Practical Blogging

To keep up with my blogging, I have to have some sort of schedule on paper. As much as I would like to just blog, I must have structure in order to keep my blogs current.

Now, first I must say I think a blog should be updated daily. Two reasons:

-Your readers will come back more often if there is something new every day. Noone wants to visit a blog and see the same thing there every few visits. They’ll give up and stop checking. Let’s face it, you will have a lot of readers who don’t subscribe and will just check in daily. Give them a reason. Also, depending on the ping services you use, everytime you post may be pinging somewhere, adding to your ‘traffic’ as far as Alexa, Google, etc. know. I know everytime I post to my blog, it pings Feedburner.

-Every post helps you drive traffic. In one way, it adds more content to search, more keywords to scan, and more links to check. The bots will come back more frequently when there is alot of fresh content. The larger the site, the larger the footprint, the heavier the site, etc. Search engine bots like frequent postings. Remember, 85% of your traffic will come from web searches. If you are not getting search engine traffic yet, you are only getting 15% of your traffic.

With these things in mind, I offer you my blog schedule. I came up with it by placing ranks for my blog, taking into consideration:

1-Subject Matter
What kind of blog is it? Are the posts typically long ones or link-posts. For instance, a personal development blog will require more work per post than a gadget blog, but a gadget blog will require work more frequently. You may update a gadget blog 3-10 times daily. A personal development blog may only need a post a day.

2-Visitor’s Character
Do most of your readers subscribe? Do most of them visit your page? If you tend to get more subscribers, just reading your feed, you will want to make sure there is something there for them to keep reading. If they are visitors, you may end up taking a different approach.

My Schedule:

Duzins.com-Deals Blog
updated twice daily
Once after breakfast, once right after my kids go to bed

www.balanceindiet.com-Full-blown dieting site
updated once daily, at least 3 recipes per section, at least one personal blog post daily
I try to do this one right after breakfast too. Of course, it takes a while (about an hour) so sometimes I will break it up into two seperate times. I group this one in my head with the deals site. They are done around the same time every day.
www.sleepyblogger.com-Practical Blog
updated at least once daily
I do this one in the late afternoon or evening. I know this isn’t the newsy-ist time, but that’s when I am most creative, and have the least distractions. Also, this gives me all day while working around the house to kick around my ideas.
www.gamingandtech.com-Tech news and reviews
updated 3-6 times daily
I do a long post here around midnight, if there is something on my mind, relevant to this topic. More often, though, this post get around 5 posts throughout the day as stories break.
Athomemama at PrimeGeekTech Reviews and News
updated 2+ times daily
This one also is usually a reaction to the day’s stories in the gaming and tech world, though this blog is heavier targeted to cell phones. It’s brand new, so I am working this one out as I go along. I may tweak it a little as I go.

So, that’s my schedule. What do you think?

I have a few blogs, only one of which targets an audience of techies. Therefore, I knew most of my target audience knows little about RSS syndication. I have taken the liberty of drawing up a “What is RSS” general page explaining, on your grandma’s level, how to utilize this technology.

Considering most RSS virgins are really only interested in subscribing to a page’s most recent posts, that’s the only topic I covered.

So, if you are too lazy to make your own, feel free to steal this. What is RSS?

Feedback? Do I need to add or subtract anything?

Bluecasting is set to make alot of people really, really angry.

When will advertisers learn that if ads piss people off, they aren’t going to buy the product?

New Scientist Breaking News-Bluetooth-beamed ads

I have really underestimated this tool in delivering earnings.

In the past few weeks I have had it up at my gamingandtech.com site and on this site, with only a few searches per day.

You can imagine my surprise when I finally got around to putting it on the Deals sites I run and on Balance In Diet, and saw my search stats go through the room. Truly, I am talking about going from 10 searches per day, to over 100. Now, I don’t get heavy traffic, but you get the picture.

I guess the difference is that those sites need a search feature because people come there looking, many times, for something specific to buy, especially on the Deals sites. Of course, when they search and see the ads, whether I happen to have that specific thing on the site or not, these people who are ready to buy see targeted ads mentioning what they just searched on.

I finally bit the bullet and bought some Google Adwords for myself. Well, I did the whole set up a few days ago (scroll down for some comparisons on the diff. ad companies), but today my Google Adwords started.

I decided the best way to put my site out there was to use their site-targeted ads. And, since their minimum CPC (cost per click) is rather high at $2, I just went with the minimum CPC. However, after 2 days the ads still hadn’t run. So, I put in an email to customer support.

Meanwhile, I decided to change my minimum CPC to see if I was maybe bidding too low. I went up to $4 per click. Still no ads. Now I was advertising on some really expensive sites, I knew that, but $4 a click wasn’t high enough?

OK… So, then I went up to $6 a click. And, still no ads. So, not knowing what to do, I went on to something else, and forgot about my google ads.

Of course, after I upped my bid to a $6 CPC, I got an email from Google saying my ads had been pending approval up until that point, but “congratulations” they were up and running. Cool, I thought.

Well, I thought that for about 2 seconds before I remembered my $6 CPC bids (on 8 sites, no less). Aaaaaggghhh!

I rushed to Google and after logging in I had already seen over 10 thousand impressions and around 35 clicks (3%). The overall cost was a shock, and it was 30% over my budget before **I** turned off the ad, but, it turned out my avg. CPC was only around $2.50, so it wasn’t that bad, I guess.

On a good note, I ended up as a featured advertiser on at least one site, I guess it was because my max CPC was so high. The site in the screenshot is the site that sent me 70% of the traffic I got, and I got ALOT of traffic in that hour of time my ad was up. It was akin to turning on a faucet full-blast, and then turning it off. My sad little stats just continued on as normal for the rest of the day. Hopefully I got some subscribers, but I won’t know that until my little feedburner chicklet updates in 24 hours.

Will gamingandtech.com burst into popularity?

Ahhh… Probably not from this one little ad. Sadly I understand it will take much more work to get the site to ‘stick’ but I have a small devoted group of visitors that never miss a day. And, I really LOVE updating the blog. So, I guess it fulfills the most important goal, huh?

**gamingandtech.com used to be athomemama.blogspot.com, but I bit the bullet and bought the domain a few weeks ago. I just turned it over (rather than redirecting it) Weds afternoon. (will update you on that rigamarole later)

CNET News.com

Finally a company catches on… Don’t try to force people to buy your product, give them a reason to ‘sell it’ to their friends.

Word of mouth, is there any better advertising?

In a stunning development, Yahoo is giving the impression that their new ad service is better than Google’s adsense. The horror!

The new system hinges on new ways to track the users receipt of the ad, rather than when the ad leaves the server. Yahoo claims it’s tracking will not count blocked pop-ups and such for payments.

I’m interested to see how this pans out. If they can really do what they claim, advertisers may be more excited than we are expecting.

Here’s the link:

Yahoo Ushers in New Ad Tracking System

How Make Money from Your Web Site

Great link for advertising info.

I am now advertising my gamingandtech.com site with Google Adwords, on a gadget blog, on Yahoo (overture), and on Adbrite. I look forward to spilling the beans on which service helped me the most.