Steve Shockley's Blog, page 13

Change Your Life with the Magic of Tidying Up

In The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, decluttering expert Marie Kondo teaches how you can clear the clutter out of your life so you can focus only on the things that spark joy. Here are my favorite twelve takeaways:

There are really only two steps involved in tidying: discarding and deciding where to keep things. Discarding anything that does not spark joy in your life must come first. Do not start putting things away until you have finished discarding. That is because putting things...

Blog Idea #80: Write for a Print Publication

You don’t have to limit your activities to the internet. Print publications like local newspapers, newsletters, and magazines also have audiences. Try submitting articles or letters to your favorite newspapers, newsletters, or magazines. When you do, see if you can also have your web address or blog name listed in your byline.

The first step to take is to research which publications might accept your work. Some publications don’t accept any freelance work. The ones that do will often publish...

Blog Idea #82: Advertise Your Blog

It’s not worth it to spend money to advertise most blogs; however, if you offer a product, you can advertise the product and use your blog as a place interested people can go to for more information.

There are many places where you can advertise. Look through the “Ideas for Monetizing” chapter of Blog Ideas for ideas. You will also need to create some advertising materials like advertisement graphics, marketing text (called “copy”), and free content to draw people in (called “lead magnets”)....

Blog Idea #30: Optimize Page-loading Times

People have short attention spans on the internet. If your blog takes longer than a few seconds to load, many of your first-time visitors will click out and never return. There are a few tricks you can use to make your blog load faster. W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and Autoptimize are popular plugins that cache and compress your blog files for faster loading times.

W3 Total Cache minifies your web code and caches files to make your blog run faster. Minifying code means removing extra...

Blog Idea #84: Join a Blog Hop

A blog hop is an event where a bunch of blogs get together and share blog posts. Usually, it is a collection of links (called “linkies“) posted on every participating blog. Link parties are similar, though they are usually centered around a single theme. Every participating blogger tries to visit the other blogs in the blog hop and leave comments.

The main purpose of a blog hop is to get to know other bloggers in your niche. Many blog hops require participants to leave a comment on each blog...

Blog Idea #117: Change Your Environment

It’s hard to come up with new ideas when you’re looking at the same things all the time. Take a walk outside. Go somewhere you’ve never been before. Go to another room and sit on the floor for a while. Chances are, you will notice some things you’ve never noticed before. Noticing new things can help you think of new ideas.

Here are a few more ideas for things you can do to bring about an environmental change:

Go outside and walk, but take a different routeIf you work in a coffee shop, go to...

Blog Ideas: Introduction

The following is an excerpt from Blog Ideas: 131 Ideas to Kill Writer’s Block, Supercharge Your Blog and Stand Out

I had a blog in 1997. It wasn’t WordPress because this was years before that was even an idea. It was on a platform called GeoCities. GeoCities was a free website hosting service. Back then, people didn’t have blogs. They had personal homepages.

My homepage had clippings of things I found interesting. Some snippets of JavaScript code. A few lines of markup teaching basic HTML....

Introduction to The Life Actionbook

The following is an excerpt from The Life Actionbook: Tools and Actions for Personal Development

One of my tenets of writing is only to write what I would want to read for myself. Nobody is perfect. I know that I am far from perfect and have a lot of work to do. That is why I wrote this book. It is not a traditional self-improvement book. I won’t stand on a pedestal and try to be your guru. I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. I won’t try to advise strangers without knowing...

How Long Does It Take to Close on a House?

Buying or selling a home can be an arduous process, especially if it’s your first time. It takes two or three months on average for a seller to receive an acceptable offer. A homebuyer can expect to spend a month or two shopping for a house. But the transaction doesn’t end when the seller accepts an offer from a buyer.

Once a homeowner accepts a formal offer to buy their home, the closing process begins. The closing process ends when the buyer takes ownership of the home. Usually, the entire closi...

Baseball Cards as Investments

Any conversation about baseball cards that I have with a non-collector inevitably brings the question, “are they worth anything?”  I collect baseball cards for fun and never thought much about making money from the hobby.  I’ve always assumed that the stock market is a much better investment than baseball cards.  In this article, I will explore whether that assumption is correct or not.  Can you make money investing in baseball cards?

How to measure an investment

The standard for determining whether an inve...