Being on a diet, one that restricts you to bland food and makes you feel like you’re suffering, is probably not the best choice you can make to start off with living a healthy lifestyle. Once you take the joy out of anything, you don’t want to continue with it for too long. This applies to everything in life as well, not just diets.

Diets that make your eating habits take an about turn are always doomed to failure, as they might work in the short term but you will always, always fall off them.

Instead, as I’m sure you have heard this at least one more time elsewhere, don’t go on a diet — go for a healthy lifestyle change instead. That means, make changes that you can sustain for the rest of your life.

5 Ways to Lead a Healthy Lifestyle

Live Healthy!

Here are some simple lifestyle changes you can make and keep in your diet:

1. Eat “whole” – Substitute whole grains for refined carbs. Stop eating white bread and eat whole grain bread (note that wheat bread and whole grain bread are different – the first uses enriched wheat flour, which is refined, and the second uses whole grain flour, which isn’t). Eat whole grain pasta instead of regular pasta. Eat brown rice instead of white. Whole grain bagels instead of regular. You get the idea. Whole grains are much healthier — more nutrients, slower to digest, more fiber. Refined carbs offer nearly no nutrition in exchange for lots of calories. And after a little while, you won’t want to go back — whole grains taste better and are more satisfying.
2. Fruits and veggies – Even though your mother told you to eat your fruits and vegetables, you probably did not follow her advice into your adult years. But it’s an easy change to make — just stock up on them every week when you go shopping, and snack on them throughout the day. Have berries for breakfast. Snack on fruits at your office. Eat raw or steamed veggies with lunch and dinner. Fruits are great as desserts (juicy pears yum!) or as a snack at anytime of the day. Fruits and veggies not only provide nutrients and fiber, but they fill you up without giving you too much calories and fat.
3. Lean meats – Switching beef for lean chicken or turkey is an easy adjustment. No matter how much you say you like red meat, it’s killing you! Even better, substitute the protein from meat with the protein from beans, soy or even whole grains. It might be hard to make this change so do this one steadily. Start with once a week and see how it goes.
4. Watch your sweet tooth – Cutting back on sweets can be very difficult. I used to eat a whole lot of cookies, cakes, brownies…oh God! the temptation to wean yourself off sugar is probably the hardest thing you can do. The solution you need here is to follow steps 1 and 2 to the best of your ability.
5. Cheat – What?! All that effort and you want me to just throw it all away and gorge myself?! No, not exactly gorge but treat yourself for a job well done, for ONE day only. Let it be once a week, once a fortnight or once a month. You’ll feel better and it will give you a sense of accomplishment. Just remember to set yourself back on track the following day.

If you implement these changes one at a time, slowly and over a long period of time you will start seeing results. Trying to stop everything you were used to tomorrow and starting a new way of life will not work. You will have a difficult time, suffer, and fail within a few weeks or even days!

Post  inspired by Zen Habits.

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Everyone’s trying to make a buck euro or two, or double what they made yesterday online. The best part about the web is that you do not need a degree, you don’t have to be in any specific country or city and most importantly you do not need to know someone that’s knows someone so you can land a “deal”. You can pretty much make it on your own here and look forward to an early retirement.

So in the spirit of everyone, and their mom, offering up tips and tricks on how to rake it in online. Here’s -

5 ways that you can use the web to plan an early retirement

• Get Social Online & Offline – You do not need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on traffic, SEO, a custom made CMS or glitzy graphics, even though a good web design can help you down the road, to get started on the web. You just need to have a sense of humor and good social skills. Then let social media do the work for you. Use linkbait content that people just cannot resist seeing. Learn everything you can about social media marketing, slowly but surely, and remember to market yourself offline too. People still read t-shirt slogans no matter how silly it may look to them. Social media marketing is where the new rich hang out, you need to get started today before it’s too late!
• Write To Retire – People are getting book deals because of their daily ramblings. BOOK DEALS!!! Was that possible 10 years ago if you kept giving advice, or telling funny stories, to people from your cubicle? Nope, but today you can. If you are good with words, and are not abusive of using tags, then by all means get started on your A-list status. You never know what could happen.
• Affiliate Today, Super Affiliate Tomorrow – This takes some work, but once you get started there is seriously nothing that can stop you. I’m getting a little bit of the taste myself and I’m loving it. Starting in affiliate marketing can be a little intimidating at first, but mark my words the key here is perseverance. If you can persevere in your job, just so you can retire after 40 years, then spending a few months on this cannot be that hard.
• Freelance Today, Vacation Tomorrow – Seriously it’s not that hard as it sounds. I’ve been doing it for years now, even though my pace is slower than most, I can very arguably say that going freelance is probably the best choice I made. I started slow and steady before I went in full swing. Word of advice, if you have a family – get a separate office space where they cannot see you for said amount of hours, unless it’s an emergency.
• Use The Web, I Mean That Literally. USE It! – If there is one thing you should know about the web, it will not care about you tomorrow. It probably doesn’t even care about you right now. Don’t try and be friends with search engines, algorithms, traffic rankings, “buzz” indicators, linkbacks etc… they can stop caring about you in a heartbeat. Use each and every single aspect of the web for what’s it worth.

Now that you are on your way to planning an early retirement there is one other thing you should know.

Stop reading this and take action. You’re not getting any younger.

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Having an online business has a lot of advantages over the “normal” day to day activities that most people do.

For instance -

• You “normally” don’t need to drive to work.
• You “normally” don’t need to get dressed for work.
• You “normally” don’t need to set a budget for gas to go to work so you can buy gas to get back there again!

But, you still do have to plan and prepare for slow periods in your online business, you’re not invincible you know. Sometimes people just drive click by your store site without even glancing. Pretty much the same as a real world scenario.

You can however turn this slump into a very power packed period for you. By using these 5 ways to do so -

• Close out pending projects – There’s nothing worse than constantly seeing a project in your portfolio that you either never got around to doing or just kept putting off time and time again. Deal with it, now! If you think you are not going to be able to handle one more thing, then just fire yourself over it.
• Empty your email inbox – You probably think that having your inbox filled with emails shows that you are a busy person. To me it just shows that you are busy with the wrong things. If you really want to save emails then create folders and organize them. Having them all show up when you log in won’t increase your importance to anyone, even yourself. Once you reply, have the sent email automatically save itself. You’ll have much less deleting and screening to do later on.
• Clean out your computer – Delete things you know you will not need anymore. If you really want to save it, buy an online storage account and archive it. Don’t be cheap, you’re making money online. Act like it.
• Get a facelift – No, I don’t mean for yourself. I mean for your websites. Times change, you need to change your online presence with them. Even if it’s just giving your sites a few extra hints of graphic goodness. It’ll help you like your business much better later down the road. Not too mention your visitors will appreciate the freshness.
• Take a break – If you think you got it all covered and just want to chill for some time. There’s some real nice deals that you can find over at tripology. I could use a sandy beach somewhere in the Caribbean right about now. sigh…

Your online business will thank you later for approaching it with a clear head once your back in the swing of things. Because now you don’t have any extra nagging thoughts clogging you up.

It’s no secret that virtually every blog out there has the ubiquitous 125 X 125 ad blocks, even me! But I’ve noticed that visitors don’t tend to click much on them. In this day and age when advertisers demand to know how much ROI they can expect on their ad spending this could have a HUGE impact on your blogs monetization strategies.

Here are 5 ways that you can combat ad blindness on your blog -

1. Rotate your ads – Download this plugin to automate your ads being rotated every time a page on your blog is loaded. If you find that visitors tend to click, come back, reload and visit other pages on your blog they will see a new placement each and every single time. Provided you do not have wp-cache installed.
2. Use a different format -There are more formats than just 125 size ads. You can display 120 X 240 ads or use a randomizer plugin to show bigger 300 X 250 each time a page is refreshed. You need to keep experimenting and changing, kind of like how you wear a different tee over the same jeans everyday to get a whole new look.
3. Don’t show ads – Yep, as drastic as it may sound you are probably better off not showing any “graphical” ads. I have a skyrocketing CTR on my affiliate “text” links within posts all over this blog. Give it a try, only make sure that whatever you are linking to is relevant, and don’t over do it please. That just negates your effort.
4. Ad free days – I’m going to take off all my graphical ads for the next two days, not text links. I figure if people see a clean blog they might stay longer and probably click on the right affiliate text link, or better yet actually subscribe to my blog and become regular readers. That would be worth much more than a couple of bucks. So when you do turn your ads back on you’ve already won over a new audience. You can always sell to them later.
5. Get a designer – If the ads on your blog suck, I’m talking about affiliate banners, then you need to get some custom designed banners. You can find a lot on freelance job websites, forums etc…Try some different formats than non-industry standard and have some fun.

Give some of these tips a try and figure out what works best for you. Let me know how it goes, I would love to do case studies.

Community Question: How often do you click on an ad on blogs you regularly visit? Comment on this post to answer.

I’ve learned a lot of things about blogging during this year. The most important stuff probably was how I shortened the time I spend blogging. Here are 5 ways that I’ve used to help blog faster.

1. Blog On The News – Sometimes a piece of news or information can set the blogosphere on fire. A recent example is the Google PageRank debacle. Everybody who was somebody had something to say about it. The best part here is that the topic is already chosen for you and much of the content as well. Traffic can increase in times like these. Of course, it helps if you’re right around the corner and leave a trackback, or a good comment, on a popular blog {like mine, ahem} this can bring in extra traffic.
2. Type When Inspiration Hits – That’s exactly what I’m doing.
3. Simple Posts Draw More Attention – Lookie what I did on this guest blog post competition and this post about unpopular blogging topics. Those posts took me all of a few minutes to type up and got the fastest comments in the shortest amount of time.
4. Get Guest Bloggers – Sometimes you just don’t feel like it, or you want someone else to do all the work. Clean your minds, I’m talking about blogging. So hire someone to help you update your blog. The next time you write your own blog post your ideas will flow like there’s no tomorrow!
5. Cut Out Distractions – That means turn your music, TV, live stream video channel off. If you work at home like me, shut the door and inform the family members that you’re being creative. I like to grab a cookie after I’m done with a post I really like. I’m going to go grab one now! John Cow probably has a glass of milk. {or gives a glass of milk?}

Hope these tips help you blog faster in 2008. They helped me in the later half of 2007 post faster than I did in the first half. If you have your own tips post a comment and let me, and the other readers, know about them.

Life comes at you fast, sometimes too fast and at times you don’t have time to think or slow down before the next curve. Here’s 5 ways to get ready for those curves in your life. Warning: I’m only 28, but I’ve been through enough to warrant writing this post.

1. Starting your own business - Feeling entrepreneurial huh? Well, here’s my piece of advice – if you don’t think you can pull it off, do it anyway. Doesn’t matter if you fall flat on your face, next time around you won’t. I know, because I learned by falling flat on my face the first time. Giving up is not an option.
2. Babies and Diapers - They’re expensive. But even if you bleed with debt the smile they put on your face when they come running to hug you just wipes it all away in a millisecond. Money comes and money goes, but when kids come you don’t want them to go. I would advise you to stay smart about planning that aspect of your life though, because it will take a lot out of you.
3. Growing Up - I’ll be 30 before I know it! I plan on having my retirement fund completely set up by then. I’ve been working on my web products, toning my skills, reading and experimenting as much as I can to get myself ready for the next phase of my life, the phase where I take action! A lot of time and planning went into this phase, I started by falling flat on my face first.
4. Network Online and Offline – No matter how much you try to do things by yourself, sometimes you need a little help. There’s absolutely nothing wrong in seeking help from the contacts that you have built up. Remember successful people surround themselves with great people to help them become {more} successful.
5. Free Your Mind – I think it was April/May 2006 when I had approximately $1.28, or something like that, in my PayPal account and no prospects of new freelancing jobs. I had a little obscure blog at the time and had a little contest to give $0.50 cents away {Lame, I know}. But a few people got in the competition for the fun of it. Then another week later I was giving away more cash in a new contest, as new funds had arrived from new jobs I got, just because I let my mind free from worries. I shut that blog down, mostly because the domain name sucked {see point number 1}.

A little reminder before you finish reading up, don’t forget to give back. Remember there’s always a straight road at the end of a curve, till the next one…

While developing my customized theme I thought of a few ways that I think the folks over at WordPress might take into account for implementing in the near future.

Here are 5 ways to make WordPress better:

1. Diversify – It would be great if they would include or develop at least one or two more default templates NOT meant for blogging. I don’t care if they even offer that as a separate code package and even charge for it! OMG! {at least only serious people would download it, and not spammers}. WordPress is being increasingly used in various web formats rather than just for blogging. A lot of designers have made premium website and magazine type themes, I’m working on one myself, they could take over one of those projects or should get one custom developed.
2. Basic CSS editing “panel” – I would prefer if the CSS file was somehow made to work in its own little panel. So rather than editing the basic CSS code via the “Theme Editor” users could just edit the major elements like text color, backgrounds etc…via a central CSS panel. A default set of CSS “ID’s” and “Classes” should also be assigned as a standard to follow for all developers. A one-click “back to default” option would be welcome as well.
3. Image Resizing – Changing the image height and width is the easiest way to change an images dimensions, but the size in bytes stays the same. If they could tie up with some online image editing website to offer easy access via the “Upload” area of the “Write a Post” section a lot of bytes could be saved. Benefits of this are faster loading times for your blog, especially if you have are an image happy blogger. Not everyone has photoshop or Gimp {even if Gimp is free}.
4. Automattic or Easy Updating – This horse has been beaten to death over and over again, yet it keeps standing up. Can the WP developers please put it to sleep?
5. Help! – Why there isn’t a little library of help items yet for WordPress within the admin section is just beyond me. The support forums are good enough, but a little help on the inside can’t hurt that much can it? Speaking for those who don’t know the ins and outs of WordPress i.e., which are the majority.

Have your own suggestions? Leave a comment.

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With the PageRank downgrade that just happened recently everyone is talking about the negatives and how it affects them etc… I, on the other hand, give you 5 ways you can actually benefit from the PageRank fiasco.

1. If your PageRank is above a 4, or equal to it, you can now boast that you have a higher, or similar, PR to ProBlogger.net and CopyBlogger.com.
2. You can now uninstall Google Toolbar since the only reason you downloaded it was to check on everyones, and yours, PR. Now that it doesn’t matter anymore you can uninstall it. If you liked the shortcuts that Google provided to their service stop being lazy and just make a special bookmarks folder for them. You now have a de-cluttered browser. {I just uninstalled my Google Toolbar. Wow! I feel so much better}
3. You can stop looking for high PR blogs with the Top Commentator plugin installed to leave your comments on. If it still hasn’t hit home yet, PageRank is irrelevant.
4. If your blog got hit by a PR downgrade then you will notice that you get less offers for link exchanges. Your inbox will feel so much better thanks to Google.
5. You don’t need to write anymore posts on your blog about how to increase your PR, since nobody really cares anymore.

I made this little banner for ProBloggers contest. Feel free to use it on your blog.

Currently I’m experiencing some internet connection problems at home. Which actually turned out to be a good thing as I got to do a lot of other stuff that I would not have done yet. Here’s 5 ways to make yourself buys in times like these, however painful they may be.

1. Clean up your computer – I had so much junk on my system it was not even funny. By the time I deleted, organized and deleted some more files/folders/apps I had freed up around 5 GB of space. That’s a lot of junk! I feel better about using my system now.

2. Clean up your computer…on the outside – Have you ever looked at your keyboard? Those white spots are actually bacteria and fungi which sprouted due to your oil stained fingers from potato chips and the cola you spilled a while back. Clean it up! It’s gross. Also if you have a desktop it doesn’t hurt to open the side panel of your computer and clean out the dust. All you need is a screwdriver and a vacuum.

3. Clean up clutter – Yep, I’ve been doing a little bit of cleaning on my desk and it feels better without the clutter. I can actually concentrate on my work now.

4. Get some pending work done – I’ve finally finished the layout for this blogs new theme. Time to begin coding it. I’ve also finished designing another project that needed doing, one that I was not too happy with. Plus I’ve been writing down some great blog posts for publishing later.

5. Take a Walk, Cook an egg, Watch Some TV – There is more to life than just who posted what. Live a little, I need to do more of it myself.

My internet should be back full swing tomorrow, hopefully. Till then I’m going to make the most of an IM free environment.

Got any tips of your own to share?

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“This post is part of, August – Make Money Online Month”

How do you get your blog ready for direct ad sales? When do you decide you are going to reduce or completely eliminate your CPC ads {Adsense, YPN etc…} which have so far provided you with a stable source of income, but yet not enough.

Of course if you have a lot of traffic, you can use every single method of monetization possible – at the expense of looking ugly. Personally I would like to know that my ad inventory is sold out rather than hope I get enough clicks or conversions on my CPC and affiliate links. Here are some methods I am employing -

1. Clean your blog – This includes making your sidebar clutter free, removing all unnecessary badges, those widgets that you think look “cool”, keeping only relevant links on your sidebar, take all or most CPC ads off your blog. Many of these methods will eventually keep a reader on your blog for a longer period of time. Which means they might potentially click on an advertisers banner. Which makes them happy.
2. Use plugins for CPC ads – If you still want to use CPC Ads or affiliate links and have a WordPress powered blog, then you should install this WordPress plugin to better target who sees your Ads. If you get a lot of search engine traffic the best way to monetize it is by showing ads to visitors that come via that channel. Of course you shouldn’t overdo it as you also want them to become long term readers.
3. Set up an Advertise page – If you don’t have a specific “Advertise” page yet, you should consider setting one up. Have all the various ways that an advertiser can advertise with you, make it crystal clear about the various forms of advertising you offer, alongside your prices. Some bloggers like to display their prices, some don’t. It’s up to you to decide.
4. Statistics – It doesn’t matter if you have 100 visitors a day or 10,000, you need to show some form of statistics to a potential advertiser. Set up heat map testing by using the free service from crazyegg and see for yourself where your visitors click the most. Make a graph of this, alongside your technorati ranking, traffic stats from Alexa and/or Compete {I know, I know they’re useless} or just show your own personal traffic stats. You do track your traffic, right?
5. Approach a potential advertiser – It’s OK to send out emails to a potential advertiser asking them to have a look at your blog as a platform to advertise their site/product. You can also approach other bloggers to advertise on your blog. If you have a blog and have competitive pricing for a prime spot send me an email. I might just advertise with you.

I’m working on a few of the points myself to make my blog more desirable to potential advertisers. If you have any tips you would like to share, leave a comment.

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Working for yourself on the internet has it’s ups and downs. The best part is the freedom, one of the worst parts can be managing your own finances. Especially when the going gets rough you may have to trim some edges. Just as any manager would do for their brick and mortar business. I’ve run some of my own affiliate sites, still do, so I know a thing or two about trimming costs. If you run small to medium affiliates sites or blogs that makes you a significant portion of your income then these tips might be for you.

So here are 5 Ways Your Online Business Can Save Money.

1. Budgeting advertising – If you advertise your website or blog using PPC then you should know that you can lower your PPC costs for the summer, as traffic is low. Though you may use it to your advantage and profit from the highly targeted traffic that the summer months does bring. Smaller PPC prices, less clicks, but a higher probability of a sale.

2. Learn basic web technologies – Outsourcing your work is sometimes essential to manage your business. But if you constantly have someone doing your work for you, use some of your free time to learn basic HTML and CSS and maybe an open source image editing software like GIMP at the very least. So you don’t have to pay $25 an hour to somebody to upload a couple of images or change the color of your < h1 > headings.

3. Unsubscribe to unimportant mail order magazines – And start subscribing to RSS feeds from similar blogs and websites/forums on the internet that can probably offer you more information, but for free! Just keep the ones you really need and get rid of the ones you don’t. Helps the environment too.

4. Market your website offline – I’ve written about this before as well, offline e-marketing is probably one area which can have an huge impact on your business for the local market. Plus it only requires you, a few business cards and a good conversation to leave an impression. Never underestimate word of mouth marketing.

5. Use free social sites to drive traffic – Now that you have reduced your online PPC spending. Use some time to tap into the power of social sites peppered across the web. There’s one for every niche possible. You just have to find it and use it wisely. Abuse will just get you kicked out, so be careful there.

Enjoy your savings!

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Everybody wants more traffic to their blog or site. Here are 5 Surefire Ways to Get More Traffic to your Blog.

1. Create a HUGE list – My list for online videos gets a lot of hits each and every single day from search engines. My other list for web design also brings in a lot of visitors. Just don’t copy my ideas, think of your own. Copying is for lazy brainless creeps. I know you’re not one.

2. Forums – If you’re part of a community forum that doesn’t mind if you link to your own website with articles that are of interest then go ahead and use that freedom. Topics that are relevant to the population of the forum will get you more traffic than ones that have nothing to do with it. Plus most people who are part of a forum know when you’re spamming, so don’t do it too often or you’ll find complaints racking up against you. Which could get you banned from the forum.

3. Un-Socialize – Too much of sites like digg and del.icio.us could hurt you as you get dependent on them, use them moderately. Back away from writing content meant for them for sometime and you’ll find yourself cranking out more awesome content than you thought possible. Which will eventually give you a clearer head to think straight. Remember don’t let your blogs survive solely from social sites.

4. Commenting – Subscribe to a few of the most popular blogs in your niche and contribute your comments to their posts. Don’t comment on every post though, as that will just look spammy and your comments might end up being marked as spam. Instead wait for some posts to get popular and then contribute to the discussion with your insight.

5. Piss off somebody! – Anybody! Pick a topic that is taken as a norm and take a completely opposite stance to it. Of course if you do it then make sure your article has some beef, but remember your main premise is to tick someone off. The best time to do this is when you have at least a few hundred visitors daily who can leverage your content and spread it virally.

If you have any surefire tips on how to get more traffic then post a comment. Some of my visitors may just visit your blog.

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Some people like to subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds for variety in content. I myself have various tabs set up in my Netvibes account, each dedicated to a specific genre. One tab for Tech/Blogs, one for Design and so on. Each tab has an average of 5 – 10 feeds in them. Some days I spend an hour to two or more reading, sometimes I just skim the headlines and only read if it interests me.

If you have subscribed to way more feeds than you can handle, but you don’t want to unsubscribe as the blogs you read all have relevant information for you, then here’s 5 Ways to Become a Faster RSS Reader.

1. Segregate – All RSS readers have tab or folder functionality where you can group feeds as you like. Most do it by type of content, like me, instead organize them by time of day. Choose the feeds that you have to absolutely must read before you start your day and put them in a “Start” or “Morning” folder. So just read them and nobody else in the morning, go on organizing your other feeds like that as well by time of day or even an importance level. Some examples are – Morning, Evening, Before Bed or Must Read, Wait Till Later and even make a Probation folder for feeds that were good at one point of time but suck now. Please don’t put me in that one
2. Colors – If your RSS start page or reader allows you to place colors around or on the tabs of your feeds then use them. I use colors now to show which feeds are more important to read for me. Red for the must read feeds {within any specific tab after segregating them} ones that can wait till later will have an orange, blue for ones that usually write longer posts so I know I need to be relaxed to read them and so on. Netvibes allows me to use colors, that’s why I chose them over others.
3. Look for Keywords – You know the kind of person you are and what interests you, so gaze over all the headlines you see for words that get your attention, read those posts first and leave the rest for later. Sometimes a post might be long, so skim over the post to look for keywords, read a few lines of the first paragraph and then jump over to where the “point” is being made. If the blogger doesn’t format their posts properly, then there’s always the probationary folder.
4. Numbers don’t matter – If your reader says you have “X” number of posts to read just click them off. Then go back and see what you want to read. Just because a blog posts 20 times a day doesn’t mean you have to read all of them, unless you’re devoted like that.
5. Email Subscriptions – Almost all good blogs offer email subscriptions, as I do. If you work a day job, then you can get your favorite content delivered to your office email address. So signing up for email delivery for blogs that you read the most is a good idea, provided they offer it. My email sign up form is on the sidebar. This way you can read your favorite feeds at work during breaks and catch up with other ones at home.

Hope these tips help you optimize the time you spend reading your feeds.

Let’s face it sometimes we just want to write an article that will become the ultimate linkbait to make other bloggers talk about you. That is, after all, how you build yourself as an authority.

Many bloggers see a popular article on digg, or some other bloggers post getting a ton of trackbacks and say, “Oh man, I wish I had thought of writing an article like that” or, “I just can’t write stuff like that“. There are many ways to write some good linkbait, here’s my 5.

1. If you’re a new blogger, start a meme that has a different twist to it then the ones already out there. Most established bloggers don’t participate in meme’s as they have already been there, done that. So start of a relationship with a few upcoming blogs and tag them. If you start it off you are guaranteed to be link backed too each time someone participates. Just don’t do too many memes OK, because then it just gets boring.
2. Create a long detailed analysis of a popular blog and email the blogger to let him/her know about it. If your analysis rocks they’ll link back to you, you get more traffic and ultimately more links will pour in.
3. A picture is worth a thousand words. Digg users love a good picture and if you happen to snap one, or find one then write a snappy 1 or 2 sentences and either submit it yourself or have a friend submit it to digg. Some diggers will gladly “blog it” as well from within your stories digg page. Of course, only place the picture on your blog if YOU took it, otherwise you will just get buried for blog spamming.
4. Make a poll for a controversial or a popular topic. If you can, try and include other blogs that have blogged about the topic in your poll. There are many free poll creating sites like PollDaddy, Quibblo
   and Zoho to name a few. People like to vote, though when it comes to voting for politicians they somehow mess up.
5. If you have background experience in something that many people are trying to do themselves on the internet like how to make money online or a some secret SEO tips. Create a Free E-Book and release it with some never before read content that people will just slurp up. You will get guaranteed link backs if your E-Book rocks.

So go ahead give it a try, the more linkbacks you get the more popular your blog becomes.