We all love music to varying degrees. I am on the computer 90% of the time at work so I have my playlist going all day while I’m working or blogging or just surfing. It feels empty when my day doesn’t have a dose of music to go with it. I’m sure I’m not alone feeling this way. I do love my music.
HOWEVER, I don’t always love everyone else’s music. So when I visit a blog or a website with autoplay music on it, especially when the volume is turned up to loud, I immediately turn away. I don’t bother scrolling down to find your mini player to turn the music off, I immediately hit that little X thing on the browser’s window and there you go. You just lost a viewer who didn’t even get a chance to see what a brilliant writer you are or how useful and interesting your content is.
If you are truly passionate about your music and would like to share it with your audience, I think it’s ok to have a list of your favorites on your sidebar. You can even have a player so they can hear the kind of music you like. Just don’t set it to autoplay!
P.S.
I wrote this post because today, I ran across a blogger on one of the networking sites I’m on who added me as a ‘friend’. I don’t really know her or her blogs, but she had an interesting profile so I decided to visit her sites. She had three of them. Guess what, all three of them had auto play music on them! Needless to say, I don’t really know what she writes about or how she writes about them.
But, I added her as a friend anyway. I just can’t be rude like that
Bah! I did a Britney Spears and did it again! Didn’t I just say that a sure way to kill your blog is to NOT blog? Yeah, so it’s been a month since I last posted. It was a very nice vacation, thank you. I actually got a lot done at work. lol!
I logged on today, because my bookmarks is just getting way too long and I really need to clean it up. So let me use this blog for the purpose it was created, and start documenting here what I come across online that is related to blogging that I think will help me and maybe help someone else too. (p.s. I created a category called R&R for Read and Research - these are things that I would like to read up on and investigate further)
Anyway, today’s find and which I will be downloading when I get home to read more about it is BecomeABlogger.com. If you are new to blogging, there is a collection of video tutorials by Yaro Starak that could be very helpful, judging by their titles. Even though I’ve been blogging for a couple of years and not consider myself exactly new to blogging, I never did focus any attention to the other aspects of blogging beyond writing my posts so that’s why I’m bookmarking the site here. I want to go back and watch all these videos.
Why? Because Yaro Starak claims he makes $10,000 a month from blogging and I personally know of other people who are making decent money from blogging. Not $10,000 a month, but it’s something to shoot for, right? So if you’ve got the basics down of blogging and are ready to start earning some money, download the tutorial Blog Profits Blueprint. It claims to show you “How To Earn US $5000+ Per Month From
Your Blog, ‘Working’ As Little As 2 Hours Per Day”.
Blogging is a fickle mistress. If you disappear, so do your readers. That’s kind of what happened to this blog for the last month or so. That’s because I haven’t posted anything new. I got distracted, got busy with life, and just didn’t have time to post here. So my readership has been hitting rock bottom. Well, it actually got down to one or two and one of them is usually me. LOL!
But, that is the nature of blogging. If you want to keep your readers engaged, you have to give them a reason to keep coming back. That means you have to write interesting posts (or as interesting as you can make them) and you have to write often (or at least regularly like once a week at least). I had started cultivating this blog a few months ago and some readers have actually started dropping by regularly (thanks guys!). But now, they are gone. They are on to bigger and better things, so I have to start over again.
*sigh*
That’s ok… like I’ve said before, I started this blog to document the process I’ve gone through in blogging. It’s all about the things I’ve learned and am still learning. So I’ll just continue on. If you happen to stumble through here by accident, welcome. I’ll post more often from now on.
In the meantime, if you’re hungry, please visit my food blog and if you just want to see what’s going on in our house, visit my personal blog. I’m also doing reviews, paid and otherwise, on Found Not Lost. So you see, I haven’t totally dropped off from blogging, just got busy with other things That’s life.
I’m sure you’ve heard how regimented some professional bloggers are and wished you could be like that too. Then maybe your blog can start earning some big bucks too. Or is that just me? Oh well.
Money sure can alter your perceptions especially when something that you used to do for free just because you like it starts making you some hard cold cash. You can get downright obsessive tracking the quickest way to make that buck. You start sweating when the money doesn’t flow in as fast as you’d like.
OK, I’ll quit with the YOU stuff and admit, it’s ME, I and MYSELF.
I can’t believe I was starting to get emotional when my adSense earnings were not up to my expectations. I was spending way too much time obsessing about my blogs, how to promote them to gain more readership, to earn more money from ads and to earn more from sponsored posts.
This past week, I had to make myself step back and exhale. I actually focused on other things at work and at home besides blogging. Went to the movies with my girls and actually cooked up some new dishes in our kitchen. Sure, once in a while that nagging to blog or check stats would creep in, but I I tried my hardest to ignore it. I tried not to stress as I watched my PayPal balance dwindle. I tried not to watch it all. And I breathed. Deep cleansing breaths to remind myself blogging is not all there is.
Blogger was the first blogging platform I ever used and I really love Blogger, but like most things in life, I outgrew it and needed to go on to bigger and better things. Not because I was unhappy with their service or anything. I think it’s perfect for people who want to get started blogging but don’t really know a whole lot about computers much less programming.
I saw this cool video on how to create a blog on Blogger and thought I would share it here. It certainly would have helped me a lot if I had seen something like this when I started.
I signed up for Twitter a while back but hadn’t really gotten into it at that time. I couldn’t see how anyone could possibly be interested in what I’m doing at any particular time during the day. Even if they are, why can’t I just blog about it. Isn’t that the same thing? So I took off the twitter badge from my blog and just forgot about it.
I guess it’s one of those things that just needed to ripen. In the last couple of months, I noticed that I kept getting notices that people are following my twitter posts even though I haven’t updated in months. Then my husband and daughter signed up, so naturally they added me to ‘follow’ I couldn’t just ignore them, so I found my old password and signed on to twitter again just so I can follow them too. Then I found that I was keeping the browser open while I’m online and when I think of something to twit about, I just go in and type a sentence or two. Before you know it, I am just twittering away and was enjoying it! I also started finding blog friends who are doing the same thing and my list of twits to follow kept growing.
Are you getting Twitter yet or have I thoroughly confused you? Sorry about that. Let me start over again. Twitter is another way of blogging. The abbreviated way. You are limited to 140 characters, so you need to keep it short and sweet. Something like “I’m feeding the dog hot dogs” or something like that. Some people come up with more profound sayings, but sometimes it’s the inane ones that are the most fun to read.
While you can respond to other twitters, it’s not really like instant messaging either. You can still keep up with what your friends are doing via their twitter updates, you can put the twitter badge on your blog as a complement or enhancement, and you just twitter your days away! There’s a cool video presentation of Twitter if you’re still not getting what it’s about.
You can tell that twittering is IN when even Hillary and Obama have twitter accounts. Is it any indication that Obama has twice as many followers are Hillary?
By the way, if you’re still not convinced, Twitter also brings traffic to your blogs. People who are intrigued enough to follow your twits will also follow the link to your blog. Other bloggers use it to update their followers on new blog posts. You can also gain new readers this way. Try it, you might just like it! Tweet!
Once you start blogging and start visiting other blogs, you will find that playing with your templates will soon come next. When I was still on Blogger, I created an unpublished site called Test Site. Very imaginative, eh? By the way, that’s one of the nice things about blogger, you can choose to not publish your blog to the public but you or members only can view it live.
Once I got my own domain, hosting and started on WordPress, I wasn’t sure how to test my new templates anymore. I created a subdomain called Test (that’s now this blog) but I couldn’t find a way to preview it but not make it live. I still used it for testing like on blogger and just hope against hope that no one would see it while I’m testing and it’s all over the place. What I didn’t know is, you can download WordPress to your hardrive and you can test your template tweaks there without having to test it on a live website! I’m going to have to share that link with my daughter, Jade, who is more into designing Themes than I am.
No, not flight 815. My page rank (PR) on my site that I use to do sponsored reviews on. Yep, my Found Not Lost review site just got demoted to 0 after working its way up to a PR2 in a couple of months. I was able to do sponsored posts on it for about a month, earning approximately $500.
Some bloggers have suggested making ‘disposable’ blogs just for this purpose. Start growing one use it for sponsored posting when it gains PR and when it loses it, toss it and start all over again. Seems like a lot of work, but the thing with me is, I get emotionally attached to my blogs whether I am get paid to blog or not. I put a little bit of myself in everything I write so it’s a little hard to just toss it when it’s done earning money.
So, I’ll ignore the spanking and just keep going with blogging. It’s a shame because it has just started to gain readership. So I’m not going to close shop just when people are finding out about my site. It will still be there.
I have been a fan of the Lampin network ever since I learned what blogging is. I loved reading about their family life (his wife Angel writes beautifully), their adorable children and the wonderful vacations they’ve had. You know, living vicariously though them while I was cooking, scrubbing floors and washing dishes for MY family *sob* (you can feel sorry for me now).
Seriously, after a while of bloghopping and maintaining my own little blogs, I realized I can start making money from blogging! This revelation came to me that first time I received a check from Goggle Adsense. I didn’t even realize I had reached the $100 threshold! Well, it had been three years since I last checked my Adsense account and realized I was making about ten cents a day. But I guess this just proved how every little bit helps, eh? All those dimes finally added up to a hundred bucks!
Of course I since learned that my blogs had started earning a little bit more than a dime a day as they matured and attracted some readership. I also learned that there are plenty of other ways to earn money online. I will discuss some of the ways I’ve tried to make money online in more detail later.
Now there are a great many sites online that give you tips and tutorials (this isn’t one of them. I’m just relaying my blogging experience here. I suck at tutorials, but I can give you some tips that worked for me). One of the sources I go to is ManuelViloria.com - “Tips on Adsense, Wordpress, and Getting More Visitors To Your Site today”.
He has tutorials on making money online, optimizing your site and tips on how to get more traffic. He must know what he’s talking about. After all, I was reminded to visit his site today because he’s the second most popular post on TrafficJam.
P.S. re. TrafficJam: it’s a new arm of BlogRush and it seems to still be getting some skeptical reviews. However almost everyone I’ve read so far had said that it is great for unknown blogs. So if you are looking to get some free traffic, sign up for BlogRush and get on the TrafficJam.
As I am still in the process of tweaking my sites, I am also still testing different looks or themes for each of them. Right now, my most problematic one is my food blog, but that’a a whole post on it’s own.
While searching for themes, I ran across this warning about Trojan Themes. According to the article,
I think the potential for abuse of this script is huge. I see it as a covert channel to setup Word Press enabled sites as thin zombies. The code being sent back to the server and eval’d could be a mailing script for spam or phishing.
If you have downloaded themes from WP Sphere or any other WordPress themes gallery, exercise caution and inspect the source code. If you are not code proficient, identify the original author and download the theme directly.
Beware: Download WordPress Themes only from the designer’s site or the official WordPress Themes site and even after you do, look at your headers and footers and recognize any additional script that may be hiding.
That’s life.
Once you start blogging and start visiting other blogs, you will find that playing with your templates will soon come next. When I was still on