Web’s Best Blog

I have no idea exactly why it occurs, but there’s a phenomena that I’ve noticed. If you can blog consistently, you are already halfway home when it comes to getting search engine traffic. Sure, a lot of your posts won’t bring instant visitors, but the steadiness of posting seems to do a lot to get you indexed fast.

Once your pages end up in search engine indexes quickly, you have a good chance of appearing for “hot searches” related to the news you’ve covered.

If you consistently post on topic, and do your best to be comprehensive about a subject, enough of your pages will get you traffic that you’ll easily earn profits.

If you fall off for three months, you can kiss the little bit of momentum you built up away.

That’s the weirdest thing about the internet these days. Internet news has replaced a lot of the main stream channels that used to exist. This is forcing people from all kinds of organizations to re-learn how they think about releasing “news” to the public. The instant nature of access makes it so that events come in and out of focus continually.

For smaller website developers, the instant nature of news creates a bit of a conundrum. It’s tough to be comprehensive with a small organization reporting the news, but it makes no sense to ignore stories that are of utmost importance for covering a niche.

I guess what you end up settling for then, as a blogger, or a niche content developers is providing realistic comprehensive or “practical subject depth”, and going deeper on areas where you know there is a void of information.

You can’t run from the fact the competition may be out-gunning your with manpower, but you’ll need to be clever about how you approach your subject.

2008 is upon us and the year begins as soon as the blogging starts. In the last few years I’ve used blogging to build a cornerstone to my online business, and this year will be no different. Although the internet is evolving, it doesn’t completely change from year to year, and certain techniques should keep on working for the foreseeable future. Blogging is one such technique.

Blogging is likely to remain important for most internet marketers in 2008. It’s a great way to communicate with prospective customers and current ones alike. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to do, and blogs tend to rank well in search engines. Blogging offers the best of several worlds for those dedicated to the cause.

This is the first post of the new year for me, and it feels just like old times. The WordPress is singing along as I make my point. Everything feels great to start 2008! Happy blogging in the new year.

After a short break for Thanksgiving, I find myself back on the job of blogging. So far the adjustment hasn’t been too difficult. Once you’ve learned how to grind out some blog posts, it’s a skill that no one can take from you. And after about your fifth post, or so, you’ll figure you’re just as good as ever.

But I am glad I took a break, because prior to this one, it had been five months without any time away from the computer, and that’s just too long. It’s amazing how quickly time can fly, even when you’re just plugging away.

This morning I figured I’d get right at, rather than putz around. I’d rather see my blogging out of the way early, than have to drag it on, especially if I end up struggling later. But I don’t think I’ll see any issues like that. After a short hiatus, blogging can be fun.

There’s no way to become a blogger without being self-motivated. Whether you blog or not is strictly up to you. Without a boss breathing down your neck, you might be inclinded to “screw off”, which will ultimately hurt your efforts. So when you decide you’re a blogger, you have to “crack the whip” to make sure the work gets done.

A blog can’t exist without posts. So, in the final analysis, you’ll need to constantly expand your archive in order to be a successful bloggers. Most of your visitors will land on an archived page, so the more landing pages you have, the more potential visitors will show up.

It’s not easy to be self-disciplined. That’s why so many people fail at certain tasks. But if you are able to muster up enough effort with blogging, your efforts will be well-rewarded.

Make sure to stay focused on your goals.

I ended up taking some days off last week. The main reason was I was feeling that I was in “the advanced stages of burnout” as I like to call it. When you’ve been working ceaselessly on your computer, there comes a time when you must abandon your terminal, at least for a few days. If you don’t, you’ll end up continuing on despite running out of things to say.

If you take a quick break, you’ll end up back on the job in a much better mindset than before. At least that’s the basic idea. I know today I’m feeling pretty chipper, since I haven’t blogged since last Wednesday.

How long you take off is up to you, of course. But it better an amount of time that’s sufficient to rest and come up with some new material. Otherwise, you’ll continue on in the same mode as you did before.

Ahh, isn’t that better already?

Akismet has been doing the job for quite some time. They finally added a “delete comment spam on messages older than 30 days” option to make my job even easier. All in all, the basic WordPress anti-comment spam protection seems to get the job done. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be hand editing thousands of messages a day. What a waste of time that would be.

Comment spammers never quit. I guess they must still be getting some links that way, so it’s doubtful you’ll ever see an end to that type of action. But at least you can mostly automate the job of removing the comments, since the spammers have undoubtedly been automated the whole time.

If you haven’t installed Askismet for some reason (I think it’s the default), make sure to do so. It will make you life just a little easier. You can spend more of your time on writing posts and less on weeding the comment garden.

Not all news days are created equal. Sometimes you’ll scan your RSS reader and find lots of compelling news to comment on. Other times, you’ll see just some picked over tidbits that you already used. On a slow news day like these, it’s probably best you just go ahead and get original. At least that way you can add something useful to your main body of work.

Being original will generally pay dividends for the simple reason that a lot of bloggers don’t bother with unique content, and instead prefer to link out to material they find. If you can execute a well-written piece that resonates with someone, perhaps you’ll gain a few incoming links that can actually bring you traffic.

If worse comes to worse, you could always go ahead and link up some of your old articles and put together a cohesive piece that ties together some of your past work. It’s not really the most exciting of posts, but people who visit your blog should still find the efforts worthwhile.

One area I’ve been very weak in is encouraging people to join my blog’s RSS feed. I have always been a bit more oriented towards “monetizing all traffic”. But I do realize that repeat visitors are great to have. So I’ve been thinking about this issue in some detail.

In order to get someone to join, you need to show them the option. If you don’t show the monkey the banana, he won’t eat! Therefore you have to devote some of your valuable cyber real estate to encourage your one-time visitors to become regulars.

Since I derive so much revenue from Google Adsense, I’m not willing to allow the ‘space above the post’ to be devoted to RSS subscriptions, but frankly, the space underneath each post is useless for that type of monetization.

I’m giving this a go on several blogs now. I put a reminder beneath each post. Let’s see what type of effect this has in the real world in the next few months.

In terms of traffic generation, leaving comments in other’s blogs doesn’t seem to do much. For awhile I would do about 20 comments a week. Let’s say I did 20 per week for 10 weeks. That’s a quick 200 comments. Of that, only an extremely small amount of people would ever visit your website.

Of course I didn’t “sign them” with a URL because that looked plenty spammy to me. But in the end, I doubt it matters. If you leave a very on-topic and original comment, you might get some clicks out of interest. They would be very targeted and the traffic would be good. But you have to decide if doing it is worth the effort.

I actually haven’t commented in awhile. Instead I’ve chosen to focus on building content on my own domains exclusively. I figure that at least I can control the quality of content on my own sites, and that should end up delivering traffic more than comments on other blogs.