Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

Bloggers Block: I got it… But it’s not infectious!

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Life gets busy, and suddenly a day’s posting seems too much like a burden! Then it’s a second day, and suddenly a third. Your blog begins to look like Christmas Turkey around about New Year!

How do you keep up the blogging habit when you are facing life’s pressures? So many blogs get started and after a few postings (or many), the interest dies, the fire goes out, … why?

I nearly gave up blogging several times over the two and a half years since I started. If you look at my other blog carefully over the years, you’ll see there are gaps of sometimes weeks. I nearly did the same thing this time. I was very diligent over the last few weeks since the end of Chinese New Year, to get up early and blog for about 2 hours in the morning. But then on Wednesday, I started getting up later, and making excuses, and not concentrating… And so the spiral began again.

But this time has to be so different. This time I am not giving in as there is much more at stake: my blog has begun to attract significant traffic with a rising PR rank, Alexa rank, and Technorati rating. So I have to force myself to post, to get over the hump!

So if you are facing this trial, too. Then you are not alone. All bloggers face this dilemma from time to time. Should I stop? I’ll just skip this once! Why bother? What am I going to write about now?

But this is a negative frame of mind. And one that can be surmounted. Problogger has some tips on Bloggers’ Block! Now that has to be an inspiration. I found tips #2 and #13 quite useful: keeping an idea journal and finding your golden hour !

How did you survive Bloggers’ Block? What kept you going? Comment me your own experiences! I’d love to hear from you!

TLA and ReviewME: striking out right now!

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Text Link Ads and ReviewME are two great websites for advertisers and for bloggers. They offer advertisers convenient and fixed price methods (not CPC) for attracting a readership to their websites. As a blogger, also, there are opportunities for revenue generation. With ReviewME, it is paid reviews that you can choose to accept or not. TLA provides text links for websites that individually generate revenue.

In fact, both of them have generated some revenue for me, about $60 in total. TLA was in fact three times as successful for me as ReviewME. However, that is because I blew a review opportunity. Oh, well.

However, I did note one HUGE mistake that I made with my descriptions for both of these websites: one that perhaps resulted in loss of opportunities. My text introduction used to be about 150 words or more! I didn’t realize that other websites had much shorter introductions, often about 30 words or less. That’s just enough that can be taken in at a single glance!

I guess the result is: if you can’t summarize your blog’s essence in less than 30 words, then something is wrong. Most likely, it’s a lack of focus! So I learned. I shortened it considerably. I’ll let you know if it’s successful or not. Anyway, here is the shortened version:

Investorblogger ties money management, investing, blogging and tech together, as I explore my financial insights, mistakes, and experiences over the years of my ‘Random Walk To Wealth!’.

Perhaps it still needs work. I read John Chow’s on ReviewME . It’s shorter by 10% than my, including the words “Dot Com Mogul John Chow”!

So still some way to go, eh!

Blogitive Reopens: New tool – Blogitive Directory

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Blogitive finally restored the login button! Hurrah! So I logged in and checked around to see what new goodies there are…

I found Blogitive Directory for Wordpress 2.0. So I downloaded and installed. I can’t get it to work but I’m hopeful. One of my clients was asking about just such a feature. However it is not working at the moment, so I can’t recommend installing it just yet.

It’s a link directory that you can create and people can choose to buy links in for a year. You can set your price for a year.

BUT it doesn’t quite work yet. Also, there are a few problems, including changing your pricing and help files (none!). So, it’s very much a beta. But if you like playing with new stuff, it has a lot of potential! Just not ready for general release!

Kenneth