Its very important to have your blogging milestones set before you start off blogging - thats what theory says. Unfortunately, I or anyone is rarely guided by people while starting off. After about 3 years of Blogging (4 years, If manually updating html pages everyday can be considered blogging) , here is what I think is the best way to start with your blogging milestones.

And while monetization comes in the later parts, this will probably answers your questions on making a living from a blog

It is really simple to create the style of theme you want with wordpress that you can do a wordpress magazine style homepage and theme like my homepage with almost no expertise in wordpress theming!

Until recently my hompage was a php page with only page! I did not really bother with converting my homepage into wordpress since I did not have much of a content to post there anyways. But my tastes keep changing all the time and individual php files were of no use if I had to change the design. So I posted that exact php into a wordpress theme in less than 60 seconds. How?

Usually advice and technology news blogs are galore all over the internet but its difficult to get a name for yourself in this niche. The market is usually lead by the biggies like TechCrunch or Gizmodo or others. But then, I do not subscribe to these sites, mainly cuz they have at least 10-30 posts a day and its usually everything about technology in hardware, software and gadgets.

But here is a site that claims to post only the best of the best in tech news. GadgetAdvisor - Cutting through the cutting egde. Inlike the big blogs in the niche, the Gadget Advisor aims to post news that are significant, useful or particularly cool. Their list of interesting news include:

I had recently posted my thoughts on content duplication and it was pretty much criticized over by friends due to a lot of reasons. I started off making money online rewriting content on digitalpoint and other forums and I still suggest that to beginners who want to start off making money online.

Initially it felt really bad it was work sans creativity and felt like my work at the call center before that, but then as I did it in the digital point forums, I learnt a lot of things looking just watching the forum spy. Content rewriting has been there in the traditional media as long as anyone can remember. What do you see on Sundays where you have supplements on youth, recipes, interview tips and more. They are rehashed content from the internet, from other books and journals.

This is it. I had tried so hard to ignore this newly propogated idea on the internet that suddenly “content is not king”. But being the kind of guy who reads about 100 blogs a day, its so hard. Till the recent times, as recent as 3 weeks back, it was said that content is king and suddenly everyone wants to turn the plate?

I have been hearing about this since the day I got online and from the day I started blogging. But suddenly the content king is being de-throned by marketing and linkbuilding and even social media? I beg to differ and stick to the old age saying which was phrased by God-Knows-Who.

Today I am in a mood of giving something back to the community. Today, I am celebrating the birthday of someone special with you my readers! For all you out there this is a small contest where you can win a few stuff and wish Happy Birthday to someone very special.

What is on the winnings table?

1. 2 Free domains - EnterSurf.info and Freedombabe.info
2. SEO consultation for your site - 2 hours.
3. 2 months of free link on my blogroll.

What are the advertising offers?

• 15% off on any advertising on my site. Check the advertising page for more information

This was what I found on a orkut profile:

“Don’t bother adding me as a friend, I do not add strangers as friends. ”

Then I thought, I would scrap him on orkut, but then it said only friends can scrap! Hell, then why even have accounts on all these “social” networks!?!?! I understand you want to use your orkut account only for friends, but why block the possibility of getting new contacts and friends and even fans?

The blog is finally up and running. I was having a hectic time tweaking the plugins and design to get that perfect look that I missed the posting for a few days. Presenting, TheAnand 2008!

Also, I will be putting up my old theme for public download soon since some people seemed to like it better. And wordpress themes have my fancy that I will be putting up a few of my themes for download asap.

As TheAnand.com matures with time, I think its time for a redesign again. Initially this blog used a free theme, then I got around making 2 custom themes myself and now I am in the process of getting a professional theme done.

As per the team behind the redesign, it should be up in another 3 days or so.. The main ideas behind the new design are better readability and professional looks and more nifty features. I designed the theme myself and it is being coded by pros now.

StumbleCult the upcoming stumble helper for webmasters is now going strong and registrations are coming by the day. To celebrate the popularity, we are now giving away free credits to everyone, this excludes the free 10 credits you already get when you signup! The only requirement in order to win the credits is to blog about the cult and send in a email to them. This as they say in the blog is a win-win situation for both the cult and its members since more active the cult becomes, more traffic we get to your sites.

photo credit: Georgieporg

The other day I was pondering with the pencil in my hand. What can we bloggers learn from a pencil? Here are a few things we can learn from the humble pencil.

1. The lead inside matters more than the wood outside.

You might have the best of designs on your blog, but if you have crappy content rehashed from elsewhere, or post infrequently and post without a purpose or a meaning. Visitors can start with a “Awww…” with your terrific blog design and end it with a “….Sheit!!!” seeing your content.

Alexa ranks hates this blog since every other week its only going downwards, so does PR now. Technorati refuses to index my new links and hence a stagnant ranking there. All this makes my blog pretty much useless to potential advertisers. The traffic to the blog has only been growing all these days and I end up being bitch slapped?

I never get fed up of searching for new snazzy plugins to make my blog more beautiful. A beautiful blog makes you want to blog more effectively or so I believe. You might want to check out my other wordpress plugin posts like this one.

• My New Wordpress Plugins
• Another 7 Useful Wordpress plugins
• Yet more Useful Wordpress Plugins

On to this editions useful and cool wordpress plugins

Different Posts Per Page: This is a plugin that lets you define how many posts you want to display per page. I find this very useful since I want to display all the posts in the archives page, but only 7 on the homepage, 5 on the results page and likewise. Neat.