<UPDATE: as I’m writing this the ‘vaporware’ has materialised, but it’s rubbish, so back to square one.>

So, without intentionally doing it I haven’t posted on my blog for about two weeks. This has meant two things have happened, the first is my stats have taken a nose dive, where I had been getting a nice upward stats gradient, I now have a graph that looks like it’s got heart failure. The other thing that’s happened is I’ve become very disillusioned with it all. It’s taken me two weeks to try and solve three parts to a puzzle, OK that’s not two weeks solid – I have to do my web development too, but come on… it shouldn’t be that difficult and it wouldn’t be difficult if I hadn’t had to rely on others for help and their services.

Also because I was concentrating on putting my three piece jigsaw puzzle together I had neglected to think up any future posts, again adding to my feeling of blog fade. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from full pelt to full stop in your blogging life and it seems to be when you start adding other people and their services into the mix. Now I realise that outsourcing is the right thing to do, but from my first attempt I can tell you it’s bloody difficult. If you get the right people involved at the start then you are very lucky and here’s a tip once you do find them, hold onto them.

I started writing this post about Blog Fade but I realise it’s about a wider issue. Now that I am two weeks along I’ve still got my jigsaw in pieces around my ankles, but they are now in the right order. I have realised now that what I set out to achieve wasn’t the right course of action, for example one of the items I wanted to produce would have landed me with requests for support further down the line so I’m solving this now with an off the shelf product that already has a support network. So my wider issue is a lesson learned really, I need to plan further ahead, I need to realise when to let go of an idea that isn’t going to work (instead of spending days on research), I need to be aware of the issue surrounding the execution of my ideas and I need to stop feeling sorry for myself when things don’t go my way.

Now that I have cleared my mind of what hasn’t worked in the last few weeks, I have to ask myself ‘Where am I now?’ Well actually I’m no further forward, I still have the same challenges as I had at the beginning, but now at least I have a starting place. You see even though I haven’t achieved anything tangible, I now know what isn’t going to work and what can’t be done, therefore I also know what will work and I’ll focus on doing that instead. I’ve had a two week false start but I’m on track now, I’ll soon have my jigsaw finished… and when I do, I shall superglue it together, nail it to a board and hang it on the wall from a great big hook – safe in the knowledge that I shan’t be doing that again!

In a way it’s good that I had this minor meltdown it’s given me a little more positivity in what I’m doing. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a blog fade episode too, please leave a comment below and be an inspiration for others.

1. Write at least two posts

Promoting your site is a given, no promotion, no traffic. But the traffic will only flow one way and never return if all your readers see is stale content. You need to write at least two articles a week, more if you can (if you can’t try and get guest articles from your peers) and post them a day or so apart. TIP: better traffic spikes will come from posts that appear at the beginning of the week – there is an assumption that news is ‘freshest’ at the start of the week. A great resource of tips and how to’s to help you improve your writing is www.copyblogger.com

2. Check for broken links

Links that end in a 404 page will lose you traffic so fix any incoming or internal links that are broken. A good plugin for checking your posts is Broken Link Checker. An awesome plugin for managing incoming broken links is Redirection it allows you to take an incoming URL and map it to a new post via 301 redirects. It’s the only way to preserve traffic to your posts when you change a site structure.

3. Check your Webstats

You know in the movies where you see the big macho hero choosing his weapons before he goes off and does something amazing, and he picks up a big gun, looks at it lovingly… then puts it back and picks up an enormous gun, snorts a laugh and nods his head in approval? Well your website statistics are that enormous gun. Your site stats are where you find out who is linking to you, how much traffic you are getting and what pages your visitors are looking at. The stats can tell you your most popular pages and therefore you will know what kind of content your audience is hungry for. There are many stats packages around, your hosting will come with some and there is of course Google Analytics. I’m currently using WordPress.com Stats which is a great plugin because it causes no extra load on your server and hey, who else but WP knows enough about WordPress to produce good accurate stats? A word of warning: only check your stats once a week, checking stats is like weighing yourself when you are on a diet, check to often and you don’t see any progression. Check once on a regular basis and you get to see the movement.

4. Plan future posts

Doing step three will make this step a breeze. While you are checking your stats, look out for your busiest pages or notice when your busiest times are (and note what you did to produce the extra traffic) and plan your next posts to extend your popular content. If you find your popular posts aren’t really where you thought your blog was going, don’t dismiss them and blindly push on, be sensible about it and let the market lead you, as they are the only experts in all this.

5. Don’t give up!

In every bloggers life there are moments of despair, moments where you think “Argh F**k It! This is going nowhere” if you are like this then you are probably checking your stats too often! Everyone is in the same boat here, don’t assume that others are getting more success than you, some might be, but others definitely won’t be. Just keep going and don’t give up. If you feel isolated then join a community, I’m in the Blog MasterMind coaching program and there are forums and communities to help keep me going – you can join too and I strongly recommend that you check it out.

6. Do Back up!

I will continue to harp on about this for probably the life of this blog, and even beyond, I might even have it etched on my Tomb Stone:

RIP
Ian Blackford
Blogging Rocket Webmaster
(*Snigger* I can RIP – I backed up!)

Get a back-up plugin, set it on a schedule to back up at least once a week and then forget it – job done. A great plugin for this is WordPress Database Backup

7. Take a break!

There is a lot to blogging, a lot more than people realise and if you do all the above every week along with your blog promotion and digesting information from others you are going to need a break. So don’t beat yourself up for a taking a little time off, switch off your computer turn on the TV – go on, I bet there is a good film on!

Well… when I say ‘I’ back up, I really mean I have bought some software, a second drive and I have configured it on a schedule to back up every day, so in reality I don’t actually do anything but my data is backed up nonetheless.

Well that’s fine for my local data, but what about my beloved blog and those MySQL tables with their ‘Bits’ all exposed? Well that’s a little more tricky because you don’t have full control of a remote computer.

Help is at hand I have found with a great plugin called wp-db-backup it’s really easy to use and offers multiple back up options like:

• additional tables (core tables included by default)
• back up and saved to a folder on your server
• back up and download the SQL file
• back up and email the SQL file to yourself
• schedule a backup with four time options (hourly, daily etc)

I would recommend everybody get this plugin, your blog should become one of your treasured possessions and you need to look after it.

Another excellent source of back up advice is of course WordPress.org themselves here is a backup article from their codex

Where is the best place to think about stuff? I generally think best in the car. I turn the music off and while I’m trundling down the road I have a good think. This isn’t the best place to take notes or start writing a blog page however. Another good place to think I find is in the bathroom, however I usually read my Mac magazines while I’m in there as this is the only free time I get to keep up with what’s going on in the Mac universe.

Inspiration comes from many places and normally when you are nowhere near a computer. So what do you do? Well I found the answer in a Palm Zire Z22 PDA. It’s one of Palm’s older models, it’s not fancy, it doesn’t have WiFi or BlueTooth or anything complicated. It has a calendar, a calculator, an address book and tasks and memos. With a little downloading magic it can have Acrobat reader on it and it can even display your photos.

The one thing it does really well is allow you to make notes or memos. I’m actually writing this piece on it right now sitting in my armchair in the lounge of my house. Soon I will go to my office, plug it into my computer and HotSync it to the Palm Desktop software. Then all I do is check my spelling, and paste my piece into a new post on my blog.

Easy!