Savvy Affiliate

I have been kind of Blah about blogging recently.  Not exactly burnt out, but not as gung ho as I was when I first started out.     But a couple of things have made me get more excited about blogging and ready to get back in the game

1) Make Some Money - Although it probably counts for very little to many bloggers, I recently go some clicks on a few of my Adsense ads netting a few dollars.   Does a few dollars matter?  Not really.   But any income is nice to have and making a little bit of money can go a long way to raising my spirits

2) Read my Feed Backlog - I am about 3 weeks overdue on most of my feeds.  Those were the same 3 weeks that I was feeling blah about blogging.  And you know what?  After getting back into my feeds and reading some of my favorite blogs I am starting to get more excited again.   Are you feeling blah?   Go back to why you started in the first place

3) Get Some Traffic - I have had a couple of traffic spikes over the past couple of days.    Thank you stumbleupon.   Getting some traffic and responding to comments really invigorates you.  It helps me blog when I know someone is reading it and benefiting.

 This post was written for Daily Blog Tips “3″ Group writing project.    While I don’t think it will net me the prize money, how bout some links?

Have you ever hit a blogging slump?  What got you out of it?

• » Comments (26)

There can be some really great benefits to outsourcing work on your blog

I’m not quite sold on outsourcing a lot of work on my website.  Although I wrote a post about parts of the blog I would like to outsource, I am still slightly unconvinced that I have built this site up enough yet to where outsourcing will be profitable.  

So I decided to weigh the pros and the cons of outsourcing part of my blog.   I know that sooner or later I will need to, the question is, will it be sooner or later?   This is a post of outsourcing pros, cons will come later and by then I can hopefully decide what course to follow

Outsourcing Benefits

1) Make More Money - By outsourcing portions of my work, I can potentially get a lot more done, and make a lot more money.  If I don’t have to worry about things like site design, or day to day maintenance, I can focus more on writing content, getting backlinks, and monetizing the site.  All would be great things to have more time to do.

2) Make the blog easier to sell - This blog would be a lot easier to sell, if I one day decide to do so, if I was just selling a revenue stream rather than a workload.  If what I was selling was more or less just a site which generated income, and paid employees people would be much more interested than if they would have to spend the time each week posting content and maintaining the site.

3) Save Time - Instead of having a huge time commitment over my head everyday I could potentially be free to just write a check and work on something else.  The opportunity cost of running this blog solo could be huge.  If I had another project that I wanted to work on, and who doesn’t, being solely responsible for this site would do a lot to limit how much time I can put into any other site.

4) Get management skills - Blogging has given me one skill set.  Learning to manage employees would be a whole different skill set.  I think that learning to do that well would be an interesting challenge, and make me as an individual a lot more salable in the real world

5) Increase Traffic - Paying someone to be responsible for driving traffic would inevitably go a long ways towards increasing it.  If they weren’t effective, I could always fire them and hire someone better.   This wouldn’t even have to be something done solely by my employee.  Having another person helping drive traffic in conjunction with my own efforts might create a beneficial synergy

6) Get a Better Site Design - Lets face, I am no theme designer and probably never will be.  Nor do I have the desire to take the time to learn how to do it well.  That is not leveraging my strengths.  Paying someone to design a custom theme for me (or holding a contest) would probably let me end up with a better product with a huge time savings to myself.   The cost isn’t even that high.   If there is one thing that I will outsource in the near future, it will be site design.

So are you interested in outsourcing parts of your blog?  What draws you to the idea?

• » Comments (3)

Here are four great posts which will help you save time and blog better.  3 are relatively new, one is an oldie but Goodie.  If you haven’t seen all these already, enjoy

• Top 20 Free Applications To Increase Your Productivity - Lifehack   some great applications that will speed up your websurfing, downloading, and e-mailing.  The comments on the article also include some good alternative suggestions
• 20 Ways To Use G-Mail Filters - Lifehack    Let the power of Gmail improve your life.  Stop spammy mail, separate your personal e-mails from your work ones, and save time all the way
• 17 Firefox extensions that make blogging easy - Lifehack    These extensions may save me time in the long run, but adding them all to Firefox will kill a couple of hours easily as I play with them all.  Ah well, such is life(hacked)
• Ten Tips For Writing A Blog Post - Problogger    Old school Darren.  Short and sweet, and if you aren’t already following most of these ideas, it is time for a rethink

• » Comments (0)

Wean Yourself off Stat checking, and get a lot more done

 New bloggers and even old hands are often addicted to checking their stats.  How often have you looked at your analytics statistics, surfed over to AdSense, checked Mybloglog, and then went back to Analytics 15 minutes later to see if anything had changed?  That has sure described me every now and then.  But this frequent stat checking can be a huge time killer.  I have found that doing this several times a day wastes even more time than e-mail.  At 5 minutes a pop, checking my stats can quickly eat up 30-50 minutes a day.  And I need every half hour I can scrounge.

I have come up with a plan to wean myself off stat checking.  The goal is to get down to 1 check per day, right before I close up for the night.  I have no need to know what is going on in 15 minutes increments, knowing my daily results is quite good enough thank you very much.

However to kick my stat checking habit, I realized I need visual feedback.

I can’t rely on my memory of how many times I checked my stats today.  Am I doing better than yesterday?  Stats all begin to get hazy in my mind.   So to give myself visual feedback, I put a calendar on the wall next to my computer.  Every time I check my Analytics I give that day a tick, every time I check AdSense, that day gets a tick.  (My blog log doesn’t get a tick because I usually only check it once a day anyway, right after analytics)

By putting up a calendar, at the end of the week I can see how well I did

The calendar acts to shame me in to being honest with myself.  If at then end of the week I see a lot of days with 2 ticks, one for AdSense and one for Analytics, I know I restrained myself.  If I see days with 10 ticks, I know I need a little more self control, not unlike a person trying to quit smoking who cheats every now and then.

Actually, what I really need is an online calendar.  Every time I go to analytics or AdSense it adds a tick mark on that day.  The calendar could be displayed on this blog for all to see.  That level of visibility would do great at limited my stat checking, and consequently increasing my productivity.  Perhaps when Google controls my life they can add that feature

So do you check your stats frequently?  Perhaps too frequently?  Have you decided to try and cut back?  What is your plan?

• » Comments (2)

When I first stared Savvy Affiliate I made several mistakes.  I didn’t differentiate between WWW and Non-WWW, I didn’t create a blog right off and tried to do the content management myself, I didn’t try to link up with the right people or form a partnership.

Basically, I wish I had had a checklist of things that I needed to do in order to start a good blog.  Luckily, if you haven’t started your site yet, Self Made Minds has created one.

 The Power Of Check Lists

So if you are looking to start a new site anytime in the near future, I recommend you check them out.  There may be something on their that you didn’t think of, and you will be grateful that you looked.

• » Comments (0)

Day 17 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

There are basically two schools of though when it comes to any business.

1) You can do it cheap

2) You can do it right

And blogging is no different.  Although you can get away with setting up a blog for practically zero investment, if you want to make money over the long term you need to invest in your tools and pay for the services which are worthwhile.

That’s not to say there aren’t good free tools out there.  In fact the internet abounds with excellent free tools for starting your blog.  In my list of the Top 5 Tools every Blogger Should Use, 4 of the 5 tools are free.  But you can’t get everything for free.  Here are some things that it is worth the money to invest in.

1) Get Your Own Domain - It is possible to blog for free with blogger or wordpress, but you shouldn’t do it.  Take the time to get your own domain.  It will save you the trouble of switching from your free account to your own domain later on.  It will make your site a lot more brandable, and lend it an air of authority.  It will also allow you to do a lot more with your site with many fewer restrictions.

2) Get a fast internet connection - Take this connection speed test.  How fast are you?  If you are running under a couple hundred Kbps you should consider upgrading your connection.  The time you spend connecting to the internet is worth money!  If you have to constantly wait to download files and upload changes to you blog, you are becoming much less productive, and it is worth it to speed up your connection

3) Get a faster computer - How old is your computer?  How long does it take to load up?  Are you constantly having to fix software problems?  If you think that your computer is crappy, then it probably is.  Calculate how much time you waste every year fixing and waiting for your old computer, then see how much a new computer would cost. Are the dollars/hour worth it?  Most likely the answer is yes.

4) Upgrade Your Workspace - What is your blogging workspace like?  Is the chair comfortable?  Is there enough room on your desk for whatever you are working on?  Is everything well positioned ergonomically?  If you are uncomfortable when you are blogging, chances are you won’t want to do it regularly.  Upgrading your workspace with a desk and chair that fit together well will help your health, and your attitude toward blogging.

5) Get Good Antivirus Software - If you are making money on your computer, you need it to be secure.  Invest in some good, up to date, anti virus software and a good firewall.  Although you may think that it can’t happen to you, it can.  The worst thing would be if you have all your files on your computer and a malicious piece of code wrecks your hard drive.  You are out days of work, assuming you can recover your data at all.  (Note, this is also a good reason to keep several backup copies of your site in separate places)

• » Comments (0)

Some things are good to outsource, others, not so much

Recently I had written about some parts of my blog that I would be interested in outsourcing.  I wrote about how some bloggers are able to greatly expand their sites, and make a lot more money, by outsourcing the tedious and time consuming aspects of blogging, leaving themselves more time to focus on making money.

The impetus behind this series of post is a recent book called the 4 hour workweek.  The author extols the virtues of outsourcing, and people are quoted as loving the book with such quotes as

“With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week.”

 That is all well and good.  However, although there are some parts of my blog that I would like to outsource, there are others which I would never consider doing.  Here are some things which I can never believe I will pass off, and that will always cause me to have a greater than a 4 hour workweek.

1) Give up writing any content - Although I would love to have contributing authors on this blog, I would never give up writing content.    Other authors would be a great way to expand this blog, but I think that my posts would be necessary to keep the flavor of the site the same.  Additionally, if I stopped writing content I would stop learning more about blogging, and may quickly lost interest in the site.

2) Let other people handle the money - I would never pass off the monetizing aspects of the blog to anyone else.  Learning how to monetize a blog effectively is arguably one of the most important skills you can acquire while blogging.  I am willing to take the time, and maybe even do it less effectively than whomever I would hire, to gain experience on monetizing a blog.

3) Build Blogging relationships - I have stressed many time that building up relationships with other bloggers is vital if you want to be successful.  I think that it would be disingenuous to hire someone to build up relationships for my blog.  Additionally, if I did that, there would be nothing to stop my employee from taking his relationships with him if he stopped working for me.

4) Back up my blog - Regular backups of your blog are essential.  Let someone else do this at your own peril.  If you keep this to yourself you know that it will be done, and done correctly.  If you pay someone else to do it, you won’t find out about a problem until your site crashes, and then it is too late.

5) Control over employees - If I do hire people to help me run this site, I would maintain the relationships with them myself.  I have no interest in adding another level of management, i.e. hiring an employee to run the employees.  I think that maintaining control would enable me to ensure only high quality work was being done, because in the end everything that goes up on this site reflects on me.

So do you outsource?  What are you interested in shipping off, and what will you keep for yourself?

• » Comments (0)

Day 16 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Yesterday I blogged about how you can improve your SEO in less time by tracking what works and what doesn’t.  But there is more to building a site than search engine optimization.  What about the rest of it?  Are there any tools for comment moderation, for spell checking, for networking?  What else can a blogger do to get more done in less time?

In fact there are a lot of tools and tricks out there improve your blogging productivity.  Take comment moderation for instance.  Every Wordpress blog comes equipped with Akismet.  But if that is all you are using, then you have to waste some time checking the spam Que to make sure that you don’t just delete real comments.

I used to spend time deleting 100-150 junk comments from Akismet a day.  But thanks to a post on Blog-Op I decided to get more spam blocking power with this Quartet of plugins

1) Bad Behavior - Bad behavior is designed to identify malicious bots and throw them off your site before they have  a chance to do any damage.  Using this will help keep your server from being overloaded if you get too many malicious bots on there.  It will also stop the bots from harvesting your e-mail address. As an added bonus, you can specify a bounce page to send their bots to.

2) http:BL -  Made by Project Honey pot, this plugin comes with a huge database of malicious IP addresses.  If one of those IP addresses comes to your site they will be booted.

3) Simple Spam Filter - Not all spam comes from bots.  There is human enabled spam out there, and if it is a first time spammer http:BL may not catch them.  This checks the comment to see if any words in the post are from a small list of forbidden keywords.  If they are, the post is not allowed and the user is given an error message saying what went wrong.

4) Akismet - Akismet is like a trusty friend who you may be angry at for while, but is always there when you need it.  Anything which slips through the other three plugins will be caught by Akismet. However since using the other three plugins, the number in my spam Que has dropped from 150 a day to about 2 or 3.

So now that you are spending less time working your comments, you can spend more time writing content.  What is one of the annoying things about writing content, and how can we fix it?

Wordpress built in spellchecker is slow and annoying.  It does not remember words, it doesn’t even know common blogging words like blog, blogger, or Wordpress.  Using it saves some time over proofreading yourself, but not that much.

But you can get more efficient by using the Google Toolbar spell checker.  Truly a wondrous tool for efficiency, not only will it check your post itself, it will check your post slug, your excerpt, and any other forms on the page.  You can remember words, set it to autocorrect, or just make it highlight misspellings.   If you aren’t using this, and are still using wordprocessor spellchecker, consider making the switch.

Finally, how can you get more networking with other bloggers done in less time?   There are two powerful tools which every blogger should be using.   The first is MyBlogLog.  Mybloglog lets you track other bloggers who are visiting your page.  This enables you to visit their page, contact them, and begin forming a stronger relationship.  Blogging is all about building relationships, and MyBlogLog is the tool to do it with.

Additionally you can build up your networking with Digg.  If all you are doing is Digging your own posts, and not working on getting Digg friends you are making a mistake.  A great passive way to get Digg friends is to simply put your Digg Id in your about page or on the bottom of your posts and ask people to link up with you if they like the site.  Many will and it will be great for your long term traffic.

• » Comments (0)

So feel free to go gangbusters on the comments

I previously had comments held for moderation if the commentor didn’t have at least 1 approved comment previously.  I had this function on to fight spam.

 But given my new and improved comment spam protection, that turns out to no longer be necessary.  So that function is now turned off, comment at your leisure.

• » Comments (0)