Zsolt Balla archive at ZsoltBalla.com

Author Archive for admin

Jan

How to stay motivated after losing your job?

By Zsolt Balla 0 Comments

Categories: carreer

Follow our tips to stay motivated during the most difficult period of your carreer!

Layoffs, nowadays, can happen anytime, to anyone. In the times of crisis and recession, you don’t have to be a second-class employee to wake up one day and find yourself losing your job. Even worse, it can happen totally unexpectedly.

How to stay motivated after a layoff

The airline industry has an apt term describing the first ninety seconds after a disaster. They call it “the golden time”, because if you are able to act quickly in this short period of time, your chances to survive the plane crash dramatically increase. Similarly, rapid and appropriate action is inevitable if you want to stay on the surface after unexpectedly losing your job. Follow our tips to do just that.
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Jan

Ben Barden: “I play to my strengths”

By Zsolt Balla 0 Comments

Categories: bloggers talk

Ben Barden is a versatile guy, busy with blogging, coding and occasionally composing. The 28-year-old blogger, who is the mastermind behind the increasingly popular Top Ten Blog Tips, and the Zen Working productivity blog tells us about moving to a different continent, his new venture of launching an advertising network for bloggers and why IT people shouldn’t make excuses.

Ben Barden

How much of your grown-up life have you spent with blogging?

I had a LiveJournal account as far back as 2002, and wrote an occasional personal blog on my site from 2005 onwards. I didn’t get into blogging “seriously” until November 2007, when I started writing about blogging and website tips without the jargon. I launched Top Ten Blog Tips, my current blog, in late 2008.

Was it a linear growth and development, or was there a trigger point when you decided to “take it seriously”. Did you have a particular reason or motivation to do so?

Well, the personal blog only had a handful of readers, and I got sick of talking to myself. I wanted to write about something that people would actually want to read. It wasn’t much fun posting and getting 0 comments time after time. Once I started writing about blogging and website tips, the blog had a fairly slow but steady growth.

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Jan

The Twitter dilemma: how to tweet value in 140 chars?

By Zsolt Balla 1 Comment

Categories: twitter

If you like this article, subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter!

Everybody seems to be nuts about Twitter these days, and although I’m a real greenhorn compared to some of the Twitter-Top-Guns, even I find myself checking my Twitter homepage before opening my mailbox first thing in the morning. Those who use twitter for professional purposes agree that, the key of a successful Twitter profile is constantly sharing (rather: tweeting) value with your followers.

how to share value on twitter

When I first read these words of wisdom, a pretty natural question popped into my mind: how the heck can you share value in 140 characters?

I was unable to answer this question aptly enough, so I’ve plowed through a couple of thousand tweets to find some real value on Twitter. Here’s what I’ve found.

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Jan

The 40-second checklist to see if your next post is worth writing it

By Zsolt Balla 2 Comments

Categories: uncreative blogging

This article is a part of the Uncreative Blogging series, providing you with tips on how to Get creativity out of the way of your success. If you like what you read, subscribe my RSS feed to stay tuned, because there is more to follow.

Most bloggers will agree that, a relatively low number of posts generate the vast majority of their blog’s traffic. How easy and simple it would be, if only you could see which posts will become these traffic generators before actually writing them (and especially before writing all the rest, that later prove to be useless).

I’m pretty sure that you have quite a lot of topics in your head that you are planning to write blogposts on. This easy-to-use checklist helps you determine whether they are worth the effort of writing them. This list, of course, cannot guarantee success, but it can provide you with solid guidelines for providing value for your readers that can result long term high, quality traffic (significantly different from the traffic you receive when you ask your friends to digg your article).

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Jan

Uncreative Blogging: How to get creativity out of the way of your success?

By Zsolt Balla 5 Comments

Categories: uncreative blogging

Note: This post is the introduction of a series of articles covering uncreative ways of making your blog (or online business) successful. If you like what you read, subscribe my RSS feed to stay tuned, because there is more to follow.

Do you consider yourself creative? I sure do.

If you are anything like me, you are always full of brilliant ideas, and these ideas seem to come faster, one after the other, than they could be accomplished. If you are anything like me, you take a piece of paper and a pen, and write those ideas down, so that you don’t have to keep them in mind, and also to make sure that they are not forgotten. And if you are anything like me, you have at least three notebooks (the analogue ones) full of these ideas, many of which you will never achieve.

I have a creative job (I’m an editor and a journalist, beside managing the newspaper I write for), and I started both my personal blog and this one, to write a piece of my creativity out of me, then, after a while, I noticed something.

And if you’re anything like me, that’s bad news for you, too.

Your blog’s success, and your personal success as a blogger has nothing to do with creativity. In fact, for reasons that I will unravel in another post, your creativity can be the greatest hurdle and threat to your blog’s success.

Let me explain!

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Dec

Skies of Rome

By Zsolt Balla 0 Comments

Categories: zsoltballa.com

Okay, this post has a very little to do with online business (maybe even less than that), but it’s almost New Year’s Eve, so I decided to share some beauty this time, as a farewell to 2008.

I’ve mentioned a couple of days ago, after our holiday in Rome, that every simple concept may work, if you consequently stick to it for a while. I found proof, when I pointed my camera to the sky on the second day of our three-day trip, and shot a picture that I pretty much liked.

What follows is a breathtaking set of images based on this very simple concept: I kept pointing my camera to the sky (almost) randomly. Less than 48 hours, almost 20 images.

I hope you’ll like them too. If you do, please share them, comment them, and regardless of whether you like them or not, a very Happy New Year to all of you!

Skies of Rome #1 - photo by Balla Zsolt

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Dec

Google defeats the blogosphere

By Zsolt Balla 0 Comments

Categories: adsense, blogging, geeky, google and sources

In this 2,000+ word, massive article, 12 Google services fight their non-G alternatives to boost your blogging career. Way beyond first blood.

1. Blogger vs. Wordpress

The first dilemma when launching a new blog comes pretty early. You have to decide which one of the numerous blog engines you want to choose to provide the CMS background for your blog. Although there are a number of available options, the vast majority of bloggers tend to pick one of the two (three, really, but I only want to cover free services here so that disqualifies Movable Type immediately) most popular blog engines: Blogger or Wordpress. The subject of which one you should choose has an extensive literature on the web, so I’m not going to dive deep into details here.

Wordpress

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Dec

A little more experience a few more changes

By Zsolt Balla 2 Comments

Categories: blogging, design and zsoltballa.com

Three weeks into blogging, I’ve found myself unhappy with the design of ZsoltBalla.com, and although I still like the look of the Redoable Wordpress theme. Even though I still dig the basic elements of the theme, I’ve already made a couple of modifications, and given certain difficulties I had to face when trying to modify it further and further, I’m not sure if I will stay with Redoable on the long run. Anyway, I’m sure I will change it to something else only if I completely run out of workarounds and alternative ways. But before that, here are the few modifications I made to make the site look better (I’m still not 100% happy with the result though, but I think I still have plenty of time to experiment).

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Dec

Six things to do before 2008 is over

By Zsolt Balla 0 Comments

Categories: insanely useful

I hope everybody is having a great time throughout the winter holidays, and I also would like to chip in by wishing happy holidays to all of you.

But while everybody is busy with preparing for the next year I also wanted to remind you that 2008 is far from over! If you want to make the most of the last days of this year, here are the six things you’ll definitely need to do before 2008 is coming to an end.
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