Entries from May 2007 ↓

Do you enjoy blogging? or is blogging a chore, a bit like going to work?

If we enjoy our blogging this will effect the quality of our posts; our natural enthusiasm will be reflected in the care and attention of our posts; it is this which will attract and retain readers..

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”

Albert Schweitzer

How to Enjoy Blogging more

• Write on Topics that Interest you.

Don’t choose topics just because you think they may get traffic or money. You need to have a real interest in the topic, otherwise you will struggle to motivate yourself to write.

• Don’t Compare.

No matter  how successful, or not, you are, there will always be some blogger more successful than you. When you are starting, you may feel that your posts deserve more traffic / appreciation. However, every blogger has to work hard to get established and develop a loyal following.

• Competitors or Friends.

Blogging is not a competition. If other blogs are successful, it doesn’t mean less success for you. See other blogs as ways of helping you. The great thing about blogging is that linking to your “competitors” can actually help you in many ways. see: Pingbacks can be a great source of traffic
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In my opinion the best free statistics programme for blogs and websites is Stat Counter.

Advantages of Stat Counter

• Updates in real Time
• Has increased log size to 500
• You can track visitor paths. - this is useful for seeing how a visitor navigates through your site.
• Very easy to use / invisible

The next best choice would be AWSTATS, but if it is not included on your hosting package, it is not so easy to install.

Of course, the only problem with statistics programs is that they can be a good way to waste time and reduce productivity.

Having said that they can also be very good for increasing traffic. Basically I look at the popular keywords for entering the site and work on developing them. E.g. if people come through UK Housing Market, I work on London housing market e.t.c.

I have started experimenting with Blog Carnivals and feel these are a good way to increase the number of inbound links to your site. In addition, they can provide new readers and greater exposure for your blog.

How Blog Carnivals Work

1. Go to Blog Carnivals
   
2. Search for Blog Carnivals related to your Blog. You can go here to list of blog carnivals and browse by category. Alternatively, you can also use the search button for looking for your keywords.
3. After finding a suitable carnival you can submit relevant blog posts. Most ask for a short summary of your article.
4. If you don’t find a carnival relevant to your recent postings, it is worth writing articles with certain carnivals in mind.
5. If your blog post is useful it will get mentioned on the host carnival, creating a link to your site.

For a relatively short amount of work, you can gain inbound links from a relevant blog. I cannot see any downside to this at all. Obviously, the better the blog posts submitted the more success it will have.

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“If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.”

T. S. Eliot

Never underestimate the importance of your first sentence and first paragraph. It is essential your first sentence provides clarity and purpose. Try to make a bold, clear statement that captures the imagination of the reader. The first sentence and paragraph will set the tone for the whole article; it can also determine whether the reader actually continues with the rest of the blog post.

What to Include In First Sentence and Paragraph:

• Make a clear introduction to the article
• Use short sentences, to give added clarity
• Consider using a quote by a famous writer / authority

Things to Avoid in first Paragraph

• Use unnecessary phrases such as:
• “In this article, I will look at whether an interesting topic to consider….”
• “seeing as how”
• “I haven’t had much inspiration to write recently… (this is real killer for me)”
• Sit on the fence.
• “It might be the case that getting links to your blog could help your SEO in the long term”.
• Make an obvious typo
• “There time has come to go over their”

(it should be THEIR time has come to go over THERE)

Some questions from CLKL at Juggling Frogs

• Does SEO matter for blogs that are not profit oriented? If I’m not in it to become a “professional blogger”, should I care about SEO? Why or why not?

It’s up to You. SEO can help get more visitors to your site. If you rank highly for target keywords, you will attract more people who are interested in these keywords. Generally (including me) most blogger’s like to have more people reading their blog, whether it is financial or not.

• What is a reasonable amount of traffic for a beginning blogger? I have been at this for three weeks, and average about 200 visitors a day. Does traffic matter for not-for-profit sites?

I would say 200 a day is very good for a 3 week blog! However, I always look at unique visitors and not other measures. Unique visitors gives most reliable account of how many people actually read the blog. Also, it depends on type of traffic; Stumbleupon can send 100s but these visitors stay very short time on average. Generally I advise not to worry too much about traffic, especially in the beginning of a blog. My site rp.com gets over 2,000 a day but it took a couple of years to get that amount of traffic

I did put in some passive (adsense) ads and links to an (amazon) affiliate account on my site. I did this in the spirit of “why not?”, rather than as a goal of the site. How much traffic does one need to offset the nuisance factor of their presence? I’d be delighted if I could compensate for the domain name registration fee with such income. Is this realistic?

• You will find that adverts where you place them are non intrusive. However, because they are non intrusive, you will get very few clicks. With low traffic I doubt your ads will get much revenue. I find Amazon and google products quite a low revenue earner (unless you have very high traffic volumes). I would suggest having one standard google ad (like top right on my blog), rather than promote google firefox product. I will blog more on google ads later.
  
• I get a little from amazon.co.uk but it is mainly me buying!
  

If you are considering whether to have a website or a blog, it is worth bearing in mind that a blog has several advantages over a traditional website. Technically a blog is a website. However, a blog is characterised by the way content is added. Usually a blog is organised into archives of monthly content; they will also have RSS feeds and the ability to add comments.

Blogs are not always the best solution. There are various cases where I prefer to use a non blog format ( I will mention this later) However, theses are my Top 10 benefits of Blogs.

1. Easy Organisation:

Blogs are easier to categorise and organise. New entries automatically get added into monthly archives and relevant categories. It saves time manually adding links to relevant pages.
Top tip: Some blog software has better organisation than others; Wordpress allows a lot of customisation to get optimal organisation

2. RSS Feeds

Blogs enable RSS feeds. These are increasingly popular as a way to check the latest content of your favourite sites.

3. Encourages People to add Content

Adding a blog post can be less intimidating that a standard webpage. Blog posts can be short or long. Because content is automatically organised it leaves you free just to add the content.

4. Freshness.

A blog gives regular updates to the reader. It is a reason to keep coming back to the blog every day. It is like the difference between a newspaper and an encyclopaedia. A newspaper (blog) you read every day. An encyclopaedia (every now and then for reference)

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If you would like to ask a question about blogging, SEO or writing, feel free to leave a comment on this entry.

I will try to answer your question as a new blog post.

For each blog entry. I prefer to use just one category. The reason is I don’t want duplication of content. If I chose 5 different categories. The blog post would be repeated in 8 different places on the blog.

• on home page
• as individual entry
• within 5 different categories.
• Monthly Archives

Maybe Google have a way of dealing with this, that doesn’t penalise the duplicate content. However, for the moment I am sticking to one or possibly 2 categories.

It is also a good reason to use the MORE function - it enables less duplication of content.

There is a good post here on avoiding duplicate content issues with wordpress; many ideas are useful for other blogging platforms.

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One of the real secrets to becoming a successful blogger is, rather unromantically, - hard work. The more posts you have, the bigger the chance of gaining more links, more traffic, more earnings e.t.c.

We often assume A List bloggers, get lucky, or have some elusive quality. It may be true in some cases, but for example, Darren Rowse, suggests he posts upto 20 - 25 posts per day. At the end of the year, that is 8,000 + blog entries. If you can post with this kind of quantity, you can go along way to becoming a successful blogger.

Here are some suggestions for becoming a Prolific Blogger.

1. Have more than 1 blog.

If you have only one blog it is difficult to produce 20 blog posts a day. (there is a limit to what you can write on any subject). Having different blogs, enables you to write on a variety of interests. There is a saying “A change is a good as a rest.” After writing on SEO, I can write on a completely different topic for my other blogs.

2. Don’t Waste time

The internet is ideal for wasting time. The success of forums and sites like DIGG, reddit is because we love to waste time, finding the latest news and links. However, if you want to be prolific you have to be disciplined about writing and producing comments. See: 13 tips for increasing productivity on the internet
3. Set Targets.

In the back of my mind I have a target to add an average of 10 pages / blog entries per day. Some of these will be long posts, some shorter posts. However, this target makes me focus on content and keep producing new posts. See: Make a contract with yourself

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1. Categories.

At Reddit you just submit, at Digg I often struggle to find a suitable category, it’s like they started creating categories, but stopped before they had finished.

2. Submission.

Submission at Reddit is easier. You don’t have to worry about writing a description, just a good title is all you need. Nor do you get asked “Are you really sure you want to submit this article?” If it is a duplicate URL, Reddit automatically deals with it, giving credit to original poster.

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