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“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton

There are millions of blogs in the blogosphere and, unless your blogging about teaching your parrot advanced calculus, thousands in your niche. Right now, the market is flooded with other blogs just like yours. What is it that makes your different? Why should I follow your blog on making money/SEO/funny videos/whatever over the next guy (or gal)? Like the wise Cecil Beaton says above (actually I’m not really sure if he was wise, but that’s a darn good quote up there) you don’t want to be a play-it-safer. Make your blog different.

Take a controversial position – 2+2 = 7?

It’s easy to follow the crowd. It’s easy to find some popular topic and blog about it just like everyone else. You love twitter? So does everyone else…including me >blush<. Try standing out. Write about the 10 things you hate about twitter or tell people how they can get rich by dropping out of high school to flip burgers.

People don’t want to hear the same thing from you that they’ve heard from everyone else. (Let me throw a marginally off-topic nugget of wisdom in here also – if you are regurgitating news you’ve read somewhere else, spice it up – add your thoughts, add a video on or find a complementing post from a fellow blogger. That’s what I did in my post a few weeks ago on how expensive text messaging is.)

Make your design unique

To the first time visitor to your blog, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. I don’t care if you’re Agatha Christie (world’s best selling fiction author, BTW), if your site is ugly, people won’t stick around to read your potential award winning post on the sleep patterns of sheep.

Upon starting a blog, most people set-up WordPress and begin blogging with the default theme (very boring mind you.) Some get a little more adventurous and Google “WordPress Themes” and grab the coolest looking one from the first site they come to. So now you and 6 million people are using the same template (look at you, you’re so unique now!)

This leaves you with two viable options – purchase one or customize one that someone else has done most of the hard work on. Purchasing a template is a great idea, but not always an option for the low-income, part-time blogger. I prefer to customize a pre-made template. I find a template that I like and modify some of the images and formatting to fit what I’m looking for (that’s a whole other topic, more on this in a future post.)

The point is, most first time visitors will only glance at your page for a few seconds before moving on. Be sure to grab their attention with a unique blog design.

Make your blog you

When it comes down to it, your blog has to be your blog. Why is blogging so popular? Because people are interested in getting information from real people, not a faceless news site. Whatever your topic is, your blog is really all about you – your interests, your writing style (voice) and your personality. You is what will make your blog stand out from the crowd – even if you have the dullest blog in the world. This is a huge reason that the biggest bloggers are the biggest bloggers. People like them – their interests, their writing style and their personality. I hope my personality shines though on WallerBlog dot Com (I feel like it does anyways.) I like to be a little snarky, a little nerdy and a little outside-of-the-proverbial-box in my ramblings.

If your goal is to have a blog where you’re the only reader (family doesn’t count) then be the same as every other blogger out there. Otherwise, you have to be different. These ideas above are by no means a complete list on how to make your blog stand out from the millions of others out there, but it’s a starting point. Go, be different!

Physorg has posted an article highlighting the outrageous cost of sending a text message.

From the article:

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

For those of you that don’t speak in British Pounds, that’s $732.17 per MB! Want to text message your music collection? It’ll cost you a cool $61,356,851.20.

Maybe technology really hasn’t brought us that far…

As a manager for God, one of your assigned duties is to set aside a portion for Him. From the very beginning, people brought offerings to God (Genesis 4.) They understood that God really owned it all and that they were simply in charge of taking care of it. And part of that job was to offer some of their resources back to God.

The word tithe comes from the Hebrew word ma‛aser which is literally translated as a ‘tenth’ and generally referrs to the portion of one’s income that is set apart for the Lord. As I said above we see offerings being presented to God from the very beginning, however we don’t see the first instance of the true tithe until Genesis 14. After God gives Abraham victory in battle, he offers 10% of the spoils of war back to God.

Later on we see several more instances of the Biblical tithe. This process was written into the Jewish laws. “A tenth of the land’s produce, whether grain from the ground or fruit from the trees, is God’s. It is holy to God.” (Leviticus 27:30 MSG) In addition, the Word goes further to say that you will be blessed for doing so: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.” (Malachi 3:10 NIV)

What is the Biblical Tithe? Literally it is 10% of what we recieve. Really though, I think it’s much more that that. You see, God doesn’t need our money. In fact, God doesn’t really even want our money. What He wants is our heart. And often our money is very tightly connected to our heart.

In order to control our finances we have to find our own hot buttons. We have to know what makes us angry and incites a passion to change. In order to make a committed change we have find those buttons, press ‘em down and not let go until the change has been fully made. You see, to do something crazy (from a materialism driven society’s point of view) like become debt free, you have to act crazy.

1) Find what makes you go crazy. What drives you nuts? What makes you angry? Chances are, whatever makes you angry is closely related to a vein of passion deeply rooted in your soul, your core values. If stupid people make you angry then you probably are an over-achiever, passionate about achieving excellence. Now, find what makes you angry about being in debt. Is it the insecurity? Is it the wasteful spending? Do you feel trapped and out of control? What makes you angry?

2) Find what makes your heart bleed. What makes you sad? What rips your heart out? In the same fashion as anger, empathy is closely related to the passion buried in the depth of your soul. When you see someone living on the street does it upset you? Do you flinch at the sight of an impoverished family? If you feel empathy for those in need then you may have the core value of generosity. What makes you sad?

3) Write it down and commit to it. Write down your hot buttons from step 1 and 2. Write down why you want to take control of your finances. Maybe it’s “I want more financial security” or “I don’t want to feel like a slave to debt.” Whatever it is, write it down. Finding your motivation, or your “hot buttons” is all well and good, but if you don’t write it down, you probably won’t commit to it (at least not for long,) and if you don’t commit to it then it really doesn’t do you much good.

4) Put it where you can see it, push it and don’t let go. After putting your hot buttons to paper, display them boldly where you will see them every day. Put it on your bathroom mirror, your fridge, or on the dashboard of your car. Every time you see your reasons to be financially free it will empower you. It will push you towards your goal. Push those buttons and don’t let go.