I am starting to notice just how important some visual stimulation is when writing. You can’t simply write a great post and expect people to read it, they will get bored before they even finish loading the page. You either have to do some fancy writing with lists/bolding/etc or you have to integrate images into your posts. You can either have one image for each topic, or a different image for each post.

This is not really something that I do a lot on this site, and probably won’t since I don’t make money here and I really simply use this site for my own thought processing. But one a number of my other sites I have noticed that I get a much better response to posts with an image in the start of the post.

Since I am not much of a photographer, although I have an interest in it, I have to resort to using stock images. Currently my source of choice is CreStock. One reason is the free image of the day, which may not fit all of my niches, but it is a start to a library that I can grab from, and then you have the images that start at $5, which in my mind is pretty cheap, in the run of a good article I expect it to make me at least $50, and if I hit it good on Stumble even more, so a $5 investment is nothing. And there is nothing saying that you can’t use the same image in more than one post, or on multiple sites.

Let me know what you think.

I have just installed a new base theme. Out of the box it still needs some work, But I think that it is cleaner than my old one.

I will be adding some colour to it as time allows. Sure I should have done the majority of the work offline, but I am not that kind of guy

I have finially taken the leap and upgrade Wordpress on this site to 2.3.1. Yeah I know….it is about time, I am actually still behind some but I have some other things that have to come first, like getting this site looking better.

I am thinking about starting out with something similar to what is over at Bluenoser Poker, maybe make two columns on the right, or just widen the first one. I really like the VERY clean look.

I will be working on this for the next little while and plan to have it up and running by the end of the week.

I have decided that the best way to get a couple of my new sites running is to be writing at least one GREAT article a week. I am talking about a 500+ word informative/opinion piece for the particular niche that I am writing for.

I tried doing the one post a day per blog thing, but it started to kill me and I am not sure if I was really getting the results for the time that I am putting in. The one informative piece a week should be enough for people to keep coming back, and it will allow me to judge how the site is going to grow, and what direction I want to take it.

One of the sites has a forum, it actually started mostly as a forum, but I have since added a blog to the home page. This is the URL that I have most of my links pointing to, so I think that it is important to have more than just a summary of what is going on in the blog to get people interested in that 0.5sec that it takes for people to decide if they like the site or not.

The other site is going to be a very interesting site, one that I would add to me RSS reader if I didn’t own the site

I am posting a lot of short articles there too, but I am thinking that they may be better as blog posts and have the long ones as articles. I know that is not what I said above, but I think that shorter posts make better forum or blog posts than destination articles.

What do you think? Are you like me and add feeds to your reader but then are more likely to delete them if they make 5 submissions a day? Or do you delete them if they are not updating enough? And what is the right frequency for you?

PS this site is not one of the ones that I am talking about, the last post being a week ago is just coincidence.

I do think that writing can be fun, but I have so many ideas that I don’t know what to write about. There are some ideas that I think would be fun to research and then report what I find, but I am not sure if they are profitable ideas. For example, I am not sure if they are good ideas such that people are going to search for them, and then when they reach my site they are going to earn me money somehow.

Blog writing is something that I am still not sure what I am doing. I know that the posts on a blog are supposed to be personal, but sometimes I get an idea that is technical, or one that I want to state without bias and I am not sure how to post it. Do I add a little opener and post it in one of my blogs? Maybe a forum? The majority of the blogs that I read do not have the same feeling. I am thinking now that one way to get around it is to have a “newsletter” or online journal that I can compile these type of articles.

Writing as a whole is fun, however I don’t think that I would be able to do it for a living. I look at the amount that I pay a lot of my freelance writers and I am not sure how they do it. I pay what they ask, and I stay away from the cheap ones as I have been burned before, but still $.05 a word and less seems like too little for me to live on. But maybe they are doing it as a hobby like me.

I don’t think that I am ready to become a freelancer yet, but that is something that I am working towards. I am aiming for 5 years where I can work from anywhere. I want to be able to pick up my computer and get out of the office, and work from anywhere there is an internet connection, which with 3G and the like is almost anywhere in North America, and I am sure that I can get a reasonably reliable connection somewhere warm and tropical