Creating a Daily Blogging Habit (Again)

If you followed my blog long ago, or if you look through the archives, you'll see that I've had this blog for a long time.  I started blogging a long time ago, nearly 17 years ago now, back in December of 2005.  You can find my very first blog post here!  It's absolutely crazy to realize that my blog is old enough to drive, old enough to be a junior in high school, if I had given birth to a child instead of a blog.

Okay, that's slightly weird imagery.  But you get the point.  I've been blogging (and freelancing!) for a very, very, very long time.

Unfortunately, I haven't been blogging regularly this entire time.  I blogged pretty consistently the first several years of my blog, and then my posting frequency started to fall off.  It was pretty sporadic for the last decade or so, with only even a couple of posts to show for some years (if any at all).

What changed?  Honestly, I'm not entirely sure.  Looking back, I think I was in a slump with my freelancing.  For quite some time, I'd only been doing the minimum to keep my freelance career going.  Then last fall (a year ago now!) I started struggling with my energy levels and it was all I could do just to get the bare minimum done.

The doctor tested my vitamin D levels and found they were really low, so she started me on vitamin D supplements, and I started taking a daily multi as well.  My energy levels were just beginning to recover when my horse got sick, and then of course there were no more thoughts of whether I had enough energy for anything, because it was ALL PANIC ALL THE TIME.

I'm really glad that's over, of course, but as he has improved, I've slowly been regaining more and more of my schedule.  Instead of fitting freelancing in here and there as I had time, like I was when he was at his sickest, I've actually been able to focus on my career again.  In addition, I've started a new website and business that I'm really excited about, so it's been fairly natural to work more on my writing website and blog as I work on the new website and blog.

I've been blogging almost daily for a couple of months now, and I'm finding that I really, really missed blogging.  It has a way of keeping me grounded and focused on my career.  It also helps me to maintain a daily writing habit even when I don't have client work to do, and most importantly, provides a dedicated space for my own writing (rather than client-ordered stuff).

It's ironic that I'm getting back into blogging, when it seems like pictures and video are the more popular way to go these days.  I don't mind though.  I still feel like blogging has value (obviously, since I write them professionally for a lot of clients), plus I just love to write.

Scrivener for bloggers

I have to admit I don't use a separate software for my blog posts -- I write them directly into the blog platform -- but if I had to use something, I would use Scrivener.  This isn't a very detailed post, but it does list some compelling reasons why you should consider using Scrivener for blogging:

 Scrivener is Your All In One Software for the Writer or Blogger

Happy 1,111th post

I love hitting interesting milestones on my blog.  I just noticed this week that my next post would be my 1,111th post.  I've been keeping this blog since December of 2005, and although it has changed a lot over the years -- from just general blatherings to a more focused writing blog -- and I've gone through periods of writing more and writing less, I always like seeing these milestones as they pop up.

Happy 1,100 posts!

I like counting things and celebrating milestones.  For instance, in March I celebrated my eighth freelancing anniversary.  Not full-time or even all that seriously -- but my first-ever freelance article (an article for a content site, not something I'm necessarily proud of, but it's what got me started) was sold in March 2005.  (I freelanced full-time for six years, from October 2005 to November 2011.)

This post represents another milestone: It's my 1,100th post on this blog.

Blogging burnout?

I have struggled with keeping up on my blogs lately (as you probably have noticed).  The last day or two, I've actually started to wonder if I am a little burned out on blogging.

Part of it is probably that when I decided last year to shift my focus and start working on my fiction a little more, the client work I hung onto was primarily blogging projects.  As a result, I write a number of blog posts a week, and by the time I'm done writing the ones I get paid for, I don't much want to write any for my own blogs.

But part of it is also just that I've been busy, and that is contributing to my feeling of not wanting to blog even when I have time to do so.  I have, however, been doing some research for the second draft of my novel — there were things that weren't researched properly the first time around (no time to do that during NaNo), and some changes that I decided on for the second draft that require some additional research.

In fact, I've been working so much on the novel recently that I started wondering if I should cut back more of my freelance work, or perhaps reduce my blogging responsibilities by dropping one or two of my blogs.  Not any of those that are earning income from AdSense, obviously, and none that have other importance (such as this blog and my novel website), but maybe I'd feel less burnt out if I wasn't trying to force myself to do more blogging than I actually have time for!

Some things to think about.  In the meantime, stay tuned — I do have a post planned for later this week on something I discovered recently that makes organizing my research a lot easier!

1,000th post!

Today's post is a big milestone — it's the 1,000th post on Swan's Blog.  I started this blog back in December of 2005, which feels like so long ago now.  That means I have kept a blog for over five years now!  Sure, I've gone through some periods of infrequent posting, and I go back and forth on which blog is my favorite (i.e., which gets updated more regularly than the others), but I've had my blogs for almost as long as I've been freelancing.  I don't know anymore what I'd do without my blogs.

What about the rest of my readers?  How long have you been blogging, and how many posts do you have?  Let's be macho and compare the size of our... um... blogs!

Culling the herd

For some time I've kept a separate blog from this one called Reading 4 Writers.  I started the blog some years ago as a review site for writing-related books, but I rarely update it.  It also has very few visitors (something like 29 in the last month, and most of those from an anonymous comment stalker), and the books there are pretty much covered by Livre du Jour, so I've decided to let the domain expire.

I'll copy a few of the reviews over to Livre du Jour, so that those worth saving are not lost.  Normally I should be setting up a forwarding page to Livre du Jour and keeping the domain a while longer, but with only 29 visits, I don't think it's worth the cost of renewing the domain name, as little as that may be.  So in a few more days, you will see one of my blogs disappear.  Farewell, Reading 4 Writers!

Comments and linking on my blogs

I've been getting a lot of spam lately, but what took the cake was a link request I got via my contact form yesterday.  The person who wrote to me pretended to be a teacher who was using my wedding website in class, and had a link suggestion from a student.  Something about it seemed fishy, so I did my homework.

1) The person's email address had a domain name in it that was clearly NOT an official school website.  Upon perusal, it appeared to be a link exchange type of site.

2) The WHOIS information for the above site showed that the site was registered to someone with a different name than the person who wrote to me, and to an address in a different state, so it wasn't a teacher running an education website on the side.

3) My contact forms always give me the IP address of whoever is contacting me, so I looked up the location and found that the "teacher" was writing to me from an entirely different state from where they claimed to teach.

4) Finally, I contacted the school to follow up on the person's story, and discovered that there was no teacher there by that name.  I know this was a bit extreme, but because there was potentially a kid's hurt feelings hanging in the balance, I wanted to be sure it was a falsehood before I told the "teacher" where they could put their link.

Before you comment on one of my blogs or ask me for a link, please know that I monitor all of this pretty closely.  Some of my seldom-updated blogs get a lot of comment spam, so I have to approve comments on those blogs before they are posted.  Why any spammer thinks I will approve the nonsense comments I get is beyond me.  I have also started deleting comments that clearly have nothing to do with the post, even if they are anonymous and contain no links — I suspect they are from spammers, testing me to see whether I still approve comments on those blogs.

My other blogs are set up to post comments without my approval, but they notify me of every comment, so rest assured if yours is spam it will not last long!

Also know that if you email me, my contact forms record your IP address.  I can and will check up on your story, so if you are asking me for a link, be honest about it and don't feed me a B.S. story.  If I feel my readers will benefit from your link, I will add it.  If not, I won't, no matter what your story.  And if I catch you lying to me, I won't do business with you at all.

You would think this kind of thing would be common sense — and common blog etiquette — but it just goes to show to what lengths some folks are willing to go in order to gain a link!

Making time to blog

I've been neglecting my blogs for a long time now, almost all year. I've had a number of things come up throughout the year, until I literally felt like I was barely hanging on, barely able to even manage my client workload, let alone administrative and marketing tasks such as blogging and finding new clients. Put it this way: I have a lot of catching up to do with my email inbox, my freelance income and expense records, and other administrative tasks.

I've been trying harder lately to keep up on my blogs, however. I did miss a week recently, but you'll notice I am trying to get two or three posts up on my blog every week. It's a far cry from the daily posting I used to do, but it's a start.

Part of what I'm doing is trying to make time to blog. A couple of times a week, I make it a point to blog first thing in the morning. This is what I used to do, but with all the trail rides this summer, and feeling pressure to get caught up on the days I didn't go out to the barn in the morning, I'm having to make a real effort now to work this into my schedule. I'm also trying to write and schedule future posts when I have a chance, so that I don't get wrapped up in something else later in the week and forget.

How about you? Do you schedule time for blogging, and when do you find is the best time to do so?

The best indicator of my workload...

...is how seldom I update this blog, I'm afraid.

I've been pretty busy lately, and it usually shows up in the declining frequency with which I blog. The blog most likely to be updated, regardless of my workload, is my horse blog — the others tend to get pushed onto the back burner when I get too busy to maintain all of them (and I have quite a few!).

This is one thing that I need to work on: balancing work and my own projects. I tend to load up on work when I have it, and then inundate my readers with blog posts during slow periods. It's just like how I tend to only market when there is no income in sight (which, luckily, hasn't happened in a while — but still, a bad habit to get into!).

So I'm going to make a list of a few ideas for keeping up on my blogging — and my marketing, for that matter:

* Setting aside an hour of time dedicated to updating my blogs (not reading other people's blogs — I don't need any encouragement there!)

* Focusing on writing rather than reading blogs (something that I've had a difficult time doing since Blogger introduced the dashboard Reading List)

* Scheduling more posts several days or even weeks out when I find I have extra time

How do you avoid neglecting your blog and/or other marketing tasks?

A tribute to a great blogger

Today marks exactly one year since Riverbend last blogged on her Baghdad Burning blog. Iraq is not as hot a topic for Americans as it was during the first couple years of the war, but I still check Riverbend's blog regularly, because of what an influence it has been on me — not just regarding Iraq, but also regarding blogging.

In many ways, Riverbend has been the Anne Frank of the modern era (though I fervently hope her silence doesn't mean she met a similar fate!). Millions of children of all nationalities have learned from Anne Frank what it was like to be Jewish during the Nazi reign — and millions of readers around the world have learned from Riverbend what it means to be a young Iraqi woman during America's war.

The major difference is, of course, the difference in technology. Anne Frank recorded her experiences in a journal, which wasn't published until after the war and her death. Riverbend, on the other hand, was able to post her observations and commentary almost immediately — that is, as soon as she had electricity to run her computer and Internet connection.

Baghdad Burning introduced me to the possibilities of blogging. I first heard about the blog by way of the book, which was on a list of books available for review in a magazine I wrote for. (Riverbend's first year's worth of posts were collected into a book and published in 2005.) Although I wasn't chosen to review Baghdad Burning, I did check it out from the library.

At the time, I was already contributing to several client blogs, but these were fairly dry — nothing like the politically charged Baghdad Burning. Although I had kept a journal since I was 10, I didn't have a blog of my own yet. That changed just a few months later.

As of right now, Riverbend has not updated in a year. Last we heard, she had finally fled to Syria with her family, but there was some doubt as to how long they would be able to stay there. Any number of things could have happened: She could have abandoned her blog, feeling that it had served its purpose of educating readers, or she simply may have not had Internet access for the past year. The fear of many of her readers, though, is that it would have to be something much worse (imprisonment or death) to keep Riverbend from blogging.

I believe that I owe Swan's Blog to Riverbend, as it was Baghdad Burning that first showed me how much a little blog could accomplish. Her fate may be unknown as of yet, but her blog is still online and her book is in print. Her voice can never be silenced as long as her writings circulate. If that's not immortality, I don't know what is!

Scheduled posting comes to regular Blogger

I have interesting timing — Blogger just announced today, shortly after I first started experimenting with scheduled posting in Blogger in Draft, that the scheduled posting feature is now available to everyone in regular Blogger.

In other words, you don't have to log in to Blogger in Draft at all — just start future dating your posts from regular Blogger, and they'll publish at the date and time you schedule them!

Blogger in Draft: Testing, testing, 1-2-3

I can be a little skeptical and resistant to change, so I'm just now trying out Blogger in Draft, a beta version of Blogger that was announced last summer. The feature that clinched it for me was scheduled posting, something I always wished Blogger offered: The ability to schedule posts to publish automatically at certain a date and time.

This post is scheduled to publish in about ten minutes, so we'll find out the scheduled post feature works with my FTP setup. If it does, I may be using Blogger in Draft from now on. It's a great feature, one that I could use to avoid long periods of not blogging — like the one this blog saw recently!

New blogs coming

I've come up with several new blogs lately, and I'm working hard at getting them ready to go. If it seems like I'm neglecting this blog a bit, that's why.

I'll post about it as my other blogs go live!

More on multiple blog categories or labels

Several of my readers expressed interest when I blogged about the multiple categories/labels penalty, so I wanted to share some additional information with you.

According to my client, they've found that there are two ways choosing multiple categories can hurt you. The worst is when the search engines decide not to index your blog post at all. You can test that by searching for your post title, or a unique phrase in your post, in quotes. If the post doesn't show up in the results, the search engines aren't indexing it at all.

The other way that it can hurt you is more subtle: Essentially, choosing too many categories or labels can hurt your blog's PageRank, even if all of the pages are still indexed. When I learned that, I remembered a time when my blog's PageRank dropped suddenly and inexplicably. While I can't remember if the drop coincided with when I started using labels, I'm going to play it safe from here on out!

Perfecting my blog

I'm making some changes to my blog that I hope will improve its ranking.

I found out from a client of mine — an online marketing company for whom I write press releases, articles, and blog posts — that choosing multiple post categories (or labels, as Blogger calls them) can get you dinged for duplicate content.

I'm really bad about choosing multiple categories — sometimes I'll choose four or five for a single post! For each category I choose, my post shows up on a page with all the other posts with that label. So if I choose four labels, my post shows up on four label pages, as well as the main page, the archive page, and the individual post page.

I don't know if that really results in getting dinged for duplicate content, but I might as well try limiting my posts to one label each. And anyway, it'll make things simpler, and perhaps even help me focus my blog posts a little more.

Making money blogging

The Denver Post ran an article yesterday about the money to be made in the blogging business. As usual, the article cites the unusual cases: the folks who make $1,000 or more every month by selling ad space on their own blogs.

However, to its credit the article does note that this is the exception and not the rule:

That doesn't mean bloggers are suddenly flush with money. For every blogger earning a decent side income like Brooks, countless others will never earn a cent.

What I thought was interesting and useful about this article is its discussion of different companies you can use to make money selling ad space on your blog. Here are the services mentioned in the article:

* Google AdSense
* PayPerPost
* BlogAds

Honestly, the only one of these I am familiar with is Google AdSense, which I use on my own blog. And though I am one of those bloggers that earns only peanuts, those peanuts do build up after a while, making a nice bonus for something I'd be doing anyway.

Does anyone have any information or personal experiences with either PayPerPost or BlogAds? I am interested in how they compare to Google AdSense, and I'm sure it's probably a subject of interest for many other bloggers as well.

Happy birthday, Swan's Blog!

Today is my blog's birthday: I started this blog two years ago, on December 3, 2005.

It seems like so long ago; I feel like I've been blogging forever. I actually said in my first post that part of my blog's purpose was to bring additional traffic to my website. I can't believe I even knew that was a benefit of blogging back then.

Since I started this blog, my entire website has seen many changes and improvements, including:

* An updated website template and logo
* An integrated blog (i.e. the blog looking the same as the website)
* An expanded portfolio
* A services page
* A contact form (which has significantly reduced the spam I get)

These are just the cosmetic improvements. Much more important are the many readers I've gained — not to mention the satisfaction of being a part of the online writing community!

500 posts!

You are reading the 500th post on my blog.

I will have had this blog for two years in December. It has (obviously) grown quite a bit since then, but it has also spawned several other blogs. I love to blog, but I never would have known that had I not started this one!

How to be the Anti-Blogger

Now this is a fun meme! The point is to give "evil blogging advice" guaranteed to make other bloggers hate you and avoid your blog like the plague. Thanks to Alicia for passing this on to me!

How to be the Anti-Blogger: An e-Course in 5 Steps

1) Be really offensive. Offend everyone you possibly can, from the entire range of the spectrum. Rail against pretty much every type of person under the sun. Market yourself as a misanthrope.

2) Blog about politics. Nothing pisses people off faster than politics. Be sure to keep #1 in mind while blogging, though. Don't just write about politics — piss all over everyone else's opinions and beliefs.

3) Humiliate your fellow bloggers. Make fun of them every chance you get. The worse you embarrass them, the better!

4) Complain ALL the time. Write 2000-word posts about each of your complaints. Five thousand words for more significant complaints. Then complain some more about how no one reads your blog.

5) Spam everyone else's blogs and email. Post your link in comments at least a dozen times on each blog. Email your fellow bloggers daily whenever you can harvest their email addresses.

If you follow these five simple steps, you will be sure that not only does no one want to read your blog, but also that they hate you with a passion!

I'm tagging: Deborah Ng, Kathy Kehrli, and Kristen King. I would apologize for double-tagging any of you, but...well, that would go against the "evil" spirit of this meme!