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

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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

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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

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Alex Cristache, the mastermind behind Blogsessive.com and the QBKL Media design studio, has just release a free PDF eboook called “Corporate Blogging Guide”. This comprehensive collection of useful tips and back to the basic explanations of the whole blogging process is meant to help companies assess their need of a blog, draw some goals, come up with a blogging strategy, choose the best available tool and start reaching out to the blogging community.

All you have to do to get this business blogging ebook is to subscribe for free to Blogsessive’s RSS feed and you’ll spot the download link at the end of each article in the feed. If you’re already a Blogsessive RSS subscriber, you only need to click the link, it’s already there

Yours truly played a little but significant part in the process of getting the Corporate Blogging Guide published, meaning I helped Alex translate and did a bit of editing as well. So download it, read it and let Alex and I know what you think Oh, and happy blogging!

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There hasn’t been one day in 2009 when I got bored. As my world kept changing in every aspect that could change, I kept experimenting, adjusting, learning and meeting new people. So reading along the lines I have written and published all year and trying to find the essential words for 2009 was quite an interesting experiment. It reminded  me of where I’ve been, what I have discovered and of how this particularly full year has altered my views on certain aspects, including my thoughts about who I am and what is important for me.

Joanna Young’s challenge to find the essential lines and the essential posts of 2009 wasn’t easy easy. But it was fun and I managed to find the essential lines for both me and the readers of this blog. An important lesson that I see as the most important of the year that’s about to pass. It’s not something new, it’s not at all complicated…

“Sometimes we are reminded of the big secrets in the business world by what appears to be the most unrelated situation.” Continue reading

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