Music has a effect much more significant than most other self-improvement tips, if you don’t believe that try blogging while listening some heavy metal - your brain wont work! Finding the right music can create the opposite effect of that and directly “zap” the parts of your brain you are trying to access to produce activity.

How Music Alters Concentration

This is a personal theory, but it is backed up by science.

I find that music which has an obvious and distinct beat to it demands too much attention (e.g. most rock, rap and dance). It takes the attention of the mind and the body. I think of it as melody is for the mind, beat is for the body. That is backed up by science which finds classical music with a less obvious best (notably Mozart) to be good for concentration.

It also helps explain why older people tend to listen to less up-beat music. Very generally rock, rap and dance are what younger people listen to and classical is for the older. Of course many people enjoy both, but generally that is true. This links into dancing being linked to sex because the older you get the less sex-drive you have and so the desire to listen to up-beat music, which is for the body, declines. Generally with age (not that I have much experience of that!) life becomes less physical.

Conclusion

The melody needs to be more defined than the beat for only the concentration center of the brain to be stimulated. If you are finding yourself stuck with bloggers block, music may well be the cure.

A further step to experiment with is listening to the same music at the same time each day just before starting work to try and associate that music with work. You can try and see if it helps you slip into “work mode”.

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Everyone needs help getting inspired from time to time, so here is my best shot at it.

1. Blogging keeps your brain sharp. Blogging uses so many different skills you will find it keeps your brain on the ball. I’m sure that all the reading and creativity involved in both marketing and writing means bloggers have bigger than average egos brains.
2. Blogging time is alone time and some alone time is good for you. Keeping some sort of journal is often recommended by psychotherapists because it is a therapeutic activity where you have time to remember who you are and not get carried away with whatever is happening in the outside world. I consider it a very healthy hobby/job in that sense.
3. The uniqueness of blogging for a living. Blogging is not something anyone I know in person does and has become part of my identity.
4. The idea of going through life never having been employed or having a boss is very attractive.
5. Blogging produces something tangible that you can be proud of. School never did that for me. There was nothing special about getting an “A grade”. A zillion other people had them. A great blog is unique and much more special than a grade someone else gave you on a piece paper.
6. Blogging is a gateway to the best profession - entrepreneurship! What could be better than starting something from scratch and turning it into a wonderful money-making cash cow?
7. Blogging gives you a dream. Forgive me for sounding like a cheesy 1980s American film but everyone needs a dream to chase or an ultimate ambition of sorts. The Internet is like the wild-west at the moment where anyone can “make-it-big”, which is a strong motivator for innovation.

Those are 7 reasons why blogging is fantastic and they all inspire me to blog. I look forward to reading your own in the comments.

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From A Buyers Point Of View

Lets say you are looking to invest and buy a blog that receives 1000 unique visitors per month, which is a pretty small amount.

Option 1
90% of those 1000 visitors find their way to the site via the search engines and are not repeat visitors.

Option 2
30% of the traffic is from search engines, 50% are from referring sites and 20% are repeat visitors.

These traffic differences tell you a massive amount about the quality of the site and how much time it will take to maintain. Humans are the best judge of content quality (quality meaning useful/informative/entertaining) which means it is likely the second site which has a community of repeat visitors is of higher quality. A site with a community also has potential for faster growth, be it virally from the visitors spreading the word or from the them providing links to it. However, a community takes resources to manage and with humans being the best judge, if you mess up and fail to keep providing content that 20% may shrink rapidly to 0% and that’s not because the other traffic sources increased!

With option 1 what comes to mind is a more “passive income site”, which in some cases is an MFA (made-for-adsense) site. The site sits in the search engines and the owner occasionally adds content to it at too slower rate for a community to build up, but saves resources by adding content less regularly.

Which Set Of Traffic Sources Is Worth The Most?

Positives For High Search Traffic:
Some of these are direct advantages, others are indirect.

• Traffic is highly targeted and as a result highly monetizable
• Needs less fresh content than a site with a community
• Search engines take longer to react than people, even if when they do act it can be very sudden. If the traffic has been stable for 3 months there is little reason to believe it is about to be lowered.

The big disadvantage for a site with lots of high quality search engine traffic and little other traffic is that if the site is penalized by the search engines the traffic is massively reduced. There is no diversity.

Positives For Mixed Traffic Sources

• Overall traffic is more stable. The traffic is more likely to decrease a small amount but less likely to be completely reduced.
• Is a sign of a site that is kept up-to-date. Often on a dead Website or blog all the traffic sources dry up apart from some of the search traffic.
• Quicker to grow traffic. Search engine traffic takes time to accumulate, if a site is receiving a sizable percentage of traffic from referring sites that percentage is more likely to be able to increase more quickly.
• Community could create content themselves with the right model

The big disadvantage for having a mix of traffic sources which vary in quality is that the traffic is not as well targeted and so not as profitable. This isn’t because of the mix of traffic, but because there are few other traffic sources that match up to the profitability of search traffic.

Size Matters

To take it to the next level, the budget and overall plan of a buyer makes a big difference. If I were buying a site with just 1000 visitors per month, its purpose would be to be part of a passive income network, where the low cost of maintenance would be a big factor which puts the high search trafficked site in the lead. Having a large number of small sites in a passive income network negates the riskiness of having most of the traffic coming from just one source.

However, for a larger site with perhaps 10,000 monthly unique visitors per month (at the very least) I would be looking for a very high quality site with a community. Not only for the money but if I was going to spend large amounts of my time working on that site it would need to be enjoyable and community sites are much more fun! Also on a larger site it is much easier to take advantage of the viral aspect, because there may already be enough evangelistic repeat visitors to spread the sites popularity across the net with little paid promotion.

Conclusion

This is somewhat theoretical, but for a small site where the plan is to have lots of them then sites with high search engine traffic are a good choice. For a larger site repeat visitors and referring sites is a positive attribute.

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You start a blog, publish lots of posts for a few weeks (or maybe a couple of months) but you find yourself not earning as much as you would like and ideas for blog posts are starting to become harder to find. You end up reducing your posting frequency down to just once or twice per week and then you stop posting altogether. The blog is dead and you are frustrated at having wasted all that time and only earning a few Adsense dollars.

If that has happened to you all is not lost!

Your “dead” blog has value and can still be resurrected to help you make money online!

5 Ways To Make Use Of A Dead Blog

1. Write sponsored posts from sites such as PayPerPost. PayPerPost (and other sites like it) have such massive inaccuracies in their blog ranking systems that they chances are your so called “dead” blog still has a high enough ranking to earn the same amount per post as it did when it was still alive. I say use that to your advantage!

2. Plug your current blogs and new blogs that you launch. When I launch a new blog a problem is that it can take a long time to get indexed in the search engines. Knocking together a quick post about your new blog will have it indexed the next time your old blog is crawled. An advantage of owning a dead make money online blog is that blogging about a new blog fits the niche!

3. Add your new blogs to your dead blogs blogroll. Simple but effective. Do this in moderation and at your own risk. Blogroll (sitewide sidebar links) are more dangerous because you are linking from every single page on your blog, which can put the site you are linking to in danger of penalization because 100s of links suddenly appearing is somewhat suspicious.

4. Use it as a link trading epicenter. 3 way (or 4 way or more) link trades are a way to help disguise the deliberate trading of links and your dead blog can be used as a way to gain links for your new blogs.

5. Leave a “current projects” post. This is simply a post left as the last post on the blog listing your current blogs and projects. Rather than writing a new post when you launch a new blog you just edit this one to include the new blog.

Disclaimer:
To some humans, search engines and zealots, bringing a blog back from the dead to perform these wicked deeds is offensive and should be done so at your own risk.

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If you are one of the ever-so-numerous subscribers reading via RSS and cannot see the counter clicklet, observe the evidence below:

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1. All bloggers learn from experimentation. Science is, “knowledge aquired by experimentation.” There are definitely elements of experimentation in blogging, especially with monetization (i.e. tweaking).

2. Blogging is for everyone. I previously wrote that not everyone can be a blogger. What may be closer to the truth is that not everyone can become a successful blogger, but they can can start a blog with a few basic skills, just like raw science.

3. Blogging is cutting edge. It is not just science that is expanding the frontiers of mankind, the Internet and blogging using cutting edge marketing principles and technologies.

4. Blogging is about the numbers. These may be the traffic figures, the earnings, the subscriber count or even the number of comments. If the number of people reading what we wrote didn’t matter bloggers would publish what they write online.

5. Blogging is about identifying controlling factors. For a blog to make money, traffic and monetization is needed. If the blog is fully monetized the controlling factor is traffic, which needs increasing.

Conclusion

Science is about acquiring knowledge based on scientific method. The question is whether blogging uses a scientific method and I think that varies from blogger to blogger, which means blogging as a whole is not a science. All bloggers learn from experimentation, but those experiments are not properly controlled most of the time. If you want to get really ‘airy-fairy’ you could say everything is both science and art.

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Side Of Sauce concludes that, “Science is about right and wrong and finding the truth, art is about winning the popular vote“. (emphasis is mine).

Building a successful blog involves the use of lots of different skills, some of which could be called science (e.g. traffic stats analysis), but ultimately it is about winning the popular vote.

Photography by
jepoirrier

5 Reasons Blogging Is An Art form

1. Blogging is never finished or perfect. Just like art there are always imperfections and by definition an active blog can not be “completed”.

2. Blogging is propaganda. Blogging is not about bettering the world or giving people what they need; it’s about giving people what they think they want. This is Persuasion of the masses also known as politics.

3. Some people will never be able to blog, no matter how much you teach them. This is because blogging involves being able to express the creative part of the brain. Some people just can’t do that, in just the same way I’ll never be able to become a mathematician or a “real” programmer. They see blogging as being “too pointless”. After all if it doesn’t involve any number crunching it must just be something stupid people do, right?

4. Blogging relies on inspiration. Sure, news blogs just cover the news, but that is journalism really. With science there is always a problem that needs solving. With blogging you actually have to have that “idea” moment before writing a post.

5. A large part of blogging success is left down to chance. Science is all about eliminating chance by planning. This is true for blogging as well but there are so many factors that cannot be planned for in blogging. For example bloggers can practice good Search Engine Optimization, but as long as Google is in charge we will never know the precise success formula.

I really want to know what everyone else thinks about this. If you could do a degree in blogging would be a science or arts degree? Let me know in the comments, or write a post about it yourself and I’ll link to you in part 2.

Coming up I will put forward 5 Compelling Reasons Blogging Is A Science. Subscribe the the RSS to get part 2 of the Art Vs Science series. Which will prevail?

Technorati Tags: art, science, theories, Blogging

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I’ll explain it with a story:

I’m sitting at home watching TV and a programme about how “Obese will be majority in 25 years in the UK” comes on. The show starts by explaining how this trend is spreading from America. Then they go on to show some ‘present day fatties’ living in the UK.

Judging from the sad and ‘doomsday’ voices and music used I assume most of the population is going to be thinking what a sad situation it is. Instead, I find myself getting angry at the fat people and struggling to keep the swearing in my head. I think it is their responsibility to stay in shape and its pathetic to become like so many Americans have (I like Americans, I just don’t want us Brits picking up their bad habits)

Later in the news there is an obese person complaining about how she felt offended by the Ambulance officers saying they can’t take her because she is too fat. At this I just lose it an start ‘heckling it good’. My mother then says I am insensitive and shouldn’t be angry at that ‘poor woman’.

The point is, that now if I were to ever start putting on the slightest bit of weight I would have all the people who have witnessed my “anti-fatty rage” reminding me how I can’t become fat because it would be hypocritical.

Lesson:
Insulting fat people keeps you thin.

Real lesson:
If you openly voice your negative opinions, you will be under more pressure to not become like the thing you hate.

This can be applied to blogging. For example if you are sick of bloggers doing very average top 10 lists you can write a post about it, which will force you to not fall fowl of the same flaw.

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