3 stupid things I’ve done with this blog

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Maybe this will save someone else a little time and misery. Maybe it will give someone a laugh or two. Maybe it won’t. What it does do however is provide me subject matter for an article.

Tried to make my own theme

Fortunately for everyone who reads this blog that endeavor never saw the light of day. It did however cost me about 2.5 weeks of my life that I can never recover. To say that my calling isn’t in Wordpress theme building would be an understatement. Perhaps even a lie. Take it from me kids, know your limitation and save yourself a lot of time and effort.

Lesson learned: There are things out there that I’ll never be good at no matter how much time I waste trying to do them.

Took a break

This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but what was intended to be a 2 week break to “collect my thoughts” turned into a several month absence. Granted I still popped in here and there to check things out, but I was missing in action. The damage? Lost about 85% of my readership judging by various stats. It seems to be building back up nicely, but imagine where I might be had I not gone stupid.

Lesson learned: Slow down if you must, but don’t stop completely. It’s just wasted time!

Tried to make it into “A Blog about Blogging”

Yeah I know… WTF was I thinking? What kind of a clown names their blog A Blog about Nothing and then gets the bright idea to make it about a particular topic? Me, that’s who! I’m the clown that tried doing that. It probably would have succeeded too if not for one grim bit of reality setting in. I didn’t have a damn clue what I was talking about!

Lesson learned: Either stick to what you know, or learn something about what you’re blogging about BEFORE you start telling other people what to do.

What about you? What stupid things have you done with your blog(s) that you regret (and hopefully have learned from)

Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »

Surefire way to write the best blog post ever

Friday, May 30th, 2008

I don’t want to waste a lot of your time so I’ll get right to the point. If you follow these tips you will be well on your way to writing a blog post that can easily become your best. There are only 5 steps and a two year old could do them. Isn’t your blog worth a little effort?

Get to the point

Tell your readers exactly what you are going to do immediately. Don’t mess around with wordy prose just stuff it in their face and tell them how things are.

Follow through on what you tell them

If you promise the moon you damn sure better show up with the moon. People don’t like to be jerked around or lied to. Deliver as promised.

Make it interesting

It’s not the subject that is interesting it is what you do with it. Make your blog article to be interesting by what you do with the information and how you present it.

Spelling and grammar count (for something)

The internet isn’t an English class, but you can’t expect to be taken seriously if your “best blog post ever” is riddled with basic spelling and grammar errors. Take a few seconds to proof-read what you’ve written BEFORE you publish it

Be interested in what you write about

No matter how much you might pretend people will know immediately when you’re writing about something that doesn’t interest you. Don’t bother trying to fool them. Write about something that interests you and don’t waste anyone’s time.

Posted in Blogging, Writing | 3 Comments »

The lonely side of the blog

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

I had almost forgotten how cold and lonely it could be waking up to an empty blog. Recently I’ve been reminded how dreary it can be as I’ve been working on my blog about pet snakes. With this blog I get a couple of hundred people visiting on average per day. It sits at a Page Rank of 5, I have a respectable number of subscribers to my RSS feed, many of whom use the email RSS feed (no doubt hoping to win some money). Even when I don’t post for days at a time (like recently, sorry about that work and “stuff”…) I still get visitors. It takes almost no effort on my part to retain the status quo. Which of course means if I were to put in a concerted effort this blog would probably grow. But not so with the other one.

Getting visitors to it is like pulling teeth. Big, hardy, deeply rooted teeth. It used to be like that around here, but as I’ve grown I’ve begun taking it for granted. Starting this second blog has been an eye opening experience for me. It’s a lot of trail and error due to the fact that it is a niche focused blog whereas this one is not. On the other hand everyday I know exactly what topic I’m going to blog about over there. I have Google Alerts setup to notify me of news, groups, blogs, and videos that might deal with snakes and reptiles. Currently I’m only writing a few articles a week for it due to “ramping up” and having learned from this blog that too many articles can be a turn-off especially when the blog is young.

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve learned from my Pet Snakes blog:

Search engine ranking

I concern myself with each articles ranking in the search engines. The first thing I do when I’m thinking of a topic is start plugging various titles into Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search. I’m looking for word combinations that get between 75,000 and 500,000 results on average. The reason for this is because I know the lower the results the easier it is to rank higher. The caveat is that it means a lot less potential generic search engine visitors.

Keyword Tracker

I also run the potential title through a keyword tracker which helps me to determine how many average searches both the word(s) entered will receive, but also what different combinations including those words can be expected to receive. I’ve not reviewed how they determine that information, but I suspect it has something to do with querying search engine results. Either way it is a handy little tool to have.

Monetization

The potential to make money is a lot better with a niche specific blog because the majority of people who are there have an interest in the topic. Currently I’m just using Adsense to gauge how many clicks I can expect to get. Since the payout for the snake niche is almost nonexistent I’ll be switching to something else in the near future. For now however it lets me see if there’s any potential. I can’t give exact stats but if I had the same percentage of click-throughs on this blog (and they were paying the same average rate) as I do on that blog I’d be pulling in an extra $300 to $500 a month, easily.

Content is still KING

I’ve always believed it to be true and on more than one occasion I’ve even preached it to you folks who read this blog. My experience with pet-snakes.com is the same. Content makes the world go round. I was a little surprised to find how easy it is to write on a niche topic. I’ve always been “passionate” about snakes (reptiles in general), but had expected it to be a huge bore writing about them all the time. So far I’ve got more topics to write about than I know what to do with. But no matter how many ideas I have in the fire, or how many topics I want to cover I’ve learned not to sacrifice the quality of content for quanity.

Never stop learning

I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning. From cradle to grave I believe we are not only capable, but best served by continually learning new things. This blog taught me a lot, but it’s going to a whole new level with the new blog. First and foremost because I’m continually learning new things about the snakes. Secondly because as I work towards realizing the blogs full potential I’m learning new blogging, design, and marketing techniques. It’s a continuous process which has been extremely rewarding.

I invite everyone to checkout Pet-Snakes.com if you haven’t done so already, and keep your eyes open for a contest over there that will be announced sometime within the next 3 days!

Speaking of contests I’ve been running the “500 email rss subscribers” contest here. Well I’ve changed the rules a bit. Decided instead of 500 we’ll set the limit to 100. Which means that once I have 100 ACTIVE email rss subscribers to this blog I will randomly draw 1 name and send the winner a check for $50 $100.00!

Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »

A new blog

Friday, January 25th, 2008

Two days ago I finally had enough content to get pet-snakes.com up and running. It is dedicated to keeping snakes as pets (as if you couldn’t tell by the url…) and general care of other reptiles as well. Instead of leaving the blog posts open to commenting I installed a phpbb 2 forum on this site to facilitate discussion, and feedback. I took this approach as I wanted the main site to be more for disseminating information regarding snakes as opposed to open discussions. Currently there are 9 articles up on the site and 12 more currently in the works. I’ll be posting 2 or 3 a day until they’ve all been posted at which point I will be adding even more content with the help of some other folks. That’s the short story. The long story is how I came to decide on starting that project.

I’ve always been fascinated by snakes since I was about 5 or 6 years old. Throughout my childhood and early teens I had snakes as pets. At the time I really had no idea what I was doing so it was surprising anything made it, and sometimes it didn’t. As I got older I lost interest in snakes and became interested in all the wrong things young men become interested in. Except for one brief stint of taking care of a ball python for about 3 months I was virtually snake free for about 8 years.

Then a few months ago I had a really screwed up dream. I was being chased all over the place by a rat. This was no ordinary rat! This was Mighty Mouse’s big brother! I don’t remember much about the dream but I remember waking up thinking to myself I need a snake!, and at that the seed was planted and I began to absorb all of the information about snakes I could get my hands on. Until I was satisfied I had enough knowledge at which point I started shopping around.

The long and short of it was I got the snake and soon realized that I was beginning to forget half of what I learned. Rather than forget it all I started typing it out on the computer. After I had several potential articles lined out I put in place a plan start a new blog dedicated to snake care. At first I had intended to make it a regular blog with replies, widgets, and all of that stuff. I quickly came to realize that I wanted to monetize the blog because it lends itself well to that because of it’s tight niche focus. I’ve gone with the standard Google Adsense advertising for the moment but as it gains in popularity I will start approaching targeted businesses about partnership opportunities.

This will mark the first time I’ve truly focused on monetizing a site from almost the beginning. In order to draw in more traffic I am going to hold a contest for a free snake up to a $250.00 value. So if you or anyone you know is into snakes keep an eye on pet-snakes.com for details. If not you should still check it out anyhow. Just because you’re my friend…

And yes I know I need a header/logo. If anyone wants to offer me a nice one for under $25.00 I’m willing to talk. Just get in touch with me and we can discuss it.

Posted in Blogging, Making Money | 2 Comments »

Monetize your RSS feed with Bidvertiser

Friday, January 4th, 2008

A few minutes ago when I logged into my Bidvertiser and was surprised to see that they are now offering the option to include ads in your RSS feeds. Great idea I thought and quickly signed up. After all more income sources is more income sources, right? Here’s what I figured out so far.

A little hokey, maybe…

You can’t embed the ads into an existing feed publisher such as Feed Burner. By no means am I an expert but that seems like being able to do that would be a given. Especially considering that Bidvertiser doesn’t use content relational advertising.

But all is not lost

The setup took me all of two minutes. In the end I only need to copy and paste a few lines to move my RSS feeds from Feed Burner to Bidvertiser. I’ve not made the change yet, but I’ll give it a try tomorrow. It doesn’t look like I’ll lose anything by moving the feed. Besides I’m not actually moving the feed, more like forwarding it through the Bidvertiser system but it still seems to originate on the blog, move through Feed Burner and then get handed off to Bidvertiser.

Getting started

If you don’t have a Bidvertiser account already signup for one here. Once that’s done log into your publisher account and look for the link that says Public Beta - BidVertiser ads for your RSS/ATOM feeds. Click here to start!. Click the link and go! If you already have an account skip the signup (obviously) and get to work!

Has anyone else tried this out? Any feedback? I’m going to give it a chance since Feed Burner can’t seem to get their act together and monetize their feeds. At least not so it works right.

Posted in Making Money | 6 Comments »