Now we may all know that blogging can be very time-consuming, what with reading blogs, commenting and writing our own posts, but how can we give everything an equal share of our time?

I go to work during the day and I have to admit that when travelling from one job to another I do Tweet with my Twitter @BlazingMinds and if a blog idea springs to mind I either jot it down or dictate it on my phone for later.

But is there a good way of spreading our time in to the right amount to give everything a chance of getting something done during the day.

Do you spend more time blogging, working or putting your feet up, if your married does your other half give you a set amount of time that you have on “that bloody computer” each night, so you cram in as much as you can before it’s family time?

So putting it simply, how do you fit everything in during the day, do you even get chance to do everything that you want to do?

I personally spilt my day up. Work during the day, grab a few minutes here and there to catch up on my blogging, put my feet up for a bit with a Cappuccino and they maybe tweet a little, before placing my head on a soft cosy pillow to refuel for the following day

I was talking to a friend the other day and we came up on the subject of blogging and their response was “blogs are just about tech, making money and website stuff like SEO etc! What is SEO anyway?”

So after explaining that blogs are much, much more, I decided to knock up a post, for those of you out there in computer land that when they hear the word “blog” it sends shivers down their spines.

OK. Blogs are much more than just for writing about how to make money and how to get loads of hits to your blog to enable you to get more money, yes I know I have been guilty in the past of blogging about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but, I don’t bang on about it every single post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Get paid to share your links!

Bit of a short one this week, due to my busy schedule, but I’ve brought you a collection of stats for you to view, such as the popular sites and searches etc. So if you haven’t read some of the popular sites listed then please visit then and remember to ReTweet them

Read the rest of this entry »

Building a blog is easy, but one of the major challenges every blogger faces is the part of getting traffic to a blog. There are various methods that can be used to get traffic to a blog some of which are explained below.

1. Post regularly: This is a step most people often ignore. We all know our readers are not fool, you can’t just expect them to be coming to your website or blog everyday without them finding new fresh content to read. Try to update your blog regularly because this helps your readers and it also help your search engine rankings. Search engines love fresh content and if you begin to post regularly, the search engines will soon begin to count your blog as an authority blog thereby automatically increasing your ranks in the search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the weekend and another week has flown by, so it’s that time where I bring you some stats from the week on what has been popular here on my blog as well as some other bits of information that some of you may find interesting. Last week Blazing Minds had a massive influx of traffic and this was down to a popular post about vetting your twitter followers, It even had 74 tweets on Twitter my most popular post on Twitter so far

Anyway enough of the banter let’s get on with the stats….

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post from Duncan who is an online marketing specialist and keen blogger representing a producer of natural beauty products and skin care products.

Blogging has come on a long way since its infancy. All bloggers could do back in the day was write a post, give it a title and maybe include a few hyperlinks if they were lucky. Nowadays however there are all sorts of widgets, plugins and extensions to help make the blogging experience a richer one, both for blog owners and their readers. WordPress has undoubtedly had a big part to play in this development, allowing the masses to develop the open source code and customise blogs to suit their needs. The other blogging platforms aren’t too far behind however and their progress is driven by the very human desire to make things better and more engaging.

One such development that many blog owners are taking advantage of these days is music players that they can either embed into their posts or individual pages. A couple of examples of these are the ‘Audio Player’ plugin for WordPress , which can actually be imbedded in any blog if you know a bit of code. Or Groove Shark, which is a customisable widget that will play music on your blog from their own diverse and extensive collection.

Using music on your site can really enhance a visitor’s experience. If you are trying to create an ambiance or have a clear theme on your blog, music can reinforce this. You might also like to showcase your own music on your site so you can get feedback or maybe catch the ear of someone in the industry? What you need to be careful of however is crossing the line between enhancing a users experience and putting them off by forcing your audio choices on them.

It is worth remembering that everyone has different tastes and may not like the music on your blog. Also, these days many people have their own music players open whilst browsing the net and don’t want their songs interrupted by what you think they want to listen to. With this is mind it is rarely a good idea to have music start playing automatically when people arrive on the site, but instead give them the option to turn it on if they so wish.

For example, on this site the music player is closed when people arrive

But if you want to you can open the music player by clicking on the arrow and the song starts to play. In this case it is Michael Jackson’s – Man In The Mirror…classic!

The key is, by all means give your visitors something to listen to when they visit your site and read your posts, but don’t try to force anything down their throats or assume they want to listen to your choice of tunes.

When I started Blazing Minds it was just a way for me to blog my thoughts etc. But since then the blog has really grown up, it’s now an avenue for Guest Bloggers bringing their wisdom to those that are reading the blog on a daily basis.

So now after over 500 posts, nearly 4,000 comments and several Guest Bloggers posting on the blog, Blazing Minds has really got to a point where it is something that has done better than I originally hoped for, those that are writing constructive comments have certainly helped and since starting the blog I would like to think my blogging has improved, though I do keep to my style, if I didn’t then it just wouldn’t be me

Read the rest of this entry »