Keeping my eyes wide open in blogging

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I was going through my RSS feeds yesterday, and a few posts really jumped out at me, the ones that say ‘READ ME, GO ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT/HAVE TO!’  So, me being me I did – I’ve learnt that to be an average blogger (won’t say great because I haven’t got to that stage yet) you learn most when you read blog posts, articles and books.  When I checked my feedreader, three posts caught my eye and I had to read them:

1.  Problogger – A reality check about blogging for money

2.  Blogger Unleashed – Do you have a portfolio

3.  Make Money Online – Niche Marketing

What I began to think of first was that I needed a reality check, I needed to understand where I was at the moment and how far I had come in the month or so since I started this blog, as well as looking to the future and what I actually want out of this blog and blogging in general.  I did publish a few posts about my challenge of going from newbie to problogger and how I’ve set out my strategy to achieve certain milestones in 2008, but reading these posts brought some questions I need to ask. 

The Questions I’ve asked myself

Looking into my small portfolio of five blogs, all in different niches, I wrote down how I want to expand and create more, but I also looked into and wrote down what I actually needed to do for each blog.  This allowed me to think about a range of areas – bear in mind that I want to build a portfolio of bigger blog and more niche orientated smaller ones too – this I want to be in the region of 200 – with many of the blogs being leave alone niche targeted blogs that will make me a small amount each and every day.  So I decided to write down the following questions:

How many posts would I need on each blog and how often would I need to post?

Do I need to build Squidoo and/or hubpages for each, and how many (attracting in-bound links)?

Do I monetize the sites straight away, or do I wait until I’m fully indexed by google?

How many articles should I write for each blog (again attracting in-bound links and marketing the blog)?

Should I link my blogs together in the blogroll?

Should I concentrate on one blog at a time or all of them at once?

Could I spread myself too thinly?

Are the niches I have chosen profitable?

All questions need answers

These were just some of the questions I wrote down to the questions above, as I asked myself whether I could achieve the goals I had set myself, and I did come up with answers to each (credit to the above bloggers for steering me towards some of my answers though).

I decided that 25 posts for each new blog would be good start, using the future post feature in wordpress and release the posts each day for the coming month,  allowing google to see that I’m here and providing fresh content on a daily basis.  I’ve decided that the posts need to be keyword targeted and have some long-tail terms too – being longer variations of the main keyword (well, I didn’t know what a long-tail keyword was either up until 4 months ago  – I suggest you Google ‘long tail keywords’ for more information).  All of the posts I decided will need to be 500 words in length (just my personal opinion) and link to each other to increase internal linking within the blog.

I’ve decided I’m going to definitely build a squidoo page for a couple of areas that each blog covers, so if I was starting a blog in the goldfish niche, as mentioned in newbie blog step two: niches, then I would build one for the different fish (shubunkins, black moors etc), one for aquariums and one that outlined where to buy food and equipment online – linking to the niche blog and to some affiliate sites – gaining some extra in-bound links and some potential revenue.  I also decided that I would contribute to hubpages, but only use these to help the main blog in my portfolio, and my reputation, of road2blogging.com. 

After a few comment conversations and reading the posts over at Grizzlys blog, I decided that I would wait and hold out on any monetization whatsoever on the blog(s), at least until a lot of the posts on that particular blog were indexed by google.  Then, I would slowly add some adsense and try to make a little from the traffic coming to the site.

Articles, I can write for eternity, I love writing and focusing on a new topic, but I always find myself ranting on too much about a topic and not really getting down to the core.  I decided that 30–40 articles on key terms, and long-tail key terms, would be enough to boost a small trickle of traffic to the blog.

After reading around on the subject of blogrolls and linking the portfolio of your blogs together, (also consulting Courtney’s marketing school blog)  I decided that linking the blogs together wouldn’t be a good idea and I would utilise other options to link to and market each individual blog – why?  Well, I’ve been reminding myself of what I keep reading time and time again about links – they need to be relevant links to that particular topic or area, not a bunch of links linking to another site ‘just because’.  This is the reason I don’t have a blogroll on road2blogging, because I feel that if I want to link to your site then I will do it in a post. 

I’m tempted to concentrate on one of the blogs (niches) at any one time, why?  It will keep my mind focussed on keywords and the topic/niche that I am writing on, but I’m also aware that I do get bored easily and I tend to want to vary my writing.  I’m going to focus on one new blog in a week and get all of the tasks done for that blog that particular week, then I will let the automation on wordpress take control, putting out the posts each and every day for the 20 or so days that posts have been written for.  This, I feel will help me accomplish my own set of targets and ‘goals’ and realise that I’m actually ticking the boxes off as I complete the setup of each niche blog.

In relation to the above, I really don’t want to spread myself too thinly and neglect this blog, and the other ones that I have grown – they’re quite manageable and I blog on most of them every day or a couple of times a week.  I don’t want to concentrate on too many different blogs at once either, so this is why I’m wanted to ‘box off’ (finish) one niche blog at a time so it can be left for a while and move onto the next one knowing I’ve completed the previous one.

I began to get paranoid too, questioning whether I’ve chosen niches that are going to be profitable – niches that have traffic, daily searches, affiliate programs, and other blogs in established in the particular niche with some pagerank (yes, I know pagerank maybe one thing that many don’t consider a measure, but I still like to use it along with Alexa rankings, to see if people have been interested in the blog or site).  I’ve started the thirty day challenge again (I only got to day 20 when I started in December) and want to be sure I’m covering all the bases as I go into building more niche sites for the future.  I’m starting from the beginning again, because I stopped due to a busy Christmas period at the hotel I work at, and now that we’ve hit a quiet period, I’ll be able to do 8 and 10 hours a day at the hotel (instead of 15 to 18) and then come home and do 6–8 hours concentrating on blogging (instead of just a few).

I’ve also accepted that I can’t be enrolled on all the courses I want.  I’m completing Blog Mastermind at the moment – I’m on week 8 and it’s going well – and I’m also doing some work on what I’ve learnt through Teaching Sells.  I also had the idea to join the recent Stompernet SMARTS program, but resisted the urge to actually sign up – plus I thought that the price tag was just a little bit out of my range.  So, I’ve decided to stick with what I’ve got and focus on the way forward for my niche blogs.

Closing my eyes to some things

I love to read, I don’t just read online but read a lot of books (the paper kind) about business, internet marketing, marketing in general and sometimes can’t put down a great novel.  But that’s got to change, at least for the next couple of months or so – I’m going to reduce my reading time and focus more on writing content for the new niche blogs that I’m building – it’s going to take a lot of work and I’m going to do the following to help:

• Not reading emails continually daily – yep, I do check my emails way too much, I read them a few times a day and respond speedily to questions or queries really quickly, which is great, but it means I’m ‘glued’ to my inbox, checking it all the time and seeing if I’m popular.  I can’t do that anymore.  
• Not checking stats daily, now do 3 times a week – I check my stats every day, and sometimes more than once, what blogger doesn’t, right?  To focus on the niche blogs more, I’m going to check the stats of my blogs three times a week for 30 minutes and no more – it is going to be painful, but I’ve got to do it to progress.
• Having certain periods where I work on commenting for blogs – I randomly leave a post I’m writing to comment on a blog.  I think it’s because I just want to ‘stretch my legs’ around the internet and see if there is any more inspiration to add to the post, but I’m going to stop that and get on with writing pure, focussed content.
• Concentrating on writing for one blog at a time – As I mentioned above, I don’t want to be spreading myself too thinly writing for 10 blogs at once, or 10 different articles on different topics – I think I’ll get just a little bit confused, don’t you?  So, I’m going to focus on one blog at a time, sort of like the newbie blog steps series I’m running at the moment on this blog – taking one step at a time and trying to get to the end a happy blogger.  Focus and attention will be key to an individual blog in the next few weeks for me, and without it I know I would be all over the place and lose my focus on the bigger picture.

Diversification is a must

Since I started thinking about business in general and having an online portfolio I have never underestimated or forgotten about diversification.  Focusing on one income stream I feel would be potentially negative for me in the months to come.  Yes, blogs are a really great income stream for a lot of people, you only need to go and look at John Chow or Problogger to be informed of that fact – but the truth is, that if you as a blogger (or in the bigger world a company) focussed on one engine for monetization, then you’d soon realise in a couple of years that you’ll have to change (diversify) or ‘go under’.  I agree with most people that blogging is still in its infancy and there is a lot of growth still to come, but what about 10 years down the line, or if your blog(s) becomes de-indexed from google (we all know they mean that much to us, don’t we?) - how much traffic and potential source of income could you lose?  And if these blogs were your only source of income, then what would you do?  I’m opening my eyes now and realising that, yes I do need to work hard now and build those niche sites, but I also need to think about diversification of my portfolio that I will hold by the end of the year – is it going to be full of blogs?  No, but it will have a lot of them in it together with some e-commerce stores too.

So, there you have it, if you’re still reading this post that is .  I’m aiming to keep my eyes wide open in the next coming months and I know success won’t hit me in the next week or so, and maybe even not before the end of June, but I’m damn sure I’m going to have achieved a hell of a lot by the time 2008 is up.  I know that doing the above is going to take a lot of work and will probably numb my mind a few days here and there, but it’s all in the art of sailing into the sunset in 2 years time and having a great and diversified portfolio on the internet.  Will this result in me becoming a problogger?  Well, that really depends on what or who you term as a problogger doesn’t it?

Here’s to all of us keeping our eyes wide open to the reality of blogging and the need to be focussed and diverse.

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