Life as I find it

I’ve been able to flow from one work to another almost all my life. Curiosity got into me, temptation, the lure of quick money, desperation…. you name it, me done it.

Sometimes I wondered if I was some kind of a freak who was good at so many things, yet didn’t have lasting experience with anything and when I moved on, it was usually to something totally unrelared. The only pattern I saw was chaos, which reflected the chaos in my emotional life as well (born in an unhappy family, fostered with grandparents).

My jobs ran included (in approximate sequence) part time work with a cable TV service, running children’s camps, partner in a new layout design business, modelling, teaching English tutions, working on outdoor education/experiential learning programmes, instructing on Himalayan Adventure tours, working as a cook on treks, guiding treks, cultural tour hosting, pack horsewoman on treks, joyrides on horses, conducting surveys in remote villages, “home remedies and first aid” for local horses and dogs, transcripting interviews for documentaries, research for cocumentaries, film making, outdoor adventure training, facilitation on management training programmes, website design, SEO, content development, promotion, blogging……

A varied life…. and it still goes on…..

When I first learnt that a website could be created with a little effort, I remember my wonder - I had thought it to be an exotic and expensive thing, and yet, with a free host and an internet connection and some googled up tutorials, I could do it for free! It seemed impossible and impractical at that time. I had wanted one, and couldn’t afford any money, let alone the fancy quotes I got from designers.

Its been exactly 2 years and 7 months since my first website (which was largely white with some text on it), 13 revisions of my website, as I kept learning new things and stuff. I write on three blogs, run 7 websites (some for friends), earn enough from it to keep myself in necessities, and keep discovering new people, information and dimensions to the world.

This  category of posts - my journey - is a documentation of this strange, but satisfying journey of mine, that needed me to sweat blood, but rewards me just as intensely.

Just as everything was working, I went and meddled with things as always. Got tempted into a server shift, because I wanted certain things.

Was biting nails until a few hours ago. The shift had happened, I’d been busy, my DNS hadn’t rexolved, and quietly, behind my back, my site was in shambles…… this is quite ususal after a shift like that. Problems need to be found and fixed, and I was sitting happily, unaware.

Suddenly, I woke up to the situation, and as usual sent endless messages to the suport at Mochahost, that this was not working and that was giving problems and so on. No reply. I bit my nails some more, send a few more emails. Misunderstanding!!! Now, I was ready to tear my hair from my scalp. My precious site!!! Not working!?!

Suddenly, the sun shone through the clouds, the support people went into gear, and within the last couple of hours, everything is sorted. These guys sure can work once they dig into a problem. The one problem that remains is a mystery….. something in my site that doesn’t let it be recognized at all as online to validate my blog at Social Spark. No clue why this happens. Installed their code and all, but when I validate, it doesn’t find it.

Since it was not life threatening, I sent only one email so far. Now that everything is sorted, I may send maybe one a few days until resolved. The thing is that such things are minor. The big thing is that my website, my precious website is breathing once more!!!

As I keep learning and growing from my blogging experiences, I find a certain clarity in me about which were the things I did hat helped me get better viewers. I say better viewership, rather than traffic or comments, because it is people reading your blog that counts, not the comments or traffic.

For the last year, my readership was rather low. My pagerank, Alexa, and whatnots are still low, but expect to see a shift next month, because from the last month onward, there has been a shift in my blogging behaviour. This shift has already started reflecting in my revenue from my blog, and the search traffic that I get. It is a simple matter for it to continue into recorded statistics, and I am not too bothered about that, because, after all, it is the working that matters more than the numbers.

Changes I have already seen. From the last month to this, my traffic has gone higher by 67%, page views by 89%, time spent on the site by 45%, number of pages per visit by 53%. My revenue from this site has doubled (its still pathetically low, but doubled). For one month (actually its mote like 15 days) is good enough

So what is the difference in my behaviour, and how can you get it to work for you?

1. Figuring out what needs to be done: This is important. Take a good, hard, honest look. What is unsatisfying about your blog? What makes YOU avoid it? Plan changes for making it to something you would celebrate. And don’t worry if the list is overwhelmingly long. A blog has no deadline - it should have a schedule, though.
2. Frequency of posting: If you look at my blog archives, you will notice months going by without a post, or a spurt of posts for a day or two followed by silence…… if you look at the postings this month, they are consistent. Strangely, the more I write, the more I want to write. After a gap, it became difficult for me to figure out subjects and write with any clarity.
3. Titles: If you look at earlier titles and the titles now, the titles now create interest, describe the post more accurately…. this helps readers click through to the post and read.
4. Categories: Actually, you can’t see this change to compare. Earlier, my categories were in a state of complete disorder. I had 1 post in “funnies”, “funny” and “humor”. It was the same post. My process was to make a post, asign categories, and create any more descriptive categories that came to mind on the spot. While this made me have a lot of categories, it didn’t help the visitors coming in to read to make a choice. I deleted the lot (almost) and created a comprehensive list. I am now in the process of going through the posts to make them fall into the categories I have. Thus the whole lot of uncategorized posts. It will take a while to get the whole of the thing sorted, but now that I have a direction, I find myself motivated toward the blog, rather than avoiding it.
5. Tags: The same with tags. I got rid of the haphazard tags I had, and am now in the process of planning them out to make more sense. What’s working for me for this is assigning all the tags that I can think of for a post, and then, once all the posts are done, going through the list, to ensure that newly added tags applicable to old posts get added. Then finally, I “weed out” the list of tags to remove the ones that have single or very few posts on them, and are not really descriptive. Thus, done (in progress).
6. Reading: I can’t stress this enough. Once I became aware that I needed to become a better blogger, it was apparent that I was clueless. I applied myself to reading different blogs by more experienced bloggers, blogs with useful tips…… Some of these are problogger.com copyblogger.com JohnChow.com …… no mentioning individual posts, this would become a spam post. Really, there is a wealth of writing out there. All it takes is the will to find out what can be done, and then DOING IT. There are really MANY sites out there and really insightful bloggers. All it takes is curiosity
7. Attention to titles: Luckily (or unluckily) my blog hardly had any deeplinks, so the permalinks changing hardly mattered. Where possible, I kept the permalink same, but edited the title of the post to become more interesting. I edited content I found myself yawning through, and replaced the yawning bits with things I would have prefered to see there. Again, this is work in progress…. will probably take me a long time to do.
8. Commitment: I found that there are some things I like to do, and others that I don’t. I compromise. I alternate between things I like to do, and things I don’t, and keep going. I have promised that I will devote at least a couple of hours everyday till my blog comes out of the ditch I drove it into, and then re-look at the time factor. The key thing is to keep being productive. Think of it like a part-time job.
9. Reading and commenting: Reading is not the only thing that helps. Commenting on the blogs you read helps develop an understanding of the subject matter, simply because you take a small moment to think of what you understood from the post. Not to mention the link to your own blog with the comment helps as well. Over time, I do hope to develop relationships with the writers I admire. That’s the fun of blogging - you can make friends with authors you enjoy, unlike a book……
10. Social bookmarking: Until my search hits happened, I decided to submit content that is good to social networking sites, and linked to it directly while commenting. I guess this can be done with forum signatures, newsletters, or whatever.
11. I’m planning to get a newsletter out with the announcement of the new and improved version of the site, with a promise to not neglect it again and ask for help from my readers in terms of promoting it and feedback. Not done it yet - getting my guts together, I guess.
12. Content: All the while, while this is happening, I have promised myself that I will make at least one post a day. Shouldn’t be too tough at the moment, with so much that I am doing to write about. I’m sitting right there, working on the site, and I love writing. So, it is actually a welcome break from re-organizing that I am enjoying now, while sharing my learnings for those who are interested.
13. Promoting the RSS feed.

Hmmm… so much for now. I love writing so much (or is it another avoidance of spring cleaning?). I’m hoping to make another post with a kind of credit roll for all the individual posts that helped me through this transition.

I found an “experiment” to increase Technorati authority. For bloggers, it is all important to have good authority on technorati for some reason. Whom am I fooling? That reason IS traffic.

However, something like this to increase that authority is a little too much. Who really is sitting idle there waiting to link random blogs together (AND update such random nonsense everyday!)? I guess plenty enough people. This is part of why most really good writers are less visible. They have no time to pander to bizarre measures nor the inclination.

What this “experiment” is, is no experiment, it is a link farm in a blog. There is a post with a list of links to other blogs, who have a similar list on theirs. As people join the project, they comment, and get added to the list, which is supposed to register as lots and lots of links with technorati, thus raising their authority. What in the world makes them think that their “gains” from technorati are not going to go reverse with search engines?

Uh…. that doesn’t mean I’m too good for such stuff. Actually, I AM good, but not because I don’t have the time, its simply because I don’t find it worthwhile to play these games. Not even for traffic (which is something most bloggers seem to sell their soul for). What experiment does it take to know that link lists are read by sites that count links? Worse, what does it take to know that this is basically worthless the minute some algorithm figures it out, and then its penalty bait.

How much traffic is enough traffic? And what is the point where we say… okay, I’m not going to post links that I have no respect for, because I have traffic, and now I would like some self-respect? Uh… never, I guess, unless we begin.

I feel a little disillusioned when I see such processes gain such popularity. Has anyone realized that Technorati getting hold of this link list is the one thing they don’t want, if they wish to retain their gains?

Sigh!

I don’t earn much from this blog, but hey, I’m having a blast writing, and I DO earn enough to not be spending for it. There is steady growth in traffic without spending a rupee for it. People come back, if you make an effort to write well.

I guess it would be too much to hope for that people use the daily devotion time to updating such lists to actually creating content that would gain them links that readers would enjoy, search engines would respect, and technorati would credit?