One of the biggest excuses I hear from people that want to start a blog, but never do is: I don't have time. I frequently reply to this with something along the lines of "Well, actually you do - it's just not a priority for you". Trust me, I know all about the difficulties of finding the time to blog. I work a full-time job, have 6 kids, a house to keep up, yard to mow, bills to pay, and the list goes on. Like you, my daily schedule is very busy, or at least seems busy. I decided to Continue Reading
Archives for November 2012
Google may ding you for those guest posts
I recently wrote about 5 reason's you might want to decline a guest post request. I specifically stated that two of these reasons (4 and 5) could have negative impact to your Google search engine rankings. I would seems I was dead on. Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google and unofficial spokes person for "all things Google search" released a video this week confirming my concerns. Matt basically states that blogs that post guest posts that Google deems not "High Quality" can and will Continue Reading
How to track finances for your blog
During my first year of blogging in 2007, I watched my new personal finance blog grow from earning nothing for months to earning a little over $500.00. The whole concept of making money blogging was surprising to me and frankly I wasn't really prepared. I kept emails from my advertisers, but I didn't keep track of the financial details like I should have. This unfortunately bit me at tax time the following year. After spending almost a whole day doing my taxes, I decided I really needed to Continue Reading
Do you have a vision and plan for your blog?
I recently encouraged you to treat your blog like a business and one of the core concepts of starting and growing a successful business is having a vision and plan for your blog. In business, business plans are considered important enough that many financial institutions will not provide loans to start-ups that don't have a solid business plan in place and in writing. Your blog is a business and thus no different and requires a similar vision to help it be successful. I'm not suggesting you Continue Reading
Backup Buddy – How to backup your WordPress blog automatically
One of the most critical blogging tasks is performing routine backups of your blog. Maintaining frequent backups will keep you from losing all of those articles and custom theme changes that you've worked so hard to make. From personal experience, losing a week or more worth of articles and losing 3-4 months worth of theme changes hurts. Unfortunately, I've been there. Generally, most hosting companies provide backups of your WordPress blog, but they generally combine all of your files and Continue Reading