If you’re someone who must work from home, like a blogger, and must work no matter what the weather conditions, then you’ll have to make sure you do your best to maintain your productivity. Say, for example, you’re a freelance writer who absolutely must deliver a project immediately after the storm comes through in order to be paid. Or maybe you’re a blogger who has to maintain a steady stream of content for your readers. The people who rely on you will have a hard time accepting the excuse that you haven’t completed the work due to a storm, especially if you had several months to do it. This means that you’ll need to prepare for the storm both mentally and physically.

I’ve tried to list below a few tips to help you stay productive during intense storms that threaten to interrupt your blogging or freelance writing.

How do you make your blog stand out from multitude of others?

Answer this question correctly and you are guaranteed to succeed. There is simply no way you can possibly fail if your answer this one right. And while you blog has a good chance to succeed through persistence and quality content – in this post I wanted to share an example of blog that I think will help you a lot more then what I can write here. It is something you simple have to see and experience!

This post brought to you by the letter “D” and the number “7″. D is for Dan who’s an almost thirty web developer and blogger hailing from the Great North and 7 for the number of paragraphs you will be subjected you to.

Let’s face it… all the stuff you heard about setting up your own website being difficult was not true. Most blog owners are not tech-savvy people and everyone including your grandmother has a website now. My websites have evolved over time and transitioned through various blogging platforms giving me a taste of what options everyone has when they choose to put up a site. One of the things I’ve learned is that while it’s nice to have all the newest and coolest widgets, plugins and advertisements on your website you have to keep in mind that the more fancy things you add the more that has to load for every viewer who comes to visit. The key thing to having a website is to keep it running smoothly and provide readers with a pleasant experience.

For every widget that you add to your website you are adding one more call to an external website every time your page loads. You must also remember that if one of these external websites is experiencing problems it will directly affect the loading time of your own website. A perfect example of this would be any blogger who uses a twitter plugin to display their tweets or whatever they’re called (I do not use twitter). I do know however that the twitter website experiences above average downtime.

Special guest post by Mike Paetzold

One of the best and easiest ways to get traffic to your blog is by taking advantage of the various free resources available on line.

Caveat: Your main or as I call it money blog needs to be on YOUR server and on a domain YOU own. You should be using a WordPress blog there.

Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.

• Squidoo – my absolute favorite
• Hub Pages
• Blogger
• WordPress.com
• MSN Live

For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Bumble Bees. (Hey I am old and bald bare with me here.)

As bloggers we can never have enough cool tools to help us through the day. I’m particularly taken by the many online applications that shine through and allow us bloggers to perform certain tasks easier. I have sourced some tools that you might find handy for your own needs.

Take a look at them and see what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback and whether they were helpful in any way.

This post was written by Monika Mundell

When we talk about blogging in the circles we step, this often involves a blog that has been created to make money for the blogger itself. Since this is way easier said than done, many bloggers get discouraged by the whole process and stop altogether.

What a pity, since these bloggers could get so much more out of their blogging by using a blog as a creative tool.