Are you thinking of starting a blog in 2012, or making significant changes to your old one? One thing that you should always be 100% clear on is your purpose of writing. Is it to start a personal blog where you don’t really care if you have a total readership of 9 or is it…

You can publish a book. And you can do it much sooner than you think, actually. How do you do this? Not by wasting years writing articles or obsessing over writer’s conferences and book proposals. All you need is a blog. No other activity (including years of freelance writing) has brought me closer to…

Many readers of Stepcase Lifehack are bloggers themselves and some of them are even making a (nice) living off of it. But, as fancy as it may seem, blogging is not an easy task. At least blogging for money, constantly, for several years in a row. I know it first hand, since I’m doing…

Blogging isn’t something that only the nerdy types or teens do anymore, and it most certainly goes beyond posting pictures of your children (or pets for the childless out there) and griping about your job.  Blogging is, for some, a business or a source of extra spending money.  It’s also a source of money…

In listening to a bunch of Mac-centric podcasts lately, especially on workflows with the Mac, I have come across a tool that has been around for a while but is still not extremely popular with everyone. The tool is called Markdown and was created by John Gruber (Daring Fireball fame). The best way to…

Have you ever read a blog and thought about starting one yourself because you could do as good a job? Most of us could benefit from keeping one. Especially those with small business aspirations! I’ve got over 10 blogs but only one of them is public. The rest are kept private and used…

We’ve all heard how frightened nearly everyone is of public speaking. Maybe that’s understandable, but it creates the potential for lots of misinformed conventional wisdom spread by people who have to make presentations but haven’t had the opportunity to learn what really works. To help correct some misperceptions about what creates better presenters and presentations…

Do you want more comments on your blog? Let’s assume you already know how valuable comments are to your blogging experience. But how do you get more of them? Here are 31 ways to increase comments on your blog. Some are concepts I use regularly on my own blogs. Others I know about from watching…

As part of my role as Lifehack’s manager, I am responsible for moderating the comments queue. Lifehack’s back-end has a “Pending” queue for comments that our spam-catching software thinks might be spam, a “Spam” queue for comments labeled “spam” either by the software or by me, and another queue for comments that have been…

As much as you think blogging and social networking are mainstream, corporate America has not caught up quite yet. Many companies are fearful that they are losing control of their brand — and they are.  Companies are trying to put together social media guidelines as quickly as possible, so that employees know…

In my last post, I gave you an introduction to your Google results and forced all of you to Google your name. If you have a common name, you should use your middle name or brand yourself relative to a topic ; if you have a unique name, you are in a position…

      When I first started blogging a few years ago, I went through a series of stages that most authors can appreciate. Wow, I’m online! Ok, now what do I say regularly? This is really easy! People are actually reading me? Better check my stats… Better recheck my stats… And so it goes. In those early days life was simple and something…

I started a video blog documenting my journey fighting breast cancer across America. President-elect Barack Obama started a video blog documenting how he plans to implement change in America. What do we have in common? Absolutely nothing; His vlog is way better. So if you are like me and want to video blog…

Here at Lifehack, we like to review the web apps that were released over the course of the year and see how they went — which apps stood the test of time and remained popular after the hype of their launch had subsided? In this article, we’ll look at ten apps that did particularly well…

There are literally millions of voices on the Internet. Blogs, Social networks, micromessaging services like Twitter, instant messaging services, email, wikis, forums, and dozens of technologies I haven’t even heard of – and dozens more to come – give us all an unprecedented ability to be heard. But with all those voices clamoring for attention, how…