Linkswitch #19

The Simple, Ridiculously Useful Guide to Earning a Living from Your Passion

“It’s not easy — I’ll tell you that up front. If you hope to make a quick buck, or a fast million, you’ll need to find another guide. Probably one with lots of flashing ads in the sidebar. So you have your passion picked out? Here’s how to turn it into a living.”

How to Understand Your Audience: Data Collection & Analysis

“The internet is a fast-paced environment. People can come to your website at any hour from a wide range of locations, each of them with different intentions or needs. Unlike physical retail stores, you can’t see who is coming in and browsing around. You don’t know much about the people reading you. How can we develop a rough profile of all these individuals?”

Five Useful Ways Dropbox Can Improve Your Business

“If you were using a good backup solution you could just keep on working, otherwise you could be in a lot of trouble. For those of you who don’t already have a backup and file sharing solution in place, you’ll want to learn more about Dropbox.”

Why You Shouldn’t Stick to Your Niche

“Humans. We love our common sense, don’t we? It’s brought us far as a species. If something causes pain, we tend to avoid it. If something causes pleasure, we do more of it. So when it comes to business, it only makes sense to stick to a niche where you can dominate and completely rock, right? WRONG!”

Social Media Monitoring 101, How to Get Started

“You’ve probably heard people talking about social media monitoring. It’s wise to listen to conversations before you participate in them. Social media monitoring allows you to do just that.”

Replace Yourself – A Guide to Delegating Your Workload

“For most entrepreneurs, ambition far exceeds even a superhuman workday. No matter how you slice and dice it, one person can only do so much. To do more, requires something more than working really, really hard. It requires delegation.”

20 Free Mac Apps For Web Designer’s Toolkit

“Professional web designers on the Mac platform rely on commercial heavy-hitters like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, and InDesign for their graphic design needs. And when it’s time to slice and dice, some depend on the excellent Dreamweaver CS4 for WYSIWYG design/development; while many Mac code jockeys swear only by editors like Coda, BBEdit or TextMate. Others prefer to mix, match or blend.”

10 Definitive Tips for Writing Captivating Emails

“Emails are a great way to reach people, to keep reminding them that your site still exists and that they really should keep checking you out. After all, the people who receive your emails should already be familiar with you, they will have opted to receive emails from you, but now you have to make sure they pay attention to what you’re sending them.”

How to Start (or Start-over) Building Your Personal Brand

“A ‘personal brand’ is in many ways synonymous with your reputation. It refers to the way other people see you. Are you a genius? An expert? Are you trustworthy? What do you represent? What do you stand for? What ideas and notions pop up as soon as someone hears your name?”