And I mean that literally, too–see, I was just watching The Colbert Report, and his guest was talking about the book he’d written about the value of nothing.

Naturally Colbert made the joke that “nothing” is apparently worth $14.95, because that was the cost of the book, but this concept illustrates nicely a point that we’ve been making out here for some time about the value of a killer headline.

Remember, there are two kinds of great headline: the headline that grabs readers, and the headline that grabs search engines.  And that’s exactly what that book did.  By positing that nothing has a value, he’s caught some eyes.  Nothing is nothing, you might well say to yourself.  So how does NOTHING have a value?  It doesn’t exist!  It’s an empty space!  A null cipher!  So how can it be worth anything?

And you’ll pick up that book and try to find out how nothing has value.  From there, maybe you’ll discover you like where that book is going and take it to the counter and pay for it, which is the whole point the book war written in the first place.

So remember, folks, if you ever need an example of how valuable an eye-catching headline can be, think about how someone sold nothing for $14.95 a copy.

Stop talking and start helping.

That’s an important bit of advice I kind of picked up over at Problogger, mostly because he didn’t put it quite that way, but the advice is still valuable because of what it represents.

If you’re reading this blog, sure, you’re getting some jollies out of my trenchant commentary and clever analogies and suchlike.  But if you want clever wordplay you can get that just about anywhere.  You come here for a lot more than just great reading–you come here for strategies.  Thoughts.  Advice.  Bits and bobs and ideas to execute on your own blog that you never really would have considered before.

I read the comments section here every day, usually just after I file a post.  But here’s the thing–I know a lot of you have said things like “I never thought of that” or “I didn’t think you could do it like that”, or something similar.  That’s a great way to look at your own blog.

Are you helping people?

Whether you’re helping people find a deal or find a new product or find a new obsession, or just helping them look at the world in a way they might not have before.  It’s one thing to tell people a story.  It’s another thing entirely to make that story tell people something new or useful.  The more useful your blog is, the better the chance you’ll get repeat visitors.

Having you guys come back every day looking for a new bit of blogging advice, well, that just tells me that I’m doing my job RIGHT.

Rather ask what you can do for your readers (with apologies to JFK for paraphrasing). Seriously though, in the mad rush to get yet another post out, connect with yet another sponsor, increase ad revenues but just a few more dollars, it can be all too easy to forget why we have a blog and who it exists for.

Of course it exists for you but where would the fun be if you were the only person reading your blog, what would be your motivation for writing it? Where would your ad revenue come from? So the next time you go to hit publish why not take a step back and ask, what does this post do for your readers. What have you given them that they can use?

Maybe you went out of your way to do some research and share the results, perhaps you hunted down a cool new tool for them to use. Find something that you can honestly say, yes, I have given my readers something today.

What will you give your readers?

Ever wondered if its possible to sell your blog and how much it might be worth?  If you have been a reader of this blog for a while you will know that the original owner sold it last year for $9,500. Not a huge amount in the big business sense, but then again hardly peanuts.

So how do you find out the worth of your blog. Well firstly lets make some assumptions here.  You have ad revenue, you have RSS subscribers and you have more than single digit page views everyday.

There is a very useful tool called cubestat which will do the calculation for you.

As you can see from the screenshot, having entered the URL it returns some pretty nice information. An estimated value, the number of page views and the estimated ad revenue.  Nice to be able to track this type of information if you are considering a sale. Of course, an estimated value doesn’t necessarily equate to a sales price, especially in this economy.

If nothing else you can find out the value of your favorite blogs.