HTNet

So you have purchased your own domain name, subscribed to a web hosting package, and have WordPress up and running.

You then began to write your posts and publishing them for the whole world to see. You began to get some drive by comments, and saying to yourself, “Yes! I’m being read!”. Soon, you have a few people who are regularly commenting on your blog.

Now how do you make your blog stand out more and increase readership?

Read the rest of What You Could Do To Make Your Blog Outstanding »

Copywriting is a necessary skill you need to develop for your business. Although a picture is worth a thousand words as the old saying goes, the words are the keys to transforming a prospect into a client.

I find copywriting to be something hugely ignored by Malaysian businesses. Poor choice of words in sales copies projects an unprofessional image. Malaysian prospects are a very tolerable bunch when it comes to poor copywriting. However, the few that aren’t are a very vocal bunch. Sooner or later, you’ll get the Emperor’s New Clothes effect on your poorly written content.

I find Copyblogger to be an exceptional resource for sharpening your copywriting skills, especially for web content. Copyblogger recently announced the winners of their inaugural Copyblogger Copywriting Contest.

If you’re interested in improving your copywriting skills (and I think everyone should), you can pick up a few pointers from the winning entries. I hope that Copyblogger will publish all entries along with the judges’ comments, so that we can also learn what not to do when composing our promotional materials.

I installed the Related Entries plugin to see what the plugin deems as “related posts” for any particular entry. Honestly, my initial thoughts are it merely looks up some random posts which has similarities in terms of keywords in the title and categories they’re in.

What I appreciate the most about the plugin is that it lists links posts I had forgotten about. Did you know that this blog started in March 2005? Meaning my WordPress installation is now two years old. During this time, I noticed that there are a few noticable differences in how I write now compared to when I first started HTNet.

I used to do freewheeling writing, simply voicing what I feel about the topic of discussion. Now I tend to be more guarded, trying to make myself understandable to a significant majority of my readership. I never spellcheck two years ago… now, the Dictionary.com search engine is my second most used after Google.

I almost never preview my posts before posting in my early days of blogging, now even the simplest post goes through at least three rounds of proofreading. Even then, I still miss the occasional misspelling or erroneous grammar. Sometimes I think I should just follow Papa Joneh’s advice; just post it!