Blogging Pointers

Intro - - Welcome, this is part five of the multi-part series The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques. This series covers the ever important topic of time management and how it directly relates to your success as a blogger. I will be covering some key issues many bloggers, myself included, have battled with in the past and how you can overcome them with a few simple tricks to managing your time more efficiently.

First, I wanted to mention that you don’t have to try and write multi-part series’ or two thousand word posts everyday in order to satisfy your readers. Many bloggers, yes even pro bloggers, use what they term as “filler content” at least two days a week. Filler content in short, is very simple posts often times its a quick review of another blog/product or a simple link list thats sole purpose is to fill a void for that particular day. Filler content is often a great thing to post for the weekend, just to add something new or use it if you fall behind one day. I very highly recommend that you keep a couple simple posts like these on hand for those slack days when there are no thoughts present in your head, it happens to all of us, and is sure to happen to you.

Well, I know this particular portion of the series is about product research, but I wanted to mention everything above to give you an idea of what to keep your eyes open for when you are doing your research. So with that said, content research is a very important step in the blogging process. Whether you are in need of a little inspiration or researching the hottest news in your niche, you will find yourself hitting the dusty internet trail in search of new material.

I often tend to keep a Firefox tab open while I am writing, so I can hit google to verify what I said is correct. There is nothing worse than getting an email from someone saying your material is outdated or that program doesn’t have that function anymore, something like that. So to keep this from happening, anytime I use a fact or mention, I quickly verify to make sure it is still accurate, because things change and on the net they tend to change quicker than usual.

So that is one tip, always keep a tab open for verification research as you write your posts. This willprevent you from bringing everything to a halt opening a new tab so on and so forth.

Try to research non time sensitive material in advance. I cant stress this enough, every time you do something in advance you save time and headaches down the road when its time to write.

When you are researching stay focused. It is very easy to lose track of what you are doing online. I have started searching for some new web host and an hour later found myself wanting to buy a new video game that I just spent forty-five minutes hunting for the best deal. So keep focused on your searches or you will easily double your work time.

Always check the biggest resources for your topic first. Jump over to the biggest blogs and see what they have been writing about or maybe they wrote your same idea a few months ago. By no means should you copy their writings it is against the law and just plain ethical, but using it as an inspirational piece is often why they write it, to inspire.

But, don’t forget the small guy. Even though by now you have scoured the biggest resources available to you, you should not stop there, everyone that started out was once a new guy. Which means that you can find equally great content from many of the smaller resources.

Let Google do the work. Google is a very powerful tool at your fingertips, that holds a vast amount of information. If you are searching for something specific wrap it with quotation marks, this will pull only the results that math that phrase exactly. Imagine how much time you can save if you cut the results down from two million to two hundred, its a lot.

Let the content come to you. Sign up for Read the rest of this entry »

Intro - - Welcome, this is part four of the multi-part series The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques. This series covers the ever important topic of time management and how it directly relates to your success as a blogger. I will be covering some key issues many bloggers, myself included, have battled with in the past and how you can overcome them with a few simple tricks to managing your time more efficiently.

Operating multiple blogs can be a real handful. Many people find the most difficult task to be, designating enough time for each one. When you get to the point where you are running three, four or five blogs or more, your oldest blogs tend to suffer as you work on the newest ones. Postings start to slow from one a day to a couple a week and sometimes worse.

One of the biggest tricks to efficiently running multiple blogs is schedule, schedule and schedule some more. Set yourself up with a dry erase board or a calendar and actually write down a generic schedule for each blog. As unforeseen things come up, and they will, add that to the schedule. This plan gives you some insight as to what you should be doing for the week, day or month.

In part two of this series I shared the technique of writing post for the future and scheduling them for a later date. This is very handy for running more than one blog. Your calendar can say some thing like:

Monday - Write five posts for blog #1 and leave at least six comments on other blogs for blog #3.

Tuesday - Write five posts for blog #2 and reconfigure affiliate ads on blog #1.

Wednesday - Write five posts for blog #3 and leave at least six comments on blogs for blog #2.

Thursday - Leave at least six comments on other blogs for blog #1 and create new FAQ page for blog #3.

Friday - Routine maintenance on all blogs, check links etc. catch up on emails and comments.

Saturday and Sunday - Respond to emails, write some posts if you like or enjoy a cold one and kick your feet up.

This is only an example but a calendar like that would definitely Read the rest of this entry »

Intro - - Welcome, this is part three of the multi-part series The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques. This series covers the ever important topic of time management and how it directly relates to your success as a blogger. I will be covering some key issues many bloggers, myself included, have battled with in the past and how you can overcome them with a few simple tricks to managing your time more efficiently.

Interacting with your readers plays a very important role in building relationships through your blog. Developing strong relationships with your readers is also the best way to gain return traffic, you become a trusted source of information and sometimes even a friend. The higher the amount of return traffic you can receive the less amount of time you need spend on marketing your blog, because eventually word of mouth is all you will need, to maintain your success.

Tip #1

When you reach a level where you have attained a fair amount of readers, you will probably find yourself receiving a lot of emails and comments requiring a response. Many bloggers can spend several hours a day responding to emails and comments and still never find the bottom of the list, this can be very time consuming. One great way to slow down the amount of incoming messages, is to simply outline your time and email restrictions on the “About Me” page of your blog. Let your readers know up front that it may take a while to respond due to high levels of incoming mail, let them know if you can’t currently review all site submissions or products, people are pretty forgiving if you are upfront and honest. This little tip will surely buy you some time, should you not get to all of the emails or respond to everyone you hoped to that day. If you are unsure about how to write a contact page you might take a look at Random Blog Tip - Contact Options by Pro Blogger and while you are there take a look at his Contact page as he uses some of these techniques on his.

Tip #2

Keep those return emails short and sweet. You don’t need to write a one thousand word response to be considered friendly or helpful. A simple “Hi (name), Thanks for the email. The answer to your question is blah blah blah.” Something simple like this is more than enough to satisfy your average reader, and of course writing shorter responses cuts down your time and labor.

Tip #3

Create an FAQ page linked from every page in your navigation menu. An FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page can cut down on a lot of emails. Be sure to take some time every so often to update the page with new commonly asked questions as you receive them. Make sure your answers are well written and detailed to leave your readers with no room for wonder.

Tip #4

Consider setting up a user poll or survey on your blog. This will give you an opportunity to better understand what your users want or like/dislike about your site. With this information you put these suggestions into place before you receive a barrage of emails asking for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Intro - - Welcome, this is part two of the multi-part series The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques. This series covers the ever important topic of time management and how it directly relates to your success as a blogger. I will be covering some key issues many bloggers, myself included, have battled with in the past and how you can overcome them with a few simple tricks to managing your time more efficiently.

Posting or writing is without a doubt the single most important role of any blogger, its your job description. Unfortunately, it is also tends to be the most time consuming and because of this many bloggers’ articles often suffer or fall second place to marketing, designing, responding and several other daily tasks. Regardless of your schedule, your writing can’ t suffer. Articles are the foundation of every blog, they are what draw in your readers and build your popularity, pushing these to second or even third place is essentially committing blogicide. Just don’t do it!

But what if you can keep the great content rolling and manage to save time doing it? Do you know that many people are completely unfamiliar with the TimeStamp feature in WordPress. Are you one of them?

TimeSaver #1

With the TimeStamp feature you have the ability to set a new post to publish a day, week or month into the future, whatever you want. If used properly this can be a huge time saver for publishing your posts. Rather than spending seven days a week writing an article, you could potentially spend one day a week writing seven articles and then set them to publish each day of the week, essentially freeing up six days for other important activities. This of course does not include the occasional breaking news story, but I am sure with all of the free time you just gaine, you could spend an evening writing that.

TimeSaver #2

Now, I know some of you enjoy writing daily so the last thought may not be of interest to you. If this is the case, maybe you should pick one day of the week to write say three articles. Publish one article for the day and save the others as drafts. Why? Backups, lets say you wrote and saved two extra articles on Saturday, Wednesday you found some great brewing pot of ideas you are dying to research. Instead of falling behind, or not publishing an article or even writing a non thought out poorly written masterpiece, you can a couple of minutes, open up your admin panel select a pre-written article and hit publish, your done. So in less than two minutes you have managed to entertain your readers, keep your blog rolling and get back to your research, now thats good time management.

TimeSaver #3

Mix em’ up. What if you spent two days a week writing five articles a day? You would then be publishing one article a day with three extras per week. In less than a month you would have enough extra articles to fill an entire week which in turn means you can take vacation, work on setting up a new blog or marketing, advertising and such. Thats sounds good to me!

With these three simple steps for writing you can gain more time to handle your day to day tasks while at the same time creating great, regularly posted content your readers will enjoy for years to come. Do you manage your time effectively? Help others by sharing your methods in the comments below.

Here are the links to the other parts of this series:

• Part 1 - The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques
• Part 2 - Sensible Posting - Writing for the Future
• Part 3 - 6 Time Saving Tips for Interacting With Your Readers
• Part 4 - One Blog to Another - Multiple Blog Management Syndrome
• Part 5 - Productive Content Research for Bloggers

writing posts, wordpress, blogging, blogging tips, time saving, time management

Having a lack of essential time management skills is a common problem among many people. In the everyday grind we call life, managing your time poorly can cause problems with work, relationships and even your health(stress is a terrible thing). So what happens when this bad habit overflows into your blogging career? Nothing! Thats right “nothing” happens, you won’t become successful, you won’t fulfill your dreams of blogger stardom, you just won’t make it.

Time management is very crucial to the success of a blogger, your readers rely on you to post everyday or every other day, they rely on you to respond to their comments, answer their emails and they expect you to complete all of this regularly. Many regular readers know what time of day you usually add new posts or what you write or do, if anything, on the weekends, thats all part of the bond that forms in this relationship of writer and reader.

Now, as if you thought all of this was hard enough, consider operating multiple blogs just as many of the top bloggers often do. Heres where your management skills are really going to be put to the test. Imagine doubling, tripling or quadrupling the amount of emails, comments and questions you receive each and every day from now until you retire or give up which ever comes first.

I too have fallen prey to this inner devil many of us battle. Rather than cutting my losses and giving up, I stepped up to plate, laid everything out on the line and taught myself to manage my time effectively. Learning to time management was the best thing I have probably ever done, aside from my daughter:-), my free time is now free again, my work day is shorter thanks to better productivity and life has just overall improved from every aspect.

The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques is a multi-part series written as a foundation to better your users experience, better your blogs and improve your overall quality of life. This series will be featuring the chapters listed below:

• Sensible Posting - Writing for the Future
• 6 Time Saving Tips for Interacting With Your Readers
• One Blog to Another - Multiple Blog Management Syndrome
• Productive Content Research for Bloggers

As I publish each part in the series, I will be linking the above list to their respective pages. This series will be featuring one new article per day for the next four days, so stay tuned and don’t forget to Digg it.

blogging, time management, blogging techniques, multiple blogs, writing posts, content research

With so many fly by night websites popping up these days, everybody and their brothers have jumped on the web hosting bandwagon, to make a quick buck. Don’t be intimidated by the large amount of hosts to dig through. There are a lot of good providers I have found while simply searching the web. You should know that many hosts are resellers for some other hosting company. Although this is not necessarily bad, you will tend to find better deals buying from the main source directly. Customer support is a huge advantage point for you, so keep this in mind while you shop around. In addition I always look for some sort of money back guarantee when signing up to ensure my security should I decide that I do not like the service.

Many of the web hosting review boards you find on the internet are just listing the providers that pay them the best affiliate commissions, so I place very little importance on these lists. The simplest way I have discovered to find a good web host is by looking into what your requirements will be for the particular site in mind. Once you figure this out you will narrow down the options of hosting providers. To do this I simply type my needs into Google and away I go. For example, a search for “WordPress hosting�? will yield many results of providers offering special plans for WordPress users. Another example would be multi-site or reseller hosting which narrows your search even further. With so many great hosting companies this is likely to be a process of trial and error. Just sign-up and check out their features, if you don’t like them ask for a refund and go somewhere else.

A popular hosting provider among bloggers and internet marketers is Host Gator. This I believe is due primarily to their multi-site hosting options, but as I understand their customer service is good as well. I personally use a Host Nine reseller account which, thus far, I am very pleased with. The support has been great and they offer a lot of features I can use. If you need it, they also have a monthly payment plan so you do not need to pop for a year of hosting.

In conclusion, just look at your options and find the company that fits you the best. Never settle for a provider because they are cheap. You will likely end up spending even more money down the road trying to find a company that you can work with. Pick a company you can call your own and your business will thank you.

web hosting, host nine, host gator, blogging, wordpress

I should mention that these are in no specific order but rather a random list of the current Top 50 ping sites I currently submit my posts to on a daily basis.  The list as a whole seems to work well for me thus far and should I remove or add anything to this in the near future I will let you know.

Pinging to me, is a very important tool in driving traffic to your blog.  The many social sites serve as another avenue for finding people interested in your topics.  As I have said many times, any opportunity to pick up one more reader should not be overlooked, and to this day I still believe in every word of it.  Make use of everything the internet has to offer, and you will stand a better chance of soaring past the competition.

Setting your WordPress blog up to ping these sites automatically.

Again, this is another task WordPress has made easy for us to complete.  To configure WordPress with automatic ping, open up your wp-admin click on options and then writing. If you scroll all of the way down to the bottom of the page you will see a text box that says “Update Services”, now simply copy listings in my top 50 ping list and paste them into the box, now click update options and your WordPress blog is ready to ping.

The Pingers Hit List

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

Oh no! I said the world’s nastiest four letter word that starts with a “w”. Work. Any ways it had to be said, I find way to many people are in search of being the next rich, successful blogger overnight. Not to crash your dreams but blogging, like anything else, takes work, dedication and time to grow as big as some of the greats. Writers like Lorelle and Darren did not start blogging yesterday or even the day before. They have spent a lot of time pouring their hearts and souls into their blogs, not to mention the finger cramps:-), to attain the status they now proudly have.

Some of the best advice I can give you when starting a new blog is be patient, be dedicated and be honest both to your readers and yourselves. The rapidly expanding world of blogging holds plenty of room for the growth of new bloggers and plenty of opportunities for financial gain, but you have to be willing to work for it.

Give yourself time to be great and go for it. The only person keeping you from reaching the stars is you, set your personal demons aside and blog. Blog for you, blog for your readers and blog for greatness. The success will come later, don’t be discouraged by this, thats how the world weeds out the non-bloggers.

A few quick resources to get you started.

The 20 commandments of the Blogging Bible - Lorelle on WordPress

Blogging for Beginners - Pro Blogger

10 Minute Blog Tips: Staying With It - Chris Garrett

Improving you writing - Blogging Tips

blogging, blogging tips, chris garrett, pro blogger, lorelle on wordpress, success, writers

I know that many of my articles and thoughts tend to focus on making money blogging and driving traffic to your blog both overall more commercialized means of blogging. Although this is an important, and popular, topic that is of interest to me as well, we sometimes need to remember where, or how blogging started. Every now and then we as bloggers need to step back and reflect on what it is that interests us and that drew us into this unique, exciting world of internet publishing.

Sometimes bloggers need to forget the money, forget the traffic and blog just to blog, you should write for the community and not for the almighty dollar. This is afterall, what blogging is about and at some point in time it was probably what brought the money and the traffic you have now. When you just sit down and write with out all of the clutter of commercialization, your thoughts are more heartfelt and pure, they are a mirrored reflection of your personality, your interests and of course your soul. This emotion you scribe on the internet is truly what people enjoy and that is what will draw your readers attention.

The biggest difference between some random website and a blog, is that a blog is more personal, a blog gives that everyday web surfer the opportunity to meet you and dive into your mind to see what you are about. After you visit the same blog a few times, each time you go back it almost feels as if your going to visit a friend, even though you probably have never met the person doing the writing, you have indeed gotten to know them. This reasoning is how many of the more popular, mainstream bloggers have reached the point they are at now. They have in essence befriended their readers and built their very own loyal community of followers that sit and wait for that next hot article to roll off of the press.

The next time you sit down to write your newest million dollar headline, step back for a second and look at what you are actually writing and why you are writing it. Think of how long it has been since you wrote an article for the readers, you don’t have to do it all of the time but consider giving them this one. Maybe you have forgotten how to write from the heart, try writing something about yourself, it can sometimes be very humbling and may put you back on that level that started this journey through the blogosphere.

I spend as much time as I can browsing the internet, learning, reading and watching others. I have over time found many great bloggers that blog with the same feelings that I have described above. Darren Rowse is probably the one blogger that stands out the most in my mind, he is really the one that inspired me to blog and is very successful in building a friendship with his readers. The comments left on his posts, sound as if they came from a childhood friend, they have that sense of being so personal, that is a perfect example of what you should blog for, if you can attain that loyalty, the money will most likely follow shortly there after.

Take the opportunity to give these thoughts a try and see where it takes you. Who knows maybe you will be the worlds next favorite blogger!

Your Friend,

Patric Herber

blogging, blog, writing

Founded in February 2005, YouTube’s popularity has been expanding at an astonishing rate ever since. Now days they have become one of the most popular and talked about sites on the internet. Millions of people are visiting monthly and downloading everything from whacky footage of some guy jumping out of a window to guitar lessons all on video and available to the public. Web searches for YouTube and specific videos are climbing steadily bringing significant traffic to anyone covering the topic.

If you are like me, you probably have no interest in putting your home videos on the web for anyone to see, but don’t let this stop you from cashing in on the YouTube craze. Not only are you allowed to use the videos on your blogs, they’ve made it easy by giving you the links to embed the video directly into your site. Also, when somebody comes to your blog and plays the video, it plays directly from YouTube so as not to consume your bandwidth as videos can often do.

The process of making money from these videos is actually quite simple and has been used with other media for some time. Lets say you write a post about “video x” which is rated as a popular video on YouTube therefor driving a fair amount of traffic. You embed the video in your post page and wrap it with your standard advertising, be it Google Adsense, AdBrite or whatever and your all set. You don’t make money from the video itself, the money comes from leveraging the already existing traffic for that particular video and bringing them to your blog. Now when they get there you not only give them the video they are in search of but also hit them with advertisements of other great YouTube videos, news, etc. in essence capturing their interests and turning them into Read the rest of this entry »