7 years ago, on a similarly cold winter, but less snowy if I remember correctly, I went ahead and started my very own blog on the Blogger platform. It was long before the Google buyout of this popular platform, long before I gave up on my dream of being a journalist and, yes, long before the wonderful world of PR won me over and sparkled this version of the Words of a Broken Mirror Blog.

Seven years later, I have tested a lot  of everything that has to do with blogging, from niches to frequency to communities. I kept learning more about coding and customizing and html, and JavaScript, and how blogs generally work. A few social media channels later, lots of business articles, guest posts across the blogosphere, a few hosted contests, a travel blog and an online magazine for women, I am still blogging with the same great pleasure I experienced 7 years ago.  Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest post by Susan Daniels

When most people think of blogging, they don’t conjure up images of brand blogging. However, even Coca-cola has a blog to further empower its brand. Brand blogging helps your business out in two ways: it gives your customers a sense of community and it allows you to gain greater online visibility.

But starting a brand blog doesn’t simply mean writing an article every couple of days or so. To make your brand’s blog successful you need to incorporate the following into your every day posting: Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest post by Jayson Jones

Of the many blogs that pop into existence (at the rate, in fact, of one blog per second), the vast majority are a form of “personal space.” These intentionally personal blogs are a sort of online journal, more about having a sense of territory than of really developing a following. However, for those who care about having a truly successful blog, the focus must shift to accommodate one group, and one group only: the users.

There are plenty of things you can do to make your site better for visitors; you can get an online web design degree, look up everything you can find on successful blog designing, or better yet follow these five simple tips that will help improve user experience on your blog.

1. Streamline Everything

On most blogs, there are links, pictures, design elements, advertisements, and just about everything else you could imagine, all littering the site haphazardly. Not only is this unattractive, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate through. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest post by Philip Rudy

Getting your website some exposure can be one of the hardest things to do, especially when you are first starting out. Getting traffic to your website revolves around a lot of different things, like making sure you have great on-site SEO and a website that has great value to begin with. Once you have these two basic (but sometimes very difficult to accomplish) things in order, the next step to gaining more traffic involves link building – which means generating a lot of back-links, meaning links that are on someone else’s site and lead to yours. Google recognizes back-links as one of the biggest key ingredients to ranking a website and the more you have the better your website will rank in Google’s search engine.

So how do you get quality back-links?

Obviously some back-links are worth more weight in Google’s eyes than others. If you’re a beginner in the website industry, then you have probably done your fair share of “how to get back-links” research. There are a ton of good ways to get back-links out there – some work and some don’t. Places people usually start are link directories and article directories, which are always good to have in your link building plan, but will not get you very far unless you pick out some great link directories and do a humongous article directory campaign. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]

2009 has been a year of many changes. It’s been a year of accomplishments and joy, as well as the year when a lot didn’t go according to plan, in both personal and business life. I would have wanted to skip the 2009 review and go straight to my 2010 plans. But that would have meant skipping some important steps of the process and make it less effective. So what happened in 2009?

On Words of a Broken Mirror, it’s been a year full of significant posts and essential lessons. I didn’t exactly meet my own plans of posting frequency, but I am extremely pleased with the quality of everything published here, as well as that of the guest posts I have written for other blogs.

2009 was also the year when I went from part time to full time business owner. Mirror Communications kept growing, I continued to work with IT companies and tackled other fields as well. I switched from spending part of my day in a client’s office to working fully on my own. This of course came with some organization and time management issues. It’s still fairly new but I’m getting better at it every day. Continue reading

Popularity: 1% [?]