If you do a lot of blog design (or web design), you know what a pain it is when your PC seems to get slower and slower. That is not your imagination—or too much caffeine.

PCs really do get slower and slower after you have used them for awhile. The more you use them, the sooner that happens.

While there are software programs that claim to clean up (and speed up) your PC for you, they only do a partial job. But a young guy named Kris Maineri has a better way. For $10 he’ll sell you an ebook with videos to walk you step-by-step through cleaning up your PC to make it faster.

It’s called PC Secret Formula. It really is only ten bucks, including the videos. It’s easy and effective, and it works.

Even better, he will show you how to keep your PC from slowing to a crawl again. It takes just a little more time than installing and running one of those pricey programs, and it does a lot more good.

Your PC will run faster than it has in a long time. And at $10, it’s way cheaper than buying a new one.

How does this relate to blog design? When you are sick and tired of working on your blog design because you are tired of fighting a slow PC, you tend to skip things, cut corners, and sacrifice quality. (Ask me how I know?)

We never have as much time to spend on design as we would like anyway. That is, there is never time to really perfect the design as much as you could. Why waste time needlessly waiting on a slow PC?

Instead, try the PC Secret Formula. Speeding up your PC will leave you more time for designing blogs.

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Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.

Blog design can be complex and daunting if you want to go beyond merely making an on-line journal to share your thoughts. Designing a blog on your own web site that is well optimized for search engines, for example, takes skill and know-how.

Designing a blog with WordPress that is optimized to make money is an even bigger undertaking. I wouldn’t even have the courage to start this project right now if it were not for my business-blogging mentor, Alex Sysoef, who has just released an amazing product called Web 2.0 Wealth. Without Web 2.0 Wealth, this blog would not exist, and my Talk Like a Texan blog would still be a mess.

Web 2.0 Wealth (or as I call it, W2W) is a huge package of ebooks, step-by-step videos, and too many extras to describe here. It leads you step by step from how to choose a profitable niche for your blog through how to build it, optimize and monetize it (set up a bunch of ways to make money with it) and then publicize it to bring in lots of readers.

I learned so much about so many aspects of WordPress blog construction, php scripting, plug-ins, and related topics with W2W! And I had already bought and studied a few other blog-design-and-monetization packages—some of which I liked and will write about in future posts.

Every time I turn around, Alex has added more features. And his support is fast, accurate, and truly helpful. What a refreshing change from some other vendors I could mention! Well, OK, most other vendors I could mention.

If you buy only one package on how to build blogs and make money, buy Web 2.0 Wealth. Then please come back and comment on how you used it. I’d love to see your blogs.