How do you write articles that people find interesting? The answer is actually quite simple: tell the stories you used to tell in bars while having drinks with friends. Those are your best ones. That’s exactly what my buddy Renato Valdés Olmos did. He’s a designer from Amsterdam who has his own agency and a start-up with which he wants to kill business cards. Although he’s incredibly busy, Renato recently started a blog. I loved his first three stories.

Continue reading Blog Your Bar Stories to Get Comments

Don’t you get tired of all those boring “How to be a better writer?”-posts. It’s the same thing all over again, “Have a unique voice”, “Love your commenters”, etcetera, etcetera. To help us all out, I’ve dug through the clutter and selected 36 posts that can help you become an original and all-round problogger. And because vanity is a blogger’s right, I’ve also included four articles by my own hand. Themes are Development & Design, Workflow, Publishing, Inspiration and Comments. Enjoy!

Continue reading Dig through the clutter: 40 must-reads for extraordinary bloggers

All the bloggers immediately know what I’m talking about if I start complaining that readers don’t comment. A famous study by Jakob Nielsen in October 2006 showed that only one percent of a blog’s visitors contribute to the comments section on a regular basis:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the…

Continue reading Getting readers to comment by writing an unfinished blog post