Could Lao Tzu Make Money With AdSense?

Lao Tzu is perhaps the world’s most popular author. In the 2600 years since its initial publishing, Lao Tzu’s masterpiece, Tao Te Ching, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and reprinted more often than nearly any book in human history.

Lao Tzu was a great teacher, and a master of brevity. Though the Tao Te Ching is merely five thousand characters (less than fifty pages of English text), it conveys profound wisdom. His writing was potent, concise, and meaningful: all qualities which would prevent Lao Tzu from succeeding as an AdSense publisher.

No, Lao Tzu could never support himself on income from AdSense, or other contextual advertising systems. He probably couldn’t even earn enough to feed his water buffalo. Why?

The Top 4,465 Things In The Known Universe

Another Group Writing Project

My previous post, Jackie Chan’s Greatest Fight Scenes, was one of the 893 entries in Darren Rowse’s Top 5 Writing Project. Since I benefited from incoming traffic as a contestant, it seems only fair that I pass on some link love.

Here a few contest entries related to the topic of this website, martial arts for personal development:

Build a Popular Blog the McDonald’s Way

A professional author spends months, or even years crafting a single bestselling novel. A magazine or newspaper journalist needs a few weeks to compose a feature story. The entire history of writing shows that good writing takes time.

Yet, according to Technorati, most popular blogs are updated on a daily basis, often multiple times. What are we to make of this?

Is that accepted wisdom, that successful blogs are built on great content, supported by any factual evidence?

Published
Categorized as Blogging

Add Pullquotes for a More Professional Blog

There are more than 50 million blogs on the Internet now, and thousands more are added every day.  If you want to keep readers’ attention in this hypercompetitive environment, you must create posts that both look interesting and read well.

This is an example of a basic pull quote.

Pullquotes are one of the easiest ways to add a little style to your blog post.  They break up large blocks of text, reinforce the key points in your post, and make your blog look more professional.  As common as they are in offline print mediasuch as magazinespullquotes are rarely used on blogs; they are therefore an effective way to help your blog stand out from the crowd.

Published
Categorized as Blogging

Why Write About Martial Arts?

WuAfter dedicating most of my day to work and family obligations, I am lucky to find a spare hour or two for my martial arts hobby. Many of you have a similar problem, no doubt.

Wen We could practice an hour per day for our entire lives, without exhausting the breadth and depth of martial arts. Considering the scope and challenge of the task, can we really afford to spend our precious time blogging about practice, at the expense of time spent in practice?