Marko Saric

I was part of the blogging panel at the London Bloggers Meetup last night. The topic was blogging resolutions. I shared couple of things that I am working on to improve my blogging this year. These are:

First resolution is to get a mobile responsive design. I’ve now integrated responsive design into my own blog. Now my design adapts itself to the screen size of the device you are using to access it. For example viewing from a full size browser you see the full design of the blog, but let’s say you visit from an iPhone my blog becomes a one column blog and all the images automatically resize for your screen size. If you’re here on a desktop/laptop browser go have a look – shrink the browser window size and see how the blog adapts itself.

Why is mobile important you may be asking. Smartphones have overtaken computer sales. In some countries mobile traffic is larger than computer traffic, the trend is that mobile traffic will overtake computer traffic soon. On my blog 23% of visitors are browsing from a mobile device and the trend is just growing.

The second resolution that I shared was to be more visual. Pictures are superior to words. Pinterest and Instagram are huge and they rely solely on images. Same for videos. The world watches 4 billion hours of YouTube videos every month. I am trying to tap more into the multimedia interest and my resolution is to do more visual content. Videos, images, infographics, presentational slides… See for example examples of infographics I have published in last couple of weeks here and here and also a blog post which is basically a 24 slide presentation here.

As last I will encourage everyone who has a “start a blog” resolution to just give it a go. 200 million people will connect to the internet for the first time this year, so you are definitely not too late in trying out that blogging idea you have. There is still an audience there looking for you.

Happy new blogging year!

p.s. Thanks Andy Bargery for inviting me to join the panel.

In a recent talk I mentioned how I got my parents to get me an Internet connection so I could read about my favourite band Metallica. That mention got quite a bit of nice feedback so it is about the time I also put the full story of my first Internet days online.

In 1997 I was a student, lived at home, and was a big fan of the band Metallica. I loved reading magazines and one of the magazines had a www.metallicasomething.com link in it talking about the new online world and what you as a Metallica fan can experience there.

So what was I to do? I got my parents to get me home Internet connection so I can read more Metallica stuff.

Shortly after I wanted to start my own website as well. My attitude was all kind of like “I’ll just set up a website about Metallica. How hard can it be?”. I had no web design skills what so ever, I didn’t know how to program or anything like that. I used software called Front Page and did a lot of “view source” on different sites I liked and figured a lot of it by copy/paste and experimenting. There was a lot of trial and error. I didn’t have any money so there was no money to waste on buying or hiring, it all down to me and my time.

I really enjoyed learning and exploring. When I really like something, I spend all my waking hours thinking about it, taking action, learning and experimenting. I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to eat or to shave or to sleep.

The website started with some long URL that my Internet provider offered for it’s customers, but then on 23rd December 1998 I purchased my first domain name and hosting – the URL was www.metxxxpage.com names after Metallica’s song FiXXXer.

There was a IM software called ICQ, I was constantly on connecting and networking. I emailed a lot of people who were webmasters and had similar fan sites on Geocities, I was on a continuous hunt for new information about the band that I can post with my own spin. I was always experimenting, once I even had a Winamp MP3 player skin for my own site, as Winamp was iTunes of those days.

Via CD Now I started selling Metallica CD’s, books and other merchandise as an affiliate then using my affiliate earnings to improve my own Metallica collection. This was all back in the day when people where using Hotmail for their email, Yahoo was the king, Netscape and MSN were big sources for search traffic, Geocities.com free sites were sending a lot of referral traffic, data analytics were collected with sites like ExtremeTracking etc.

The last info I have from ExtremeTracking shows visits incl. reloads being on 1.635.809 and even members of the band acknowledged my website about them.

What does it take to become a successful blogger? That was the question I had a task to answer at a presentation to a large group of blogging enthusiasts. It is a very hard question to answer as I have seen so many different ways of being successful in this field. Plus sometimes what works for one blogger in one field, doesn’t work for another blogger in another field.

One of the important skills to have in this line of business is the attitude of always being open to new ideas, always learning and exploring, trying and testing. I ended up creating a presentation focusing on the things that I have learned from my personal blogging experience and that in general could work for most of the people in the audience.

Watch my presentation in the video below:

I was invited to do a presentation to a group of non-bloggers. My task was to present the world of blogging to them, explain what it is about, what the differences between a static site and a blog are, show them a bit about how I use blogging and most importantly give them a push to start their own blog sites.

I love blogging and I see it as a very empowering tool for individuals and companies to spread the word about their products and connect with people in their target audience from all over the world. So it is not too hard for me to be enthusiastic about blogging and explain how it all works for new beginners.

Watch the presentation below and check out the slides as well:

One of the things I love about blogging is the simplicity of it. Without too much tech knowledge you can have a great looking site, and you can always keep it up to date with the latest Internet trends with simple changes or new plugin activations.

I was invited to come and speak at one of the blogging meet-ups about ways I would recommend people can improve their blogs. I came up with these 58 simple and easy-to-implement tips. You might have most of these covered already, but it is worth going through them as just by discovering one or two new ideas from this list can improve the functionality or the look and feel of your site.

That is what it is all about, discovering and getting inspired and making small continuous changes to improve your platform.

Watch my presentation below and also do check out the slides:

Whenever you are starting a new web project you usually need a home for it. For me majority of the time the home is a blog. A blog is simple to setup and allows you complete control of the look and feel without needing to spend too much time or without knowing too much about coding or CSS or HTML and all that.

A blog gives you a nice testing environment that is flexible and easy to trial things on. This is not something that big corporation can do on their main websites and servers normally, so having a blog allows the company to have a nice testing space for ideas and features.

In case you don’t have much of a budget starting a blog is also a very cost efficient way of testing out an idea – you just need a domain name and a hosting account and that it all your investment. The biggest investment is the time you spend on creating content and promoting it.

Making a blog is a simple process that I have shown in the video guide below. Follow the guide below and click here to get started.