Timing is everything.

I’m in love

Earning an online income is not easy, it may be simple but not easy. But it is immeasurably easier if your internet marketing life is good, if timing works in your favor and if you have a love here and there to take you through the rough times.  I just had such an experience.

LIFE IS GOOD – AGAIN!
Today calm has returned to the domain of Blog Income and that makes life good but it’s been a few hair raising and tearing days.   At first annoyance, then disbelief, then as the reality began to seep in utter panic.  Allow me to walk you through the turn of events  of the last two days– perhaps my experience will help you avoid this type of pain.

When you begin to know a little bit, you become a little brave, and a little bravery can be plenty dangerous.  I refer specifically to the back office – the admin area of the blog which is where I was on Monday morning.

As mentioned before, Blog Income is going to have a complete new facelift and that is in the works, but… said I to myself, in the meantime, could I not make a small change?  One of the suggestions made by my Monday night Internet Marketing Mastermind members was that maybe I could make the font a little bigger.

As chance would have it that Monday morning I came upon a blog that tackled that very same question and the answer was very simple.  Install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  No problem.  I knew exactly how to install a plugin. I did.  For some reason it did not take.  For one thing the “settings” option did not show up. I pressed a button here and a button there, looked at some of the other plugins.   Came back to the new plugin, tried editing an existing post.  Nothing happened.

Went back to the blog that wrote about how to change the font in the first place and wouldn’t you know it, there was no way to contact the author!  Now that in the world of the internet is a cardinal sin.  Before logging out I pressed the view site button – nothing, blank, zero!  Hmm.  Opened another window and put the URL into the browser line.  Nothing, blank, zero …. oh yes, bottom left hand corner “done.”

Worse yet – I could no longer log into my admin!  Same blank and “done” results.

Several  times on this blog I have mentioned that my sites  are powered by WordPress, and  supported by WordPress Direct. (WPD).  I sent in a ticket marked “urgent” and went about doing other things on the internet.  Annoyance began to seep in.  Last week of Quarter 1 and my blog is down!  Google will come crawling and surely write up enough demerits to put me in the dog house I thought,  Alexa will demote me, traffic will meet a blank white space and never return.  This couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

That night at my weekly Internet Marketing Mastermind meeting, I mentioned my dilemma to the group.  When two of the top and most savvy IM types both said “oh oh” at the same time, annoyance turned to queasiness. “Oh oh” is not a good response.  Jason offered to help by going into my c.panel but of course I could not remember  either the username or the password!  We agreed we would connect the next day

I was sure that by next day WordPress Direct would have a solution.  Next day dawned and still nothing.  Panic.  Left a message for Jason.  Resent ticket to WPD.   Acting on Dave Doolin’s suggestion,  closed shop for the day, went out enjoyed the ocean, the flowers, and the company of non internet marketing friends.   Completely cleared my mind.

Came home refreshed and resolved to rebuild the blog – with the new look.  Fortunately I have all the content.  After dinner checked with WPD , still no response.  Opened Ewen Chia’s tutorials on WordPress and began by finding the theme I wanted to install and was at that point in  Fantastico when the next step was to press “install”.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
My finger was poised over the install button.  The phone rang.  It was Jason returning my call.   Told him I was ready to start rebuilding the blog and that I was just in the process of installing.

“Hold on” he said.  “What’s the name of your blog again?”

I told him.

“Works for me” he says.

“What do you mean it works for you?”  I wanted to know.

“Well my browser brings up your site”

I was astounded!  Floored!  Flabbergasted!

I checked on my own browser .

YUP!   There it was!

I told him what I was about to do.  He told me that had I gone ahead with the new installation (outside of WPD)I would have have created even more problems.  I was literally seconds away from pressing that install button, in other words, seconds away from more problems.

I sat there and thanked my lucky stars, the universe and the creator of all whom I call god.  Seconds away from screwing the whole thing up.  It’s amazing how so much of everything we do is in the timing.

Dave’s suggestion that I take the day off kept me from making further decisions and taking action in the heat of the moment.  The day grounded me.  It gave time for Jason to call me.  Equally importantly it gave the time needed for WordPress Direct to address my problem and fix it.  But that call from Jason was the most critical of all.  Timing plays a greater role in our success than we realize and the whole day ultimately was all about timing.

I’M IN LOVE

After taking a few deep breaths I was able to collect myself.  Checked on my ticket …  there is a message from Alex:

“Valentina,

Your site went blank because you had two XML plugins (different versions) activated at the same time. The Google Sitemap XML and the karaliev’s plugins (older version) were both activated causing the error.  I upgraded the Karaliev’s plugin and everything should be working fine now.”

It hit me!  When I was going through my plugins I remember that my Google Sitemap XML was not activated.  I recall that in some recent course it was to have been activated – so I did!

It was love at first sigh of relieve!  This was not the first time that WordPress Direct saved my bacon – err … that would be site.  They have helped me many times with this blog and the other sites I have with them.  The issues were never as big as having my site disappear and I was beginning to feel fairly confident about WordPress, thinking that I can now put up a WordPress site without the benefit of the heavy lifting that WordPress Direct provide.

HUH!  Are you kidding?

Not on your patoeey!  Never!

I’m in love with WordPress Direct.  I love Alex and Brian and Roy  and all the other support that have patiently helped me out time and time again.  They have never failed me … and when you’re in love with that good, it’s a keeper!

Oh yes, another thing.  WordPress Direct comes preloaded with a lot of goodies.  I just found that I do not need TinyMce for font etc. – I have the kitchen sink that gives me that option. How did I find out?  There is an icon that I never pressed before… well, you know all about bravery now, it turns out that its the kitchen sink.

It’s all good.  Experience makes you stronger, even wiser but I still buy into Steve Jobs “stay hungry, stay foolish” even if foolish is sometimes all wrapped up in bravery.

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In fact I was just visiting over there this morning, and was keying away my comment to his post and question What’s more important to you: Quantity, or Quality?” when my flying fingers hit the wrong key and voila!  The whole comment vanished.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Thoughts were running away and the comment was in danger of gulp! Becoming a post … which is why I decided to tackle Pat’s question here and well,  make it a post.

Pat is a master at posting thought provoking content and this was no exception.  The devil has a wicked streak of bent humor and easily bounces from seemingly complete irrelevance to “… right on, that hits the nail on the head …”  AHA moment for the reader.  So bananas to you Pat!

The question at hand quality vs quantity deals with blog content vs frequency of posting, i.e. which do you subscribe to.   Predictably most of the commenters  opted for quality which is both admirable and intuitive to our “better, inner” selves.

Pat’s own answer to this question is “It depends”

I agree with the “it depends” and have a few thoughts of my own.

#1. QUALITY
The first thought that comes to mind is that quality to some degree is subjective, particularly when it comes to writing.  What might be quality to one person may be just recycled drib drab to another.  So to some degree quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Some might point to style, or correctness of grammar and spelling as constituting quality, yet, I have read some really good stuff on some blogs where English is definitely a struggle but the info was good, grammatical, spelling errors et al and conversely where the spelling and grammar were stellar but the content was not.   And then throw style into the mix … you want to talk subjective?

Another spread in perception of quality would be determined by the demographics of your readership.  A blog who’s readership tends to be in the 34-45 age bracket – apparently Blog Income -  may not be considered quality by say the early twenties crowd.   You can get your blog demographics from Alexa.

#2 QUANTITY
The argument for posting quantity is driven by the attract search engine traffic crowd.  The more fresh content on the blog, the more frequently the bots crawl the site, the higher the ranking, the more traffic the search engines send your way.

“Screw the search engines” said one commenter.

OK.

If you blog purely for the joy of blogging and have nary a thought of earning an online income, by all means post as the moment moves you and let the reader decide whether that is a quality post or not and worthy of a return visit to your blog.  That of course presumes that you do indeed have a reader.  An established blog hopefully does, a brand new one is just whistling Dixie.

Exceptions abound of course – Glen Allsopp at Viper Chill immediately comes to mind as he seems to break every rule in blogging:  infrequent posting, long articles, free of monetization(at least  on his Viper Chill blog – he does extraordinarily well with his online business) and that domain name certainly doesn’t scream “blogging”  but damn!  The content is to kill for and his followers boarder on being cult fanatics  and the numbers just keep growing and growing.

If on the other hand you are blogging for money then you cannot ignore the engines – they are the lifeline to your earning an online income and frequency of posting should be part of your blog income business plan.   I can tell you from experience that how often you post is how pretty the search engines will play with you.

Daily posting draws daily traffic, some of which is return and some new, but more importantly there seems to be a spill over effect.  The more new traffic that comes to your blog, the greater the chance that your return traffic also begins to gain traction.

I stop at the 2 to 3 times daily though.  There are bloggers who do that, and do so successfully but my thought here is that the post does not have the benefit of time exposure and I wonder if multiple daily posts enjoy a significant return of visitor metric.

#3 : QUALITY & QUANTITY
The perfectionist in us cries out “Both!  Both” but I can tell you, it just ain’t a gonna happen!  Even the uber bloggers who do indeed post daily, have off days … and many of them have staff!

If you are a part time blogger holding down a 9-5, posting daily may be a stretch, yet if you can do it, its the best way to get your blog off the ground.  Many new bloggers bust their keesters for the first three months to gain traffic and ranking, then scale back a bit to say 3 times a week.  At this point they have established a presence and a readership and can concentrate more on quality.

So as with the bananananananas … you need to read Pat’s post … the answer is:  IT DEPENDS!

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First day of a new month.  That means  a review of the month that was.  This has been a busy month and a lot got done.  One of the main objectives for 2010 is to grow traffic on Blog Income.    Traffic increase is goal one for 1Q.  I go for a monthly increase of 10% – 20%.  When the numbers are scant to begin that is not exactly a stretch.  I have chosen this rate of increase for two reasons:

1. I read in one of Darren Rowse’s posts that that is how he began.  I like to follow in the footsteps of success.
2. I am creating a mindset and therefore a pattern for results.  As traffic increases the 10% – 20% will be tougher, but by then it will be a pattern that my brain is set for and will inform my actions accordingly.

So, how did January stack up?  I am pleased to say that it was a good start to a good year.

#1.  Google Analytics Traffic up by 78.22% = reached 360 visits

#2.  .One of my goals for this year was to be on page 1 of Google for the keywords “blog income.”  I can now cross that one off.  This was a June 30 goal.  I gave myself that much time because I was so far down in position and found that it had wide and wild swings – now that may happen again, but it seems to have settled in on page one for several days now.  Here is an excerpt from my post of  September 28 which explains why I chose “blog income” as the keyword phrase that I wanted to dominate.

Blog Income is already a crowded playing field as I expected it to be.  Needless to say Blog Income was not available as a domain so I added the word “life”. The two key deciding factors were the two figures:

SEOT = 91
SEOC = 39,200

I learned at 30 Day Challenge to go for a niche (read that keywords) that has more than 80 SEOT and 30,000 SEOC (OK… this one is higher).  I have been peppering my posts with other keywords and now have to decide which is the next one that I want to get on page one for. (Blogger to WordPress full article.  Whichever one it is it will be far more competitive than Blog Income.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS OF THE MONTH

-         Played host to Mike Paetzold for a week as he published 5 guest posts here on his “Blog Tour”

-         Played guest blogger at Dave Doolin’s Website In A Weekend with four posts on MasterMinds

-         Published 18 posts

Sam over at Financial Samurai has thrown down the gauntlet (or whatever it is that samurais wear) for his community to get their blog to an Alexa of below 200K by June 30.    I started the year with an Alexa of 504,964 and ended January with 409,922.  I know it gets tougher and tougher as you approach the 200K mark, but I am confident that 200K will be toppled … of course, there are some awesome bloggers in that community that will be brandishing their “katana”  with impunity to get to that benchmark!  I have no katana, which is a samurai sword … maybe I should become a ninja (oh yes, isn’t there a course on Ninja Online Tactics … did not buy that one)

WHAT’S UP FOR FEBRUARY?

Staying focused:  Traffic increase by 20% =  432 so I’ll make that 450.  It’s a short month … amazing what a difference 3 days can make …nevertheless, the stretch is 500 plus.

I also need to work on my SE.  A few months ago I zigged in the backend – the admin area, and lost links etc.  and my SE plummeted to below 1% – gulp!  Now when I look at the actual number that come in via SE, it is not far behind what it used to be.  My referral stats have really gone up.  I read somewhere that a perfect pie chart is equal parts of 1/3.  Being as that the world is not perfect … I don’t think I’ll be seeing that any time soon, nor is it a big item with me.

I have noticed that as I keep pushing myself, my concentration is improving as is my output, not just here on this blog, but in my other businesses as well.  This is a neat game.  I like it.

Enroute to reaching that number I am sure there will be other highlights that I will be able to share with you at month end.  I wish the same for you.  In the meantime please visit often – the door is always open here and your comments are most welcome.

To Your Blog Income Success!

Valentina

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