward learning how to play the saxophone or it could a diploma mill that offers bogus degrees.

When you’re uncertain the next step is to look at your new follower’s gravatar.

2. The Gravatar

Most people choose a gravatar that expresses a statement about their blog, like my gravatar of a nail being hammered into a brain. I’m saying “Ow. Knowledge hurts so let’s never learn.” Examine your new follower’s gravatar. Does it give off this kind of vibe?

Then it is likely fake.

Some savvy spammers will use a picture of a human being to give the appearance of possessing an actual soul and conscience. Like so:

Or it could resemble that tribal tattoo you got after a night of binge-drinking green beer with a weight-loss supplement that causes anal leakage.

Don’t click on this. It likely has hepatitis.

If you’re still unsure, then the next step is looking at the actual blog.

3. The Actual Blog

You’re sorry you did this. Yeah, me too. I noticed my computer has been acting funny. It’s requesting my social security number every time I launch Firefox, but if that’s what it takes, right?

A good indication that your new best bud is fake is your best bud’s blog doesn’t exist:

Did your one day of following me mean anything!?! I feel so used!!!

Or it appears to have little content:

Well, hallo back at ya!

If only I could find a company family chicken dinner recipe somewhere…

Or it appears to be a giant commercial for everything you’ve never wanted:

Hmm…seems legit enough. Sign me up, new friend!

Uh…I’m sorry, you look exactly like a new follower of mine. Do you know iloansdirect, perchance?

If you’re still unsure then the next step is to look at your new reader’s interaction with your blog.

4. Your follower’s interaction with you.

Does it look like this?

The barren blog landscape.

Then likely your new follower is following in incomprehensible name only.

True, 95 percent of your new readership was probably created in a dank cellar in some dark corner of the world, but keep in mind that only 10 percent of your followers actually read you anyway. And, boy, are your stats looking pretty dynamite right now.

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Unlike the majority of your new readership, the Official How To Blog is maintained by an actual human being. That makes you desperate to write for it, right?

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How To Write A Blog: 10 Obligatory Blog Posts Every Blogger Has To Write At Least Once

Today’s guest post is brought to you by the letter X better known as the List of X. To read more about guest posts, see step 6.

I have been reading WordPress blogs for months now, and I have noticed that certain types of blog posts are more common than others. So I thought I’d aggregate these most common blog posts into just one short post for your enjoyment. Alternatively, you can use this post as your blogging guide which will save your valuable time by providing you with the pre-written template blog posts that you can simply copy and paste into your blog.

I was planning to write a separate post about 10 most common blog photos, but this woman is in 9 out of 10 of them.

1) Hello, World!  This blog will be a platform for my thoughts about me, myself, my thoughts about myself, and occasionally about _____, _____, what I think about this, and Kim Kardashian. I will write as often as I can, since I usually think daily about different things, I think. See, I’ve just thought again! I better start posting stuff right now!

2) The Day Of Outrage:  I don’t normally get outraged about things, but ______ was outrageous! Did you see how outrageous that was! You didn’t? This is so outrageous that you haven’t seen it yet! You gotta check out just how outrageous this was! See! Told you! Wasn’t it outrageous? Please share your outrage in the comments section, because I’ll be outraged if you don’t!

3) The Away Message:  I apologize, my dear readers, for leaving you without your daily fix of information about me, and temporarily abandoning my blog for almost three hours. I am really sorry that you had to put your life on hold because you did not know what’s going on with my life. But I was busy with things. It’s not like I don’t have a life, you know? Haha. Honestly, I promise to write three times a day from now on. It’s not like I really have a life, you know? Haha.

4) Search Terms Of Endearment:  I have to share the good news with you! I am on Google now! Yes, you can enter something in Google and it will find my blog! Isn’t it cool? And apparently, people enter completely random things and still find my blog! Check out this hilarious search term: ______. Isn’t it hilarious? And what about this: _________? Even more hilarious, right? And this: ___________. What’s up with that?? Hilarious. But you know, seriously, even though all these result are hilarious and all, but the search for “most totally amazing blog ever” doesn’t lead to my blog for some reason. I’m gonna have to call Google because I think there is a problem with their search.

5) The Freshly Pressed Hangover (posted the morning after). Thank you everyone for such thoughtful comments! I have never seen so many thoughtful comments saying “Congrats on being Freshly Pressed” ever! It is so great to be Freshly Pressed! It’s like a total vindication of my life’s work! My blog got so many page views that my computer totally crashed! Well, I was actually jumping for joy, and my foot tripped over the wire and my computer actually crashed! But now that I am a famous blogger, I have bought a bigger and better computer to write bigger and better posts!

6) The Guest Post: This amazing post is brought to you by the amazing blogger named ______ . He/she won’t be writing about me today, which is sad, but I get a day off from my blog, which is good. Please check out his/her work, he/she’s almost as amazing as me. But please read all my amazing posts first! You don’t actually have to read them if you don’t have time, but please click on them at least! Then come back tomorrow and read them! Or just “like’” them.

7) Gems From The Junk Filter:  Check this out! I just found out that WordPress is blocking some of the comments on my blog! These people have been leaving the nicest comments like “this is an excellently wrote post”, or “I have learning so much from this site”, or “your qualification is for among the best blogs of the internet”. Why does WordPress block these comments??? Who are they, grammar Nazis or something???

8) The Traffic Report:  Check out this picture. This is my page views stats. This looks just like Manhattan skyline, doesn’t it? I removed the numbers so you don’t get jealous. At least I was hoped you would get jealous but I wasn’t really sure you would, so I deleted the numbers just in case. And then here is the next month, and it now looks more like New Jersey skyline. And look, here is this month, and it looks just like Nebraska. At least I think it looks like Nebraska, because I flew over it once and from up there Nebraska looked completely flat and sad, just like my recent traffic. Where is my traffic? Why isn’t anyone reading my blog??? I hate Nebraska!!!

9) My Amazing Cat:  My cat is totally amazing. It is so warm and fuzzy and smart. I wish my cat could write a post for my blog. I just know this post would have been so warm and fuzzy and smart that it’s gonna get Freshly Pressed instantly and I would get traffic again. I need traffic! Where is my traffic! Damn you cat! Write the post now!!! And make it warm and fuzzy and smart, damn it!!!

10) The Trends I Am Seeing:  I have been reading blogs for months now, and I have noticed that some types of blog posts are more common than others, so I thought I would aggregate them for your enjoyment and make fun of all of them at once.  Check out the whole amazing post here.

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Do you want to write a how-to about how to love your amazing cat then this is the site for you! Just submit an email request and watch the magic and hairballs happen.

The Official How To Blog is the one-true source for all information and blogging needs.

How To Attract Readers

You have just started a blog. No one cares.

Follow these sure-fire steps to increase your readership tenfold. Do not be swayed by the fact that this blog has no followers. It will once I follow the steps that I will create from consulting a magic eight ball.

Step 1: Write about popular topics. Simply mentioning Fifty Shades will drive traffic to your blog. Do not worry. You do not have to actually read the book. Other popular topics:

• salsa
• the dust bowl
• sequestration
• VHS vs. Betamax

Step 2: Include pictures. People like to look at stuff, but good stuff not crap stuff. Design your own composite of Christian Grey (seriously Fifty Shades will get you hits). Something like this:

The smoldering combination of Donald Trump hair, Michele Bachmann eyes, Gonzo the Muppet nose and Gary Busey mouth. Holy cow!

Step 3: Douse your blog in generous amounts of Axe Body Spray.

Step 4: Ask people to follow your blog. When they attempt to brush you off, start crying and peeing. They will immediately agree to follow your blog to get you to stop. You can use this tactic in person too.

Step 5: Pretend your blog is more important than it really is. Give it a title like “The Official Something Or Other.” Readers like to think they’re following the work of someone important. Name-drop in posts as much as possible, for example, “I was peeing and crying with Gary Busey the other day…”

Step 6: Porn.

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Want to share your vast knowledge of insect excrement with the world? Write for The Official How To Blog, and experience all the satisfaction that comes with writing for free. 

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