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Earning money directly:

You can put ads on your site, referral links, or even write paid posts for companies, among many other things. Such actions result in you doing something on yoru blog and earning money directly through those actions.

Earning money indirectly:

Your blog can be a way to seduce people who pay you indirectly. You can blog in order to advertise your offline business, or you could blog to showcase your offline skills and have employers people contact you for your résumé in order to hire you for offline work. Such actions on your blog result in other people contacting you to pay you for doing certain things for them outside of your blog.

Are you hoping to make money from your blog?

What is your opinion on this? Do you plan on making money through your blog? If you already make money through your blog, do you hope that you keep on making money through your blog?

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it.

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Offline people knowing about your blog:

If your offline contacts know about your blog, your friends or family can probably easily find out about the business you do online, about the things you write about, about the way you express yourself to the online world, etc. Your offline contacts may also know that you write good or bad things about them, even if you use nicknames to describe them.

Offline people not knowing about your blog:

If your offline contacts do not know about your blog, your friends or family will not know about your online activities. If they search for your name, search engines may not show up any result since you may have worked hard to ensure that your site stays away from any search engine radars. You can blog about the people you know in person and they will not be able to easily find out that you are writing about them, even if you use their real names. Simply Precious is an example where a blogger is trying to blog while maintaining privacy from the offline world.

So, do you want your family and offline friends to find out and know more about your blog? Or do you want to keep your blog hidden from your offline friends? Do you want offline people that you know to visit your blog?

Please let me know, thank you.

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1. Stop learning new things: One of the reasons your blogging skills may be getting outdated can be because of your reluctance to learn new online programming languages, or new ways to do different blog things, like creating new blog themes or creating new kinds of blog content. You may be compensating for such a deficiency by experimenting a lot with what you already know.
2. Have outside factors control your skills: If you allow outside tools to do specific things on your blog, you are depending on those tools. While it is good to use external tools like MyBlogLog or plugins for your site, it is even better to know how such services work in order to come up with your own alternative or replacement if you ever wish to stop using such external tools which are not under your direct control. Otherwise, just because you know how to use an external blogging service does not mean you know how to provide to your own blog, on your own, the same functionality as that external blogging service.
3. Blog about the same thing repeatedly: There is no doubt that you can blog about topics like “Catchy Headlines“, but if you write 20 posts on the same topic even from different perspectives, you should either have a blog that focuses solely on headlines or you should have a plan that incorporates those 20 posts into a larger picture. Otherwise, blogging about the same thing repeatedly may signify that you do not know what to blog about, and are probably not looking into different areas of your life or the offline world in order to come up with fresh topics or different messages to express.
4. Blog about the same things as everyone else: If you are like many news reporting sites or blogs, you probably blog about things that everyone else is blogging about, in almost the same manner too. There is nothing wrong with blogging about something that everyone is also talking about. However, such a behavior from your side shows that your blogging skills are outdated because they depend on the blogging skills of other people. You apparently cannot come up with your own content, and you probably do not even know how to present commonly discussed topics in your own words.
5. Avoid the latest blogging tools: Even though I mentioned in the first point above that knowing how external tools work can be a good idea, you may have noticed that I did not say in that point that using external tools was a bad thing. External tools can be more than good. Use external tools if they allow you to do necessary tasks more efficiently and with better results than otherwise possible. Similarly, trying to do complex things manually, when you can instead use software like WordPress, results in your attention being diverted unnecessarily, and inefficiently, to things that can be done quickly and more efficiently through tools already developed and available for use by others. The more time you focus on different things on your blog, the less time you focus on actually coming up with great ways to convey your thoughts on your blog.

The above 5 are some of the many reasons that can result in your blogging skills to become outdated. You may simply be doing or avoiding one of these things, but along the way, you may be neglecting something more important because of paying attention to something of lesser value. As a result, your blogging skills may not be up to date on many levels. That puts you at a risk of not being taken seriously by employers looking for specific skills, or even your readers who realize that a lot of the things you do are not beneficial in the long term, for both you and your readers.

What is your opinion on this? Is there any point you disagree with, or have an example for? Can you think of other points that signify that you are slowly starting to lose control of your blogging skills and may be falling behind?

Thank you for reading.

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Controlling stress does not mean we have no stress

Controlling a situation can be an interesting thing, though controlling a stressful situation does not mean a person is able to handle the situation. A person could be able to negotiate their way out of an argument, but they may be feeling alienated from the person they argued with. A person may be able to clear a misunderstanding, but that person may also end up severing their relationship with someone else in the long run. A person may even be able to fix critical problems on their blog and avoid any damage, though they may end up acting rude for a long time to online people, or even acting different in the offline world.

We may be transferring online stress to the other parts of life

Whatever change that results in a person after or during a stressful situation, it can be because of the stressful situation. We may be inclined to think that we become moody because our friend calls us too much while we blog, though in reality we may be becoming moody anytime we blog. We may not be realizing that we are shifting our stress onto different things instead of actually working on reducing the stress itself. We may think blogging is not stressing us, but we may be feeling stress from lack of sleep, lack of enough food, lack of having friends, lack of exercising, lack of relaxing time, or almost anything else in the offline world. In reality, those other forms of stress may have been born because of our initial and real stress that may be stemming because of blogging, or any other online activity or situation.

Online stress and offline stress both have one thing in common: Stress

So far, I am noticing that people are treating online stress completely different than offline stress. I think there are differences between online stress and offline stress, the same way there are differences between different kinds of offline stress. However, one thing that many bloggers are forgetting is that both online and offline stress result in us being stressed. The critical element to consider is not that we experience and want to handle online stress, but that we are handling stress. Once we realize that, we can focus on the online nature of some stress in order to come up with a good way to try to reduce or eliminate the stress.

What do you think? Do you handle online stress the same way you handle offline stress? Do you think that handling online stress sometimes does not work as we may start stressing in the offline world, as a result of online stress? Do you think I am on the right track to tackling this issue?

Thanks for reading.

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1. Getting into arguments with other bloggers

   Arguments in the offline world can result in married couples and best friends hating each other forever, so it is no surprise that even the smallest of online arguments can result in powerful grudges. Just like any argument, just because you argue logically or think you are right does not mean you will be appreciated for voicing your opinion. An argument itself should be avoided, since forcing someone to agree with you contradicts the idea of making someone believe in something voluntarily. Also, bloggers should try to disagree with arguments, not with people who argue.

   If you argue online for business reasons, it is better to end the argument as soon as possible and to move on, since continuous arguments about something mean that either the issue should be ignored or the business deal should be reconsidered. Getting into an argument with someone, where the blogosphere sides with your “opponent“, can result in you and your blog being sent to the blog hell, resulting in you getting less attention, fewer blog comments, and even fewer ways to find inspiration to build back your affected reputation. Sometimes, it is very hard to improve a damaged reputation because of the way the online world looks at how or why you argue in arguments.

2. Punished by search engines

   Search engine optimization [SEO] is something that many bloggers, if not most, focus on. If you pay close attention to many prominent blogs and their bloggers, you will realize that they usually focus more on SEO than their readers or even their content. While such a thing may seem evil, consider this: if a blogger upsets one reader, that blogger can rebuild that relationship, or replace it with another relationship with some other reader; it happens regularly, even if that sounds evil too. However, if you upset a search engine like Google or Yahoo, you may end up losing most readers forever since it is hard to rebuild good relationships with search engines.

   Some blogs get more than 90% of their readers and commentors through search engines, because many people find those blog through their search engine searches. If a search engine bans or punishes your for any reason, you may be in a blog hell because you will have to start depending on other sources to bring in more people to your blog. Imagine having a bookstore on a street where the only way you find new customers is through newspaper ads. Now imagine all newspapers not placing your ads anymore for some reason. You will probably worry that you might run out of business. That is how your blog can be if you upset search engines for various reasons.

3. Being criticized by a famous blogger

   For many bloggers, there is nothing more shocking than having a very famous blogger criticize them in public. If you are a blogger who is suffering the wrath of some prominent blogger’s anger, you may have said or done something on your blog that the other blogger may not like saying or doing themselves. Take the issue of MyBlogLog banning Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, because he posted MyBlogLog security exploits in public. Arguing about something or having issues does create tensions, though when the entire blogosphere joins in, reputations can go either up or down really fast. Overall, MyBlogLog was criticized more heavily than Jeremy, and one of the reasons for that was because the criticism was started publicly by Jeremy first. One way for you to avoid such a scenario is to avoid telling someone that they are wrong.

   If you get criticized by a famous blogger, you may feel the blog world crashing on you. Your reputation may be on the line, and you may feel the need to either accept all blame and apologize, or to go out fighting like an action hero or heroine. The way MyBlogLog tried to correct the situation was by Eric from MyBlogLog posting an apology to ShowMoney online, and by explaining briefly how his action was justified, and how he could have done some things differently. Sometimes, accepting a criticism after fighting it for a while can be a good thing also, if you feel that not giving up on something may be hurting other more important goals in the long run. If you are worried about a small criticizing comment left by someone, you may want to refer to the Art of Reacting to Criticizing Comments for further guidance.

4. Technical issues resulting in loss of the site or readers

   This is something that allows many people to regularly visit the blog hell for a few hours or even for a few days. Such technical issues can range from your domain name expiring to you accidentally deleting all your older posts and comments on your blog without having a backup. Sometimes, your host could also simply go down for even a few days, resulting in many frustrated readers and commentors of your blog to never come back.

   Technical issues can also result from sites getting hacked due to exploits in software like Wordpress. Whatever the reason, your site may be down and your blog readers may not be able to access or comment on your blog. It can be a nightmare for you, and the time you spend trying to worry or fix the problem is actually the time you are in a blog hell. You just feel the heat more mentally than physically, unless you have the heater on.

5. Losing interest in your own blog

   This is the point that allows most bloggers to be in denial that they are not in a blog hell. Many blogs that you see today will have their owners losing interest in blogging within a year. After a long time of staying away from blogs or even posting random stuff just to fulfill the obligation of blogging, they will start gaining interest in blogging again. Many other priorities in life result in many bloggers focusing less and less on blogging, and many bloggers could simply be having writer’s block for a long time, resulting in loss of interest in blogging or even writing. By the time a used-to-be-a-blogger wants to reclaim the blogging fame that he or she once had, it may be a hundred times harder to regain the same success as before.

   It depends on each blogger whether they feel they are in a blog hell when they are losing interest in blogging, or if they feel like being in a blog hell when they try to bring their blog back up to its former glory and it just is not happening easily. Either way, the offline world plays a major role in deciding our interest in the online world, since even if we blog all day, we still sleep and eat in the offline world, thus giving some kind of an unconscious preference to the importance of the offline world compared to the online world.

That is my list of 5 of the many things that result in many bloggers getting a train ticket to Blog Hell. Some people are lucky and get a round trip ticket, though many people are not so lucky and get only a one way, first class train ticket to Blog Hell where it is hard to bring the blog out of some specific misery.

What is your opinion on this? Please let me know if you can think up of other things that result in people experiencing the scorching fires of the Blog Hell. Thank you for reading.

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You may have a business blog and may be informal on it, and you may have a personal blog and may be formal on it. You can look at several things to see if you try to be formal or informal on your blog. Following are a few traits of how you can be formal or informal on your blog.

Being formal vs. being informal on your blog

Being Formal : sharing little details from your personal life, interacting with readers only to discuss blog topics, maintaining a more typical business-type atmosphere on your blog, hoping to have more non-personal relationships [business partner, distant friend, etc] with readers, etc.

Being Informal : sharing a lot from your personal life, interacting with readers to discuss almost any topic, maintaining a more typical personal atmosphere on your blog, hoping to have more personal relationships with readers [close friends, associates, etc] , etc.

You should remember that what some consider informal may in fact be considered formal by others, and vice versa. You have to figure out yourself whether or not you consider your behavior or expectations on your blog to be more formal or informal.

What is your opinion on this? When you blog, do you try to be formal or do you try to be informal?

Please let me know. Thank you for reading.

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User participation

• Comments - increase or decrease in number of blog comments
• Visitors - increase or decrease in number of blog visitors
• Feed/Email subscribers - increase or decrease in number of e-mail or RSS feed subscribers for your blog

Blogger participation

• Posts - whether you write posts more or less regularly on your blog
• Design - whether you change or keep the same blog design
• Content - whether you add more types of content on your blog, like photos, audio files, videos, etc

These two categories can give you an idea on how you can think about where your blog will be in the future. You can also look at anything else on your blog to see how or where you see your blog in a year, like the fonts you choose, the type of topics you pursue, etc. It is your blog. You define your blog future.

What do you think? Where do you see your blog in 1 year? Where do you see your blog in 6 months, 3 months or even 1 month?

Please let me know what you think, thank you.

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Many corporations blog only to impress potential customers

Take blogs by many corporations. Many companies are giving their employees the opportunity to blog. Many of such blogs, however, are similar to advertisements, where employees blog about the benefits of a product and not on the bad things that may affect an actual customer. Such corporate blogs blog to impress readers, who might end up being potential users of specific products or services.

Many non-corporate blogs try to impress someone online

You could be impressing an employer, or you could be impressing a friend. Usually, many blogs try to impress their readers through attractive content, so the concept of blogging to impress someone is something that is being adopted on a wide scale already. Take many personal blogs, and you may notice that a blogger may write good things about an offline friend differently than writing good things about an online friend, simply because of the fact that the offline friend may not read that blog, whereas the online friend might.

Do bloggers realize when or if their blogging habits revolve around impressing others?

There is usually nothing wrong with the concept of appreciating or impressing people in different ways. You may pay for one friend’s meal while giving another friend a ride. That does not mean that you appreciate one friend less than the other. You are simply appreciating both friends in different ways, while still doing things to impress them. The discussion of whether or not appreciating someone and impressing someone are the same thing is something I will focus on next week.

Online, do bloggers realize that their blogging habits may be influenced by the fact that they may want to impress someone? It may be easy to see in person how we may be extra nice to a specific girl or a guy that we like, but online, can we notice similar traits?

Do you know if you blog to impress someone?

What do you think? Do you know if or when you blog or do something on your blog to impress someone, whether it is a sponsor, another blogger, a reader, or even a search engine?

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Hoping for comments vs. expecting comments

Expecting comments : You feel that readers have an obligation to comment on your blog.

Hoping for comments : You feel that readers do not have an obligation to comment on your blog.

So, do you expect your blog readers to comment, or do you hope that they will comment? Or do you combine the above two feelings together and come up with something different when it comes to blog comments? Why and how did you arrive at those conclusions or views related to reader comments?

Please let me know, thank you.

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1. Brushing teeth
2. Eating breakfast
3. Doing laundry [if you skip this today to blog instead, imagine you have to wait a week before doing laundry again]
4. Finding out the latest news [Reading a newspaper, watching news online or on tv, or listening to the news via radio]
5. Exercising in the morning
6. Showering
7. Spending time, romantic and non-romantic, with your significant other
8. Combing hair
9. Cleaning the house - considering the fact that if you do not clean right away, there might be ants or insects by the time you get back home
10. Taking a 10 minute nap, considering the fact that you are not feeling well because of not having enough sleep for days

What would you give up for blogging, and what would you not give up for blogging? Please let me know, thank you.

Ronald helped me with the above list. Thanks Ronald.

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Commenting once with multiple thoughts instead of commenting multiple times with multiple thoughts

You may be able to relate this concept to commenting. For example, imagine having someone called Bes post a new comment in response to every sentence in one of your blog articles. That would mean if your article had 10 sentences, Bes would respond to each line of that article in a separate comment, and end up posting 10 separate comments. Would you prefer having 10 single-lined comments by Bes to your article of 10 sentences, or would you prefer having a single comment by Bes with all the 10 lines combined into one or two paragraphs?

Replying immediately to each sentence versus waiting for someone to finish talking before responding collectively

The same idea can probably be seen in daily offline discussions also. You probably do not interrupt other people after every sentence that they say, but you wait until others have finished talking before you start talking yourself. Of course, in person, if you say something after each sentence uttered by somebody else, you may be seen as someone who interrupts others all the time. Compare that to waiting until a person has finished saying different things before you offer your opinion. Which one would you prefer?

Imagine if everyone was comfortable with the idea of being interrupted with an immediate response from you after they finished saying each sentence, which one would you prefer then? What is your opinion on this?

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Does being popular or an A-list blogger mean that you are mature?

Some of the A-list bloggers I have met so far do not know how to interact, communicate, help others, or even how to give and take at the same time, both online and offline. They simply focus on taking and not on giving anything back. Because of A-list bloggers being famous, many people assume that these “famous” bloggers are mature. That makes me wonder whether some people actually care about maturity or not when it comes to a blogger and the content that blogger produces.

How do you measure a blogger’s maturity level?

In order to measure a blogger’s maturity level, you probably need to have at least an idea of how to measure maturity level in general. However, how do you measure anyone’s maturity? Why are rich bloggers being cited as being mature simply because of the traffic their blogs generate, even when people do not know anything personal about those bloggers? Does the level of maturity depend on the amount of traffic and money ones generates through a blog?

What do you think? I am going to post more on this soon.

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1. Check for broken outgoing links

   As time passes, many websites just disappear. Because of that, many pages you link to in your blog posts will no longer exist after a year or so. Similarly, I have noticed many sites like Yahoo News changing their news links a lot, so some of the articles I have linked to in the past no longer work.

   Try to see if you can use a plugin or a script to go through all your outgoing links and check them for accuracy. Otherwise, you can manually go through random outgoing links to find links that point to dead pages, and to replace them with something else if possible.

2. Improve blog based on what users are looking for

   This one can revolve solely around the search keywords that people use to find and browse your site. You should study the list of keywords people use on search engines like Yahoo and Ask, and you should also study the list of keywords people use within your own blog to find a specific post.

   For example, I regularly have people searching for a few keywords on my site which yield no results. Check out the following search entry, “mySQL query error: INSERT INTO ibf_member_extra” that someone searched on my site recently:

   

   The first number “1” shows that one person searched for it, and the “0” means there was no search result. Whoever searched for that keyword probably ran away, never to come back to my site. That is sad! After seeing the above search keyword, I remembered writing something about it long time ago. Of course, my site’s search was not showing any such results, so I opened my database and searched through all the posts and found the result: Validating members bug in Invision Forums, a bug fix for Invision Power Forums I wrote back in June of 2004. Now I have to fix the search results so that anyone searching for that keyword will find the appropriate post. That is how the maintenance for this specific point is done on a regular basis.

3. Improve your site’s usability

   This one should be an ongoing project. As long as you do not change the entire site design frequently which results in everyone getting confused, changing small colors, fonts or the way you word things should help you make your website easier to understand and use for your readers. For example, Andrea Micheloni recently commented on my site and suggested something about better usability through better colors:

   Suggestion about The Reasoner text box input colors, by Andrea Micheloni

   If I can, I’d suggest you to change the color of text in input boxes: gray on light blue doesn’t contrast enough. And blue s can be confused with links, maybe try a different color”

   That is a very good suggestion, and you should feel really lucky if your readers start giving you suggestions. I feel happy and lucky because of that suggestion. Upon further observation, I realize that the colors do in fact cause some confusion. I am going to change my site soon to implement that suggestion to improve The Reasoner’s usability. Thank you Andrea!

4. Ask users/readers what they want on the site

   This is something you can do on a regular basis. Allow people to contact you easily if you have any questions. Publicize your contact page so much that anyone who thinks of finding out more about you thinks of your Contact page first.

   For example, I try to tell everyone to contact me through the contact page. That page lists multiple ways to contact me, including contacting me via my cell phone. The best feedback I get is from you. Usually, if a person makes a site, that person is probably going to like it because they made it. Bloggers should look at things from different perspectives, and asking users for suggestions is a good step in that direction. Polls and forums are also good ways to ask readers for suggestions. Remember to actually listen to your readers when you ask them for suggestions through comments or polls.

5. Check your blog stats to see what things are working and what needs improvement

   Vivien suggested this while we were discussing this article. You can check your RSS feed and site stats regularly to see which posts are getting attention, and which posts are always lonely. By checking these stats, you can see which pages result in more views, which result in less views, and so on. That will allow you to see if certain pages have some elements which are either attracting visitors or scaring them away.

   Also, your site stats can tell you if changing various things results in more or less people coming to your site. Those various things can include changing the layout, colors, fonts, types of posts, new features to the site like forums, etc.

Those are the 5 blog maintenance task that I think you can work on regularly. These 5 tasks can help you optimize your blog on a regular basis.

What do you think of the above? What are some of the things you work on regularly to keep your blog up and running nicely?

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