Setting regular habits for success can be very important for blogging as for any activity in which you want to create success: writing a blog, building a nest egg, marathon running, …

As I’ve recently changed my blogging environment, I’ve noticed how this has affected both the quality, regularity and type of posts that I’ve been doing. I have made a small corner in our spare room (very small – chair backed right up against my glass door bookcase!) where for the past two or three months I’ve blogged some of my best posts, and also longest.

Recently, though, I brought home my first PC from school, that is my primary PC because I know best what it can do. I brought it home to upload photographs and movies to the web for the school but because my study is cramped, I put it in the living room. That is a big mistake because it’s right next to the TV… so instead of blogging, I end up watching TV! (Also, Grey’s Anatomy has stopped playing and been replaced with NCIS… With Grey’s Anatomy on TV, I blogged a lot! But now NCIS is back, well I’ll just have to see!).

It’s important to set up the parameters for blogging if you want to succeed at it and make something of your blog. These parameters should include:

• time: it’s a good idea to set up a regular slot for blogging and try NOT to break it. This can be any time that you feel comfortable, have privacy and can set regularly. I like to blog late at night, when the hustle bustle of the day is done, and I can relax more and focus on what I am doing.
• place: some places work better for me to write than others. I noticed that I work better in my ‘cramped’ office than I do in the living room or at work. And I would hardly say that the space was ‘better’, but it suits me. I have fewer disturbances here, but I’m not totally cut off.
• mood: sometimes delaying or putting off what you should be doing actually makes it harder to get back to doing it. Exercise is a good example of how things can go wrong. It’s hard to get back into your habit! But once you get started, it’s okay!
• distractions: there are many distractions online and offline that prevent us from getting done what we need to get done. In my office, I can control the offline distractions, but the online ones can really prevent me from doing something useful!

It’s important to understand what works for you when you need to blog. Observe yourself and make mental notes on how your performance is affected by these environmental factors. You can tweak many of them to improve!

What tips do you have for blogging habits? Are there any things which hold YOU back?

Well, I’ve been using a little Firefox Plugin to monitor my website’s page health after installing a wonderful SEO plugin called SEO_Wordpress.

The results are encouraging to say the least: the number of pages actually indexed by Google has fallen by 50% as has the number of supplemental entries. Also, the proportion of pages indexed by the supplementals has fallen slightly from over 50% to around about 45%. So proportionally more pages are indexed.

Unfortunately, the summer effect and my own several days of torpitude have lessened the amount of traffic, so it’s difficult to see any traffic benefit at the moment!

In theory, fewer pages in supplementals should generate additional traffic as the pages are likely to be more relevant. But the indexed pages are also fewer. So could I be cutting my own throat with this plugin? Well, I’m prepared to stick it out over the next few months.

In fact, more than one blogger has expressed skepticism about the whole ‘supplementals’ is hell religion. Elizabeth from www.elizabethadamsdirect.com wrote me just a few days ago saying several things:

 I think Google is attempting to buffalo us into thinking that the problem is all ours … that our content isn’t good enough, that not enough people like it and link to it,  and so on and so forth. But it’s not all ours! It’s a good bit partly theirs!

and

And the idea that you should be obliged to go around your blog turning yourself inside out so that posts wouldn’t be found in more than one place … that’s ridiculous! That’s what blogs do! It’s the nature of the beast!

Perhaps the whole thing is a storm in a tea cup, but until I have had a chance to check it out for myself, I won’t know the whole story.