Archive for the 'Blogs and Blogging' Category

10 Drafts and a Focus

Published at February 7, 2008 in Success, Attitude and Blogs and Blogging. 36 Comments

I get embarrassed whenever my friends say I am a man of ideas: because I am neither a genius, nor was I a gifted child.

However, I understand where they’re coming from. Whenever I watch shows, read stuff, interact with people or simply observe the world, at least one idea pops up in my head like a light bulb that you see in the cartoons. In short, ideas keep on coming.

Because of that, I needed an outlet. And writing seems to be the perfect choice. I carry a notebook and a pen. I scurry to them as soon as ideas come, wanting to express them in writing. Not wanting to forget a thing.

I still forget, though. So I needed a tool that works fast. The next thing I knew, this blog was born.

However, the ideas that I want to write and finish are too much for my tools. I wanted to finish all of them at the same time, but that is impossible. Sometimes I catch myself switching from one post to another. Not to mention the distractions that surround me.

As a result, I don’t finish anything. I took a quick glance at my blog’s control panel and here’s what I saw: 10 drafts – posts that I had started but remained unfinished. Some of the posts are finished and only need polishing. Some I still intend to complete and publish in due time. I actually have more drafts but let’s keep it simple. 10 drafts.

At first I thought I was just uninspired. But I immediately nixed the thought because if that was true, how come in my mind, those posts are already done? I knew what to write, I have them completed in my mind. But I couldn’t channel them through my fingers because they couldn’t keep up.

Suddenly, I realized, it isn’t my fingers. It’s my lack of focus. Focus is what separates unrealized ideas from successful posts. Do I want this post to end up as the 11th draft in my control panel?

I do not. So I finished this entry - not because I was pressured - but because I liked to and I wanted to; It is my joy to share and express my thoughts. Therefore, I have to will myself to success.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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Join Support Groups and Support Them

Published at February 2, 2008 in Success, Attitude, Blogs and Blogging, Observations and Opinions and Simple Tips and How-To. 24 Comments

A person needs a support group in order to feel a sense of belongingness and to be successful. A group can define a person, that is why it is important to join a group which shares the same interest and makes us feel comfortable from the start.

I personally like small support groups for a number of reasons:

- I grow with them and its members
- I know the leaders and can communicate with them
- I can participate, be heard and be noticed
- I like the personal approach

Like any other relationships, memberships in support groups are two-way streets: they support you and vice versa.

Actively participating in your support groups make these groups bigger, more active and more influential. In turn, these changes make you proud, make you part of a community, give you more experience and more exposure. Consequently, you grow more as a person you intend to be.

I have plenty of support groups in my whole life: my family, my girlfriend, and a couple of organizations during my education. I will not, however, mention how I support them as it will sound like I am tooting my own horn.

Since we are in the blogging world, I have listed below a select few of my “online” support groups. (If you are a non-blogger reader of mine, don’t worry, the technical terms are minimal). Some of these you might be able to relate to. After reading, if you are interested in learning more about them, I encourage you to click on their links:

SUPPORT GROUP#1 - Readers, Lurkers, and Visitors

Let us differentiate the three first. Visitors are people coming from various sites. They can be from search engines like google looking for something and somehow ended up here. These people probably will visit once then leave. 7% of this site’s traffic are coming from search engines.

Lurkers, on the other hand, are people who visited and decided to come back. However, they prefer to just read and comment only once or twice (sometimes they don’t). There is nothing wrong with that. Some of these people, I know personally.

Readers are people who are regulars of the site. They read, go through the archives, and sometimes comment when appropriate. Most of the readers are fellow bloggers who know the ethics of blogging.

How do I support them?

One of the reasons this site continues to exist is because of them. So I will continue to write useful information to feed their hungry minds. I read my readers’ blogs and comment when I have something genuine to say. I make sure I link to the post I think others will find interesting.

The top commentators are rewarded by displaying their links on the right sidebar. On a similar note, last month, I had moved the “latest comments” high on the sidebar to easily keep track of any responses.

The following 5 readers commented regularly here: Vic the CaribooPonderer, Jeni of Down River Drivel, Marcus Langford, Frank C of OpTempo - Internet Review Magazine, and Cris.

SUPPORT GROUP#2 - BloggingZoom

If you are a blogger who wants your articles and posts get promoted, BloggingZoom.com is the place for you. In other similar social sites, self-promotion is considered a mortal sin. But the creators of BloggingZoom (Vic Franqui of Make Money Online and Court Tuttle of Internet Marketing) made it known that publishing your own posts is what the site wants you to do, and members will “zoom” your submission as a vote of approval if they found your articles worthy.

What I also like about BZ is that making friends is a lot easier and they comment on your submissions. It means one thing: you get a readership that generates quality traffic and might subscribe to your blog.

A BZ power user, Jason Clark of Inner88 - Review of Internet wrote a very good explanation of BloggingZoom. You’ll find it extremely useful if you intend to be a member of BZ.

How do I support BloggingZoom?

I like the community in BZ; the leaders are approachable even though few sensitive people might find Vic a little bit harsh. My way of supporting them is following the rules especially in post submission. Vic and Court don’t like members copy-pasting their posts for one good reason: duplicate contents. Google penalizes sites that copy others’ information. Vic also explained the benefit is mutual. I do not see any harm writing 4 sentences (approximately 350 characters) to describe your submission.

Also, they encourage you to zoom others’ submissions and visit their blogs so they get traffic as well; I have been doing that already since my first day as a member.

SUPPORT GROUP#3 - BlogHology

Download Free Bloghology EbookA blogging friend of mine - Mert Erkal of searchforblogging.com - has a vision, a vision where selected bloggers are grouped together and their best posts are promoted. I am part of that group. He calls it BlogHology. Below is a blurb of what it is:

… Similar to an anthology, a bloghology is a collection of bloggers, their profiles, photos, and links to their best posts. It is a PDF e-book which can be easily circulated throughout the blogosphere for personal branding and marketing of selected good quality bloggers…

How do I support BlogHology?

Mert is a hard-working person who is dedicated in achieving his goals, and at the same time in helping others. As a result, he inspires others using the “lead by example” technique. Seeing these characteristics in him, it is easy to follow suit. He only wants one thing from the participants: to promote BlogHology to their own readers by putting up a download link on their blogs.

I encourage you to download (by clicking on the BlogHology image above) the BlogHology E-Book, where I was also featured. Find out which of my posts were included in the first edition.

SUMMARY

I believe in the old adage “No man is an island.“. No one should be. Whether we like it or not, we need others to be successful.

In choosing the right support groups for me, I see to it they have the following characteristics:

-They should have a vision-mission
-The leaders support their members
-The members voluntarily reach out to others

How about you? Do you have support groups that you would like to share?

Popularity: 38% [?]

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YouTube “Video Is No Longer Available” Error

Published at January 27, 2008 in Videos, Blogs and Blogging and Simple Tips and How-To. 26 Comments

Janie of Colloquium emailed me yesterday regarding my post about my personally-selected YouTube Videos. She said she was not able to view them because there was an error in each video: it says it is no longer available.

I’ve seen that one before. The first time in my own video. I got worried, thinking if I violated YouTube’s Terms of Service (TOS). Was the video taken down due to copyright infringement or copyright claim by other parties? I didn’t think so. Fortunately, the (only) video in my account was not deleted. So how did I fix the error?

I didn’t. It was on YouTube side. My instinct told me to press F5 to reload the page before I make a drastic move in my blog. Luckily, the trick worked.

So I emailed Janie back saying that it is normal when the page with embedded YouTube video is open for a long time. The clip is not gone, removed or deleted. All she has to do is refresh the page and the video will re-appear.

She thanked me for letting her know because she didn’t “realize that You Tube timed out like that.” to quote her.

I want to thank Janie for pointing this out. She inspired me to write a post because it seems to me that this issue looks like a big deal to a concerned viewer. I hope that this post somehow reaches YouTube so they can fix the annoying “Video is no longer available” error that makes their members and users worry.

Popularity: 100% [?]

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OpTempo Reviews PlanetSaedel

Published at January 10, 2008 in Blogs and Blogging. 5 Comments

I’ve been reading OpTempo.com eversince I learned about it on BloggingZoom.com. The site is packed with useful information on blogging, and Frank - the author - writes using an “easy-to-read” approach at the same time displaying his credibility on the subjects he usually talks about.

During that time, I also learned that he does blog reviews for FREE. Knowing that Frank writes a fair and objective analysis, I decided to sign up for this free service. I also felt it was necessary to let someone with blogging experience outside my immediate connection to take a look at this site and provide an objective opinion.

However, since this is a free service, I had to fall in line and wait. It was a long list, but I felt it was worth the wait.

Couple of months later, PlanetSaedel has been finally featured on OpTempo.com.

Frank categorized his review in to two parts: Site Design/Theme and Content; it was concluded in Overall evaluation. Below is a snippet of his review:

“… The WordPress theme is a simple, two column right side bar, design with a custom logo graphic built around the K2 theme. It’s minimalist but looks good….Planet Saedel covers a lot of topics, sort of like OpTempo does in a way… Planet Saedel is an enjoyable personal blog with some interesting observations. I didn’t see anything of significance that should be changed…. ”

I am encouraging you to visit Blog Review: Planet Saedel for full details of Frank’s assessment of my blog. Then let me know what you think about Frank’s review.

I would like to thank Frank for taking time to go around PlanetSaedel. He even dug deep into my archives to look for old topics to review.

If you are a personal or professional blogger (or an aspiring one), don’t miss the chance to get your site reviewed. (Paid blog reviews range from $5 - $450). It’s a win-win situation: you learn, improve, and get promoted. On the other hand, the reviewer gains credibility, a link back to his site, and potential readers coming from his reviewee.

Quick question:
If I ask you to review this site, what would you say about it based on design and content?

Popularity: 15% [?]

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Improvement Using Addition By Subtraction

Published at January 2, 2008 in Attitude and Blogs and Blogging. 19 Comments

Addition By SubtractionHave you heard of the phrase “addition by subtraction?”

If you have not, I’m inviting you to read ahead, I’ll explain it using simple examples. Otherwise, stay with me, you might be able to share here or learn new perspectives.

Imagine you have a bag of tomatoes, and you noticed one of them is rotten. What do you do to keep the others fresh? You take out the rotten one to avoid contamination.

Same thing with a team. A team General Manager should always look to improve the pack by trading away or cutting the weakest link. That’s one form of addition (or improvement) by subtraction.

The same technique can be applied to everyday life. If you want to be successful, limit your diversions and concentrate on things helpful in achieving success.

Mert of searchforblogging.com, a hard-working blogging-friend of mine, applied similar technique in his blog to improve its traffic. One example he used was cutting his TV hours to 1 so he can focus on more important things.

Now, I will explain to you how I am going to improve this blog using Addition by Subtraction.

If you are new here in this planet, you will not even notice that the BlogRush widget already got the boot. Personally, I think it had potential, as it sent me few readers that stick around. But after its Phase 2, I believed BlogRush went downhill. While the widget is now gone, I haven’t deleted my account yet, just so I can check what kind of action Mr. John Reese is going to take against this blog. (I just checked — there’s now a notice in my control panel that says my account is temporarily inactive until I put the widget back within 45 days).

That’s improvement #1. BlogRush does not deliver. Removing the widget frees up a big space in my sidebar and at the same time, I used that space by installing a new widget called “Entrecard” (the box on the right side with picture/logo, and underneath says “Drop Yours” or “Get One”). I’ll spare you the details of its innerworkings**, but let me put it in simple term: it brings traffic more than BlogRush does. By traffic, I meant more people are clicking on this blog, and it is good, whether they are interested to stay or not.

Next, I decided to remove the ads on this site, more popularly known as AdSense. They are fetched from Google, and if a reader clicks on them, I earn money. When I started this site over four months ago, it was also my intention to monetize using AdSense. However, the earning was not good (less than $10/month) because the click per ad is worth less than .25c. I got smart-priced* which simply means that Google pays me very little per Ad click.

That’s improvement #2. Adsense only works well in niche blogs, not in general-interest blogs. I have learned this from reading useful blogs on SEO, internet marketing, and money making***. If your Adsense account is currently used in a general interest blog, remove it, wait for a few weeks and then use it in a niche blog. Doing so allows your account to no longer be smart priced.

My Amazon widget (see sidebar) is not performing good as far as monetization is concerned. It also takes time to load, therefore, any first time visitor hits the back button or browse away as soon as they enter. Consequently, I will try another variation and see what happens.

That’s improvement #3. Amazon does not perform as expected plus it causes slow page loading. I’ll see if the change I am going to do will have positive effects but if none, I’ll say goodbye to this widget as well.

Via improvement #2 and #3, I am allowing myself to focus on paid/tipped reviews, which will become the main source of income of this blog. However, I’m going to be honest that it’s a big risk doing this after reading this post about PageRank Slap by the Big G (Google). It talks about blogs losing their Google-calculated ranks. I can take that, mainly because I still have a dayjob to support me, and I am experimenting on different niche blogs for monetization. PlanetSaedel is aimed for readers, not money-making.

IN CLOSING

I also did other improvements using the “less is more” principle but I won’t go into details, since they are only minor. The key here is not to be complacent. Always explore your own site and check if there are tweakings to be done.

Planning your own addition by subtraction not only in blogging but also in life, is simply a common sense; but actually doing it and being satisfied with the results is called improvement.

—–

Resources:
*** SEO, internet marketing, and money making
** Frank of OpTempo.com analyzes Entrecard traffic.
* Court of Courtneytuttle.com explains Smart-Pricing.

Popularity: 45% [?]

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