Content Archives - Page 2 of 4 - This Week in Blogging

5 Things to Do (and Not to Do) If You Have a Copycat Blogger

September 12, 2023

It is never a fun feeling in blogging to find out that you have a copycat. It has happened to me many times over the years, and even to this day I still always have a moment of panic over all of the what-ifs that could happen.

Most end up resolving themselves just fine, but some become a persistent issue that I simply have to recognize become a part of doing business.

So in this one, we thought it'd be fun to discuss the topic of copycat bloggers more and share some things you should (and shouldn't) do when someone is imitating your business.

That said, we should also note that you may have two kinds of copycats to watch out for, namely, one that follows your lead and builds an eerily similar brand as your own and another that steals content outright. While we call both of these copycats insofar as the word's connotations allow, some approaches below may best apply only to one case over the other.

The Risks vs Rewards of Writing Evergreen Content

June 19, 2023

One of my favorite kinds of articles to write when it comes to blogging is known as evergreen content.

This kind of content, named after the type of trees that keep their leaves year-round, is considered by many to be always relevant and able to yield traffic for weeks, months, or even years after the initial post is published.

But while longevity is an excellent reward for bloggers who are successful in writing evergreen content, there are also some associated risks that many of us tend to overlook. So in this one we thought it'd be appropriate to share the breakdown of the risks and rewards in producing evergreen content in blogging!

Modern Events Calendar Review – Event Sharing Made Easy

April 17, 2023

One question I regularly received on my Pittsburgh blog from readers and potential advertisers alike was simply “do you have an events calendar?”

For the longest time, my answer to that was a resounding no simply because I thought the amount of time that it would take to manage an events calendar would not be worth any potential return on investment (especially because, let's be honest, getting advertising on a local site can be hard!).

It wasn't until I heard of a few creative ideas to monetize an event calendar that I was sold that it was something I wanted to pursue, and after a fair bit of research I settled on the Modern Events Calendar plugin. So in this one, I thought I would share a review of the tool, how I use it on my local site, and some unique monetization ideas as well.

Taking a Vacation from Blogging – What to Do to Stay Active

January 30, 2023January 30, 2023

As full-time travel bloggers, Chris and I travel a lot- upwards of 100 days a year each if not more.

When we travel, we very rarely work on our websites. While travel writing is our job, we treat the “work” of travel as a vacation experience first and proper work second. As you can imagine, this begs the question of what to do before departing as leaving a blog and its corresponding social channels without updates for days and/or weeks is often a bad idea.

So in this one, we thought we'd share what you should do to keep your blog active to ensure you get the most out of your site while away!

Should Bloggers Use AI? When (and When Not) as Written by AI

December 20, 2022

In a recent post, we discussed when bloggers should use AI and, perhaps more importantly, when they should not.

This was a fun piece for us to write about because the use of AI in blogging is a grey area at best. Some love it, some hate it, and some are in the middle.

But in writing this particular article, we thought we'd have a little fun with it and flip the script a bit. To put it simply, we thought why not make AI write the article. We did this briefly in the original post, with a 100 word segment used as an example, but in this one we wanted to go a bit more robust.

So we ran off to ChatGPT and put in a simple prompt: “Write a 1,500-word article about why bloggers should AND shouldn't use AI”. The following is the final product of the prompt.

Please note: This was the only direction we gave ChatGPT. The below article has not been edited in any way. We will provide our commentary at the end and note when our own thoughts resume. The featured image is a stock photo of our own selection.

Should Bloggers Use AI? When (and When Not) to Use AI Tools

December 20, 2022December 19, 2022

Artificial Intelligence seems to be taking the content creation world by storm these days, with new tools coming on the market every month for creating text, images, graphics, and more.

While some of these tools do appear to be fascinating and, dare we say, possibly quite useful for bloggers at large, we have to take a step back and think about an ethics question that is on everyone's minds: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Wait, no, that is Jurassic Park. But we'll run with it because the same ethics concern applies. Just because it is there, should we use it?

Let's dive into that one today looking at three broad AI uses that may be of interest to bloggers.

Note: We used AI for some elements of this article purely to illustrate points. These will be clearly noted. Otherwise the content featured herein is 100% original.

Does Upscaling AI for Images Work? Testing Popular Services

November 2, 2022October 20, 2022

When I went on safari in Africa, I got a wealth of amazing photos with my rather expensive mirrorless camera and telephoto lens.

But perhaps the best photo of the ~10,000 shots my wife and I took was not on my professional camera, but rather on my cell phone. This shot could only have been taken on my phone as the subject of the shot, a lion standing on a rock a la the Lion King, was so close to our vehicle that my 150-600mm camera lens was far too tight to do the full scene justice (even the 50mm lens on my wife's camera was not wide enough as well).

But there was one problem- my phone's camera wasn't in the best mode when I got this shot.

Instead of being on the 104 MP camera mode, I was set on a ~9 MP camera setting as I played around with other modes before coming into this quick scene. The photo looks great even at this lower resolution, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to blowing up the image to larger file size for print, it wasn't perfect the way a 104 MP shot would've been.

So I wondered, can upscaling AI help me get a better photo after the fact, ultimately to print a larger photo for my house? This seemed like a great opportunity to test out several services!

Note: Side-by-side images used within the article may not be perfect overlaps. That being said, visible improvements (or lack thereof) are reflective of the final results even if the exact level of zoom is not perfect.

100+ Topic Ideas for a Local Blog with Traffic Potential

May 28, 2026August 8, 2022

Since founding my Pittsburgh blog in 2015, my overall strategy was a very broad “do everything and write about it“.

For the first seven years, we put in a pretty solid effort and visited over 1,000 unique attractions/events/restaurants/etc. in the region. But after a while, it felt like our strategy was having less and less of a return for annual growth.

Part of this was simply because we had visited most of the big ticket attractions in the city, such that most of the places we were visiting were small and obscure spots with limited traffic potential. The other part was that I simply stopped putting effort into writing cornerstone pieces that are much bigger hitters with regards to keyword volumes and/or viral potential on social media.

So I took a break for a little bit and brainstormed all the ideas I could think of where we could repurpose existing content and create killer, themed articles with higher traffic potential. These, coupled with existing cornerstone/skyscraper articles on our site that we've published in the past, ended up totaling well over 100 ideas, and many were new for us to publish moving forward.

So in this one, I thought I'd share some of the best ones to help inspire some ideas for your own local blog!

Note: For purposes of this discussion, “[destination]” will be used as a generic placeholder for you to replace with your city, region, state, country, or other geographical areas. These are not intended to be exact keyword matches (research the best ones on Keysearch!), but more to inspire ideas outright. Other uses of brackets imply flexibility on specific items and examples will be provided for clairty.

Pros and Cons of Audio Typing – Increase Your Motivation to Write

July 21, 2022May 23, 2022

For the longest time, I resisted podcasting as a medium for my blogs. Part of this was because I was simply far too busy running five sites and part of this was also because I just didn't care about that marketing outlet in the slightest.

Chris finally got the better of me and convinced me to order a podcasting microphone for my desktop setup.

The intention for this was to have a short podcast for This Week in Blogging which is going to (hopefully) be coming out soon. But I wanted to see how a podcasting microphone to help me with my writing productivity at large as there are other ways to utilize a microphone for blogging.

One way I thought of to help manage my productivity was to use audio typing software to help write notes for my articles when I am too tired, lazy, or distracted to put that digital pen to paper via traditional writing.

Well, I found that there are many benefits to using speech-to-text software but also some limitations to keep in mind. So I thought I would talk about those today.

The Risks of Using 3rd Party Images on Your Blog (And Best Practices)

February 28, 2022February 28, 2022

If you've spent any amount of time on blogging social media groups, you've likely seen a couple of topics come up time and time again.

The first, and more common post, is “[website] stole my photos without credit!” and the second is “I was just sent an invoice for copyright infringement for a 3rd party photo I used on my blog”.

While you have many avenues for recourse if your own content has been stolen (including invoicing for damages or sending a DMCA notice), if you are the perpetrator of an infringement you may have fewer options at your disposal. Stealing is bad, and we have little more to say on that.

That being said, the advice of “don't steal” only goes so far. To be blunt, many scams exist online to screw over website operators, and if you use 3rd party content in any capacity, there may be scenarios where you can become a victim despite doing everything “right”.

So in this one, we thought we'd talk a bit more about how you can go about using 3rd party content, namely stock images, and keep yourself safe from possible lawsuits later on. While we cannot say these tips are 100% foolproof, especially as we are not lawyers and copyright laws also vary by country, these tips should give you an added layer of protection all the same.