Question: “What do  you do?” Really Short Answer: “I am a blogger.” Blank look. After about 2 seconds — question: “What is that?” Answer: “I am a web writer and I share my thoughts online. I educate people about effective communication …” Thoughtful pause. Question: “As a hobby …?” If you are a blogger, you might have come across…

Has this happened to you? You want to write some new posts for your blog, but nothing’s coming to you. You’re just sitting there, with those blank white pixels taunting you, until your eyeballs hurt. If you’re going to be a successful writer of any kind — blogger, journalist, copywriter, novelist, you name it — writer’s block can’t…

With a bold headline like that, you might think it would be easy to “cop out” and give you a ridiculous strategy that would be stupid to try. Instead, I’m going to give you a strategy will do three things to your writing: It will make it part of the top 1% of the best writing online It…

So, you have finally found what you are passionate about, you blog about it regularly, you love to write and come up with new ideas, but nobody ever told you all the other bits that were involved in blogging. The guest posts, the commenting on other blogs, the social media requirements, the eBooks, the…

Writing is the bottleneck. Not for everyone… but for a lot of people – particularly who are involved in any kind of blogging or content creation. It’s time-consuming, which keeps you from creating all the content that you want to create. And it’s frustrating, which prevents you from expressing your ideas as compellingly as you…

If you have written for an extended period of time, whether it be for your own personal blog, work, school, or all of the above, having writer’s block is inevitable. Breaking writer’s block isn’t an easy thing to do. So, instead of taking the easy way out, here are the hard ways to beat…

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…