<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.

Daniel Scocco

When you become a blogger it’s easy to get paralysed by information overload, you realise you have a mountain of work to do and you just don’t know where to start. When I get like that and I feel the task before me is just too big, I attack my bookmarks for inspiration. One site that delivers inspiration more than most is DailyBlogTips.com Daniel Scocco very kindly took some moments out of his busy schedule to answer the blogging rocket 5Q Interview.

DailyBlogTips can be found here:

www.dailyblogtips.com

1. Who is Daniel Scocco and what is www.dailyblogtips.com all about?

Daniel Scocco is a guy trying to develop his online business. He created many blogs along the past years, and DailyBlogTips.com is the place where he shares what he learned.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

Late in 2005.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes, my blogs generate around 50% of my income as of today. The rest comes from niche websites and consulting projects.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up DailyBlogTips?

The biggest challenge for any online publisher are the first 6 months of any website. You don’t have a loyal audience, so its harder to make your content, however good, noticed.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

Provide value to the readers.

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!

Plugin Master

I first came across Pawan and his plugins when I needed to prevent my blog from becoming a victim of Ping spam, and his MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin was just the job. I then went on to use many of his other WordPress plugins almost too numerous to mention. Pawan just keeps coming out with great plugin after great plugin, so he was a natural choice for my now (getting famous) 5 Q Interview.

MaxBlogPress and Pawan’s plugins can be found here:

MaxBlogPress.com

1. Who is MaxBlogPress and what is www.maxblogpress.com all about?

MaxBlogPress is a team which focus on creating software/plugins for bloggers for helping them better monetize their blog as well as attract lots of traffic to it. Currently, MaxBlogPress.com offers many free wordpress plugins for helping bloggers use wordpress in more effective way.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I think I dived into blogging around the early 2005. That time blogging started getting quite popular and was the latest buzz. I tried wordpress for my test blog to have personal experience with it. That’s from where i hooked and started using it for most of my projects.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes, I spend full time for MaxBlogPress.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up MaxBlogPress ?

The challenge which I’m facing from startup to even today is keeping up with so many feature requests/bug fixes for our plugins. WordPress constantly come up with new version and each new version might break our plugin. Also, we face unforeseen problem like conflict with other plugins, different configuration of wordpress and webhost etc…

We spend most of our time helping other bloggers run our plugin smoothly and adding new features for existing plugins.

To overcome this problem, I’ll be hiring more developers for making time for new innovations. But these challenges will still stay as the part of our daily work due to the nature of our work.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

The one advice I’ll give to all bloggers is same old “Write killer content” for your blog. This is the base of your blog and you must make it strong. If you don’t then whatever latest tricks you apply, ultimately you’ll fail.

Instead of writing lots of low quality content, focus on few good content. Ask yourself, would you read a blog with 90 posts of which 75 are simply useless? OR would you read a blog which have got only 15 blog posts but all of them are hard hitting valuable post?

Also, make sure to spend majority of your time in promoting your blog so that your content get good exposure and can have many regular readers for your blog. One mistake most bloggers do is they simply keep on writing new blog posts but never ever think of getting more exposure to their blog.

When you create a post WordPress saves the author details for you, some themes will display this on the blog posting. If you are logged in as the default user (admin) your post says something like: This post was written by: admin

Well that’s not great is it? However you have a way of sorting this out, here is how:

1. Login to wp-admin
2. Navigate to Users –> Your Profile
3. Scroll down to the ‘Display name publicly as’ option and look in the pop up menu

So long as you have filled in First name, Last name, Nickname (in the same panel) you will see different permutations of your name which can be used for display.

Every so often you come across a blog page and think “Damn! I was going to write that!” well I’ve found one, Joost de Valk of yoast.com has written a brilliant page of content on how to max your WP blog for SEO.

I could not tell you about it and secretly steal all his ideas, but I’m not into that, bloggingrocket.com has been set up to present you with the best possible info which is why I’m not going to re-invent the wheel, I’m just going to point you at his great article.

WordPress SEO

There are many ways to blog and many formats or engines to use, Blogging Rocket was set up to focus on just one of these engines, the best in our point of view: WordPress.

Blogging Rocket is aiming to become the number one place a blogger will turn to when they want advice or ‘How To’ information when they are blogging with WordPress. This whole site is built with WordPress and it is going to fill up with all manner of WP related things. There will be news and reviews, recommendations on the latest plugins, latest build updates, theme design and much much more.

Also of course, not wanting to jump the gun, there is going to be a full section of advice and recommendations on how to set up your blog. I will give you step by step guides on choosing your killer domain name, picking the best hosting provider, creating your databases and installing or upgrading your WP blog.

But who is Blogging Rocket?

Blogging Rocket is the brain child of Ian Blackford a web developer from Telford Shropshire in the UK. I’ve been designing websites now for almost ten years but only recently have I started using WordPress and its awesome power. I own my own web development and hosting company called Design Conscious .com but you will find out lots more about me in future posts.

While trying not to scare you – here I am in a recent publicity mug shot, just so you can put a face to the posts.