Just Another Writer

Well, for me, that is. Here they are. I’m sure they vary widely from person to person. For the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the physical aspect of blogging. It goes without saying (well not really, since I’ve blogged about it), that social media sites, templates and other goodies are also essential!

My cat muse. My cat, Varmint, is never more than a foot away from my computer. It may be because she is trying to impart some feline inspiration, but more likely, it is because the computer is always on the verge of overheating. It’s nice and warm over there. Apparently, Andy Warhol also had a cat muse. He painted his green. I didn’t know Warhol painted cats, did you? (I now have a mental image of kittens poking their cute little heads out of soupcans.

Diet Coke is also a must. This is an improvement over last year’s Pocky, since Diet Coke doesn’t cause blogger weight gain. I am somewhat worried about drinking Diet Coke, since rumor has it that the Columbian branch of the company will kill anyone who tries to unionize over there. However, I drink it anyway. Apparently, I am a shallow, shallow person.

Images provided by AllPosters.com

My red chaise lounge. Seriously, I do all my blogging from the chaise lounge while drinking Diet Coke and dealing with the cat stepping on my keyboard. This is one comfortable chaise lounge. It is dangerously comfortable. I must have been really, really good in a previous life.

A Honey Do. For those of you unfamiliar with this term (it may be Southern), it means you say, “Honey do this little thing for me please…” and “Honey do that little thing for me, if you don’t mind”. I like to sit on my chaise lounge and be waited on hand and foot. This can be accomplished with a willing partner + one or two eager to please children who are starved for attention because you are always blogging. It’s justifiable, I mean, who has time to go find their ringing cell phone when in the middle of a post?

I love to blog in my pajamas. I have been known to change clothes before sitting down on my chaise lounge with my computer, cat, diet coke and servants children. Yes, it is the epitome of sloth, or so it seems. But I’m making money! At least that’s what I tell everyone.

Air conditioning. I really don’t know why I live in Texas, because I couldn’t survive here without the freezing temperature I keep the air conditioning turned to. If the price of electricity ever increased to the point where I could no longer afford air conditioning, I’d dig a hole in the ground and live in it. I certainly couldn’t blog without it, never mind things like clean the house. Of course, if I lived in a dirt hole, then I wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning. Or maybe I’d be cleaning all the time. I dunno. I’m confusing myself.

Music. I have to be careful with this one, because if I listen to salsa, I start feeling like I should blog in Spanish. It might be an explanation for some of my wackier posts, at any rate. If I write something that is really depressing, just ignore it. It means that I’m listening to Radiohead’s Creep. By the way, doesn’t the first line of their poster look like topics for blog posts??

A computer. (The title does say essentials…) To be more specific, a laptop computer. So I can sit on my chaise lounge with my cat, et al…

Brain. I hear that nowdays you can blog even if you are paralyzed. How cool is that?

So what are your blogging essentials?

Some of you guys wanted to know more about my nefarious picture affiliate scheme. First of all, when I emailed AllPosters.com, they told me that I do not have a specific affiliate code. So I haven’t figured out how to do 2nd tier yet. I really appreciate you asking, though! Also, at this point, there have been 30 clickthroughs and no sales. At any rate, it’s an easy way to grab pictures that are already the size you want them to be without worrying about copyright issues!

Once upon a time, there lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter’s hands were getting quite callused from chopping so much wood, and he was also beginning to have environmental concerns. So, in an attempt to make easy money online, he started two niche blogs. It’s good to write about what you know, so of course one of the blogs was about trees of all kinds. For his second attempt, he decided to write about the challenges of living off the land.

Both of the blogs did quite well, and the woodcutter was able to cut down 67% fewer trees. However, the woodcutters wife was becoming quite angry. Since the woodcutter was now spending quite a bit of his day on the computer, he was losing some of his manly woodcutter muscles. Also, the woodcutter had discovered Stumbling, gaming and online porn, and was no longer spending long nights sitting by the fire with his wife discussing the wildlife he’d seen that day.

His wife insisted that he go back to woodcutting full time, or she’d divorce him and take the house, the DVD collection and half of his chainsaws. The woodcutter knew he’d miss his chainsaws and a few of the DVDs, so he capitulated. He put both of his blogs up for sale on Sitepoint and waited to see what would happen.

The two blogs floated around in cyberspace, and the tree blog was worried, so he began shedding leaves to leave a trail back to the woodcutter, but unfortunately, that kind of stuff doesn’t work in reality.

There was one really scary moment when a witch bid on one of the blogs, but she had a poor payment history and the woodcutter canceled the bid. However, soon both of the blogs were bought by a person who had recently grown very tired of working at Starbucks and who had decided to become an online entrepreneur. She made both of the blogs wildly successful, doubling their profits in only two weeks.

The woodcutter saw this, divorced his wife and started a green blog. He became a successful activist and earned lots of money from his 36 additional blogs, primarily from affiliate links.

His wife had much more time on her hands after the divorce, and decided to start her own blog about gingerbread. It did quite well, and both couples lived happily ever after.

<img src=”http://bloggrrl.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/affiliate-poster-sales.jpg”

There’s a website out there that will be more than happy to let you use their vast library of professional photos absolutely free of charge, and pay you to do so.

Recently, I realized that Allposters.com has an affiliate program. They also happen to have over half a million pictures to choose from, many of which are of higher quality than the Flickr photos. The affiliate program pays 25%, which isn’t bad.

My reasoning is that I’m going to use photos anyway, so why not use ones that I can make money from? Click on the photo above, and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m going to play around with this for a while. I may go ahead and add some text that says, “Buy this print”, or something to that effect. It would probably be helpful, although not nearly as covert!

Photo: PPDigital

If you’re like me, you’re super stretched for time. You may not have the time you wish you had to devote to making your blog a better place to hang out. Still, just like you can throw the dirty clothes in the closet right before company comes, you can do some quickie things for your blog that will impress company, or at least inspire them to stay for a while.

1. Download a new plugin. My very favorite plugin is the social bookmarking one. You can find an excellent social bookmarking plugin right here. It’s a great way to get traffic. If you don’t need that one, how about one of the many from this huge list of wordpress plugins?

2. Add somebody interesting to your blogroll. It’s too easy to let your blogroll gather dust (and dead links). In five minutes, you can add three new links, and if you have an hour or so, you can clean the whole thing out.

3. Eliminate any widgets and buttons that have been hanging around for no good reason. You know, things like that promotional button for BlogHer’s ‘06 conference.

4. Follow some of your blog friends (like me) on Twitter. Put up a link for them to follow you while you’re at it. (That one took me 7 seconds.) The point of this is to raise your viability, make new friends and occasionally tweet about a post.

5. Create a quick poll for your blog. Or you can use one that someone else has already made. They liven up sidebars and posts and are that great combination of quick and free.

So if you do all of these things, you’ve spent 25 minutes. Unless you get caught up following links and reading all the cool stuff that’s out there. Then it will take about a week. No worries…