Blog about your Blog Interview #1
Mike has been chosen to be our very first Blog about your Blog author interview. I have asked him a series of questions about some personal things, blogging and blog about your blog. I hope you enjoy the interview. Now here is Mike!
First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Are you married? Girlfriend? Both?
I am married and have been so for … well, years and years – or perhaps it just seems that long. No, we are quite happy – well that’s what I’m told!
I hope your wife doesnt read this!
What do you do when you are not blogging?
I love travelling, anywhere, any opportunity. My wife and I also walk for miles along the beautiful Cornish cliffs and in the countryside near where I live. I’m also trying to work out what life is really all about and have an interest in religions (though I refuse to belong to any), psychology and metaphysics. I’m also into football (soccer), painting, reading, music, early rock and, of course, my family.
Ok, now the personal is out of the way, let me ask you a few questions about your blog.
When was your blog created?
Mike’s Money Making Mission was started 16 weeks ago.
Wow four months ago, that means I have been blogging for about three. Your blog is one of the first I read daily, almost religiously.
Why did you choose your blog topic?
The subject is money. This fascinates me, how it is made and so on. I used to publish business opportunity magazines, a while back, and got to wondering if it’s possible to make money using only free blogs and without any capital outlay. It’s simply a hobby but I see blogs, and variations of them, becoming an even more powerful medium for all sorts of things in the future. I thought I’d better get to know something about them, as it could become useful in the years ahead.
Did you think you were going to be instantly successful?
I’m always positive about how things are going to turn out but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would even read my blog. I hoped a few would but if they didn’t it didn’t really matter.
What do you enjoy most about blogging?
Just being creative and seeing where it will lead – the possibilities excite me.
Where do you see your website in one year?
Ah, the big question. I look at blogging as being long term. In one year I would hope to be established, successful and nearing the objectives I have set myself – I’d rather not disclose what they are.
Mystery goals, I hope you let us know if and when you reach them!
What is the best feature on your blog?
I’d like to think it will be the Weekly Reports and that, in the future, these may become of help to other readers. One day it would be nice to say: If you do this, this and that you should make money with blogging. I’d like to be able to cut through all of the hype and just be truthful.
When will you feel like an accomplished blogger, or do you already?
I’m never satisfied and will never think of myself as being accomplished in any area of my life. Life is about changing, improving and developing. Once we think we are accomplished, and know it all, we might as well give up.
And the final series of questions, a little bit about Blog About Your Blog
What do you like most about Blog about your Blog?
I like the opportunity it gives bloggers to gain some free publicity for their own blogs, no matter what they write about.
What new feature would you like to see?
I’d like to see the number of recent posts, as listed in the side column, increased from the present ten. As BAYB becomes more successful, with more authors, posts could fly off the front page without being seen by many readers – which would defeat one of the objectives of the site. Maybe there could also be an index of recent posts arranged in categories.
We are working on that, it seems to be a concern for our authors. It may come to limiting the number of posts per day. To give us your oponion, please visit the forum and tell us what you think.
And for the hardest question of all…
What do you like the least?
Okay, if I must, only a little thing: I don’t like the text being centered in the posts.
Who have you chosen to be the next one interviewed?
Rob of The Million Dollar Experiment Down Under.
Thank you Mike for our first great interview with many more to come. Get ready Rob, I will check to see if you are interested then the questions will be on the way. If there was a question you want asked next week feel free to send me an email or just comment here.
Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability
Over at SiteProNews Linda Bustos just wrote an article about the Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability. In the article she gives tips for improves and some do’s and don’ts for blogging. As I am always looking to improve my blogs I really appreciated this article and thought I would share it.
10. Sending Mixed Signals
The main purpose of your blog should be decided from the very beginning and should be evident in every post there after. Linda and many other writing about how to make professional blogs success have stated that random or personal entry blogs don’t make for very successful blogs. Now I realize this is exactly what this blog is, but that what this blogs purpose is. I have some other blogs (Random Games and Random Super Heroes) that have a distinct purpose and so this mainly applies for those blogs.
9. Making it Hard to Subscribe
Asking for a subscription is ok to do. A lot of people don’t know how to use an RSS feed so offer email options as well. Linda says that subscribers are very important to a blogs success.
8. Inconsistent Posting
Once you have some loyal subscribers (and probably some that aren’t so loyal) you’ll need to be consistently updating your website. Your readers want to hear from you, so give them what they want. You should stick to a schedule that is realistic with the amount of time you have to give. Linda gives a tip for those times that you don’t have anything to post about. “Blog about someone else’s posts related to your topic and include a link back to that post.” It won’t hurt you if you link to someone else’s site and your reader go check it out. The owner of the website will appreciate the link and your reader will appreciate some more useful content provided by you.
7. No Contact Info.
Let your readers contact you. Don’t be an anonymous blogger. Trust is gain by your readers if they feel they know who is behind the blog and they feel they know you a little. I like to have my email address on my blog so my readers feel they can contact me at any time, as well as through monitoring my comments. Which leads into…
6. Not Moderating Comments
Spammers would love to come and corrupt the comments on your blog, make sure to monitor your comments and take care of these problems as they arise. Spam will annoy not only the author of the blog but it’s readers as well.
5. Excessive Advertising
Make sure your ads and/or affiliate links don’t over shadow your useful content. Monetizing a blog is fine as long as the ads don’t get in the way or interrupt the content your readers are trying to feast on. Linda, and others, recommend new blogs waiting a while until some good useful posts are up before running ads.
4. Not Linking to Posts
Whenever I talk about another site, or an article I found somewhere I also put a link to it. This is appropriate in order to let your readers check it out for themselves, get their own take on the story and get some background info on the article. It is also a compliment to the author of the website with whom you are referring. This kind of generosity will be noticed and perhaps reciprocated.
3. Dark Background, Light Text
I struggle with my color choices. The colors I seen to like, are not colors everyone else likes. I found this out from multiple comments from my readers asking for color changes. I appreciated the feedback. you don’t want to have your readers straining their eyes to read your posts. The hard to read colors for instants are white text on a dark background, or blocks of red. Stick to easy to read colors. Black text on a white backdrop is always a safe bet.
2. No Search Box
Readers may not remember exactly where a post is that they enjoyed, or perhaps they want to follow up on comments they left. Having a search box some easy to find place on your blog is a good way for people to easily find what they are looking for.
1. Hiding Navigation
Easy navigation is very important for your readers sanity. Don’t make your reader scroll down very far before they find your archives, or listed posts or labels. Labeling your posts is a great idea to make things easier on your readers, as well as for search engines. Tagging your posts are also a key way of receiving traffic, especially from huge sites like Technorati. Linda also points out that the easier to navigate the better, and with tagging and labeling perhaps “less is more.”
I hope this article help you reevaluate some things about your blog or website and help make it a little better. As we begin 2007 I know my goal is to continually improve Random Encounters of We as well as the other blogs I’ve listed above. Any comments about this article are very much welcome.
This post was originally published on Random Encounters of We.
KeyComplete
Please note that I am an affiliate of KeyComplete and this is a sales pitch.
What Keywords are my Competitors Using?
KeyCompete is the answer to this question. KeyCompete is an online keyword research tool that identifies the keywords your competitors are using in their pay-per-click campaigns. KeyCompete also identifies the competition that is bidding on your keywords.
Discovering what keywords your competitors are using may be your best source of competitive advantage in online advertising. Advertisers with larger keyword lists win more traffic at a lower cost per visitor than their competition.
The difficulty in becoming a legitimate competitor in any space is the time consumed in building your initial keyword lists and growing them. KeyCompete’s proprietary technology does this for you. KeyCompete allows you to download the keywords that are driving traffic to competing sites, instantly.
With KeyCompete, there is no software to download. All of KeyCompete’s search results are delivered in an online format with a web browser. Results are also available for download in Excel format and tab delimited format.
PJ’s Corner goes Country…
Janey Loree invites you to a weekend of equine fun at the “2007 Equine Experience” three-day event, that will be held at the California Mid State Fairgrounds in Paso Robles, CA, March 30-April 1, 2007. An admission fee allows you to enjoy beautiful horses, trainers, clinicians, ranch horse competitions, the colt starting contest, over 150 vendors (including yours truly) breed showcases, “Cowboy Mounted Shooting”, and much, much more. All of PJ’s Paperdolls will be decked out in their western clothing! If you are in the area, drop by the Equine Experience Information Booth to say “Hi!”.
2006 Uncommon Loon Awards
robots.txt and all that
Google indexes all sites using robots, and these critters’ first port of call is the robots.txt file.
Have you got any idea what your blog’s robots.txt file has got written in it? If you don’t have your own domain, there is probably no need to know, but I suspect the team who put this revised Blogaboutyourblog.com theme together know very well what theirs says. And over at The Pisstakers, we do too, having recently gone through the site with a fine tooth comb after a mega theme and feature update this month.
So go check out the robots.txt deal on your server, in case Google catch you out like they did Mybloglog blogger, Jangro, whose search engine traffic died over the course of a couple of days due to a slightly mis-interpreted line of code. Google have plenty of info for webmasters explaining what the file should say, or more importantly what the code shouldn’t disallow.
Blogging in weird places
And before you fall asleep from geek overload, I found a high flying webmaster who actually uses the robots.txt file to blog in! The Bot Blog has the craziest location of them all, and the robots don’t mind a bit – they can’t see it right in front of their noses because he knows the simple code to hide the text.
Whats been happening Down Under
Its been a while since I last posted on the BAYB blog, so I thought it was time for a quick update. Firstly good work guys on getting wordpress up and running. Its looking good.
Things have changed a little at the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under, with more of a focus going on long term passive income rather that quick fix, sponsored posts and the like… you can read about this more here.
We are now 90 days into the million dollar experiment and a summary of earnings to date can be found here.
A series of posts on useful tools for bloggers can be looked at via our Bloggers Toolkit category. Tools we have covered include Google Alerts, Live PageRank Checkers, the Google Homepage, Google Analytics, Google webmasters tools and more. Well worth checking out if you have a spare half an hour one day.
That’s all for now – Take it easy!
Rob
Free Phone Calls Over The Internet
Firstly I’d like to say that I am an affiliate for Skype so, as you will gather, this is a sales post.
What is Skype?
Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls over the Internet. They say they are revolutionizing the telecoms world by allowing users to make superior quality voice calls to other Skype users for free and to landlines and mobiles worldwide for the price of a local call.
There has already been over 100 million downloads of their software and every day over 150,000 new users join. There are now 33 million active users.
Skype is free to download and is easy to setup.
With Skype you can make free calls over the Internet. With Skype the whole world can talk for free .
Okay, so that’s my sales pitch over for the day!
Now, about the ‘new’ Blog About Your Blog, isn’t it just great! Well done guys.
Good blogging,
Mike
Mike’s Money Making Mission