Internet Marketing and SEO

I find it somewhat amusing when people assume that by using an ad blocker, they are actually blocking ads. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the growth and proliferation of ad blocker usage in browsers today is having the opposite effect. It’s creating more ads.

Yeah, technically, it’s true. When you use ad block software, you’re preventing a web page from displaying annoying flash ads, animated banners, pop-ups, audio ads, and similar. But all that means is that companies are finding more cloaked ways to promote their products.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of this situation, but it seems to be yet another strong piece of evidence that the people behind W3schools don’t have our best interests in mind.

I’m currently in the process of revamping my CSS3 Click Chart app and I was doing my usual cursory searches for simple JavaScript methods that I often forget the syntax for. Notice what I stumbled across, as shown in the re-enactment below.

This post might sound like an opinionated rant, so I apologize up front for that. But sometimes I write stuff because I get annoyed at how quick people are to jump on bandwagons and follow trends, and it often comes out sounding a little harsh. Even I’ve been guilty of following trends at times, as I’m sure we all have. But sometimes we have to be a little more honest about the realities of our industry.

This myth about the lack of reading online has, from what I can tell, spread to virtually all corners of the internet market, and I think it has gone too far.

First let’s clear up a few things: I’m not denying the research that has been done in this area, and I’m not saying that we should ignore those findings. Instead we should recognize the importance of gaining loyalty in readership, and work towards creating content that users will look forward to reading. Let me explain what I mean.

Since I started blogging and, more recently, started submitting articles to other sites, I have used a number of different sources of inspiration for generating ideas to formulate articles. I thought I would list a bunch of interesting ways that blogging developers, designers, programmers, tutorial writers and others can come up with new and fresh brainstorms that can lead to new ideas.

These are a mix of methods that I’ve personally used, or that I’ve considered using, so I hope you’ll find them useful. And feel free to include your own methods for generating blog post and tutorial ideas in the comments.

Although this article is specifically geared towards generating ideas for web developers, the methods discussed could also be a basis for other fields of writing.