Blogging · Dominic Foster

Habit of Highly Effective Blogging

May 24, 2006 on 9:18 am | In Blogging | 5 Comments

As part of Darrens request for ideas on Habits of Highly Effective Blogging, here is the most effective habit that I use:

Get out of bed early and start blogging quickly

This probably does not sound very exciting or even inspiring, but for me jumping out of bed as early as possible and getting online is the most effective way of boosting production.

However, getting up early does not necessarily mean jumping out of your pit at 5.30am sharp each day. I know from experience that when blogging is providing a major part of your income, that blogging into the early hours is not uncommon. Even going to bed and hopping out again an hour later because you can’t sleep for all the ideas in your head, and getting them into some blog posts is of utmost importance because you will probably forget them by the morining. Sometimes, if you don’t get to bed until 2.30am, getting up early can mean getting up at 8.00am.

So, for me, getting up early means getting up when I wake up - which is usually between 5.30am and 6.00am. By doing this I can be at the computer going through my start-of-the-day routine which involves checking stats, checking affilliate programs and then checking emails and RSS incase there is news that I should start blogging about. News includes material from news sources and marketing/PR material from affilliate programs.

Then I can get into my next routine which is writing my ’stock’ posts for the day. These are the posts which are form the regular daily articles/reviews etc. Once this is done then I’m virtually free to carry out research on my niches and running other aspects of my business.

By getting up early, it means that I can get into ‘The Zone’ pretty quickly and effectively manage my workload and get everything done by lunchtime. This then gives me about 2-3 hours of consulting/research time before my kids finish kindergarten. I’m then free to have family time until the kids go to bed, and then some time with my partner.

I usually do a couple of hours of work before going to bed, which might include writing a couple of posts, catching up on emails or doing some research.

My least effective days come as a result of waking up early and then rolling over and going back to sleep for an hour or two. When I do eventually get up, I feel unmotivated and without any direction. Breakfast usually takes a hour or so and I get distracted easily.

ProBlogger enables full RSS Feeds

April 20, 2006 on 7:28 am | In Blogging | No Comments

Well Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is back from holiday and it looks like he must be in good spirits from a well deserved break as he has enabled full RSS feeds for his blog.

This is great news for me as I have posted before what I think about truncated RSS feeds and ProBlogger is one of the few sites where the content has so much value that I have to click through to the full post.

Well done Darren. I hope this will continue and I believe you have done the right thing.

It’s official, He’s a 4 Figure Online Worker!

October 31, 2005 on 9:44 pm | In AdSense, Blogging | 1 Comment

Big congratulations go out to Drew who runs Work Online from Home - How I did it.

I first came across this blog when I started blogging myself back in July. Drew had set up his blog at the same time with similar intentions to myself - i.e. to earn some cash from the internet. In fact, I believe we were both inspired by Darren Rowse’s Slashdotting about his Google AdSense cheque.

However, he is now pulling down about $25 a day in AdSense (about ten times my daily average) and some more from other Ad providers and affilliate programs. He has published a graph of his earnings too.

The great thing is though, that this guy started his online business because of being made redundant and has been blogging to document his journey so far.

I believe he has really achieved something special - A shining example of what can be accomplished when you have to!

Also, He is from Dunedin in New Zealand.

I am from Auckland - So Drew, let me know if you are ever coming up to visit the Jaffa’s, I’d like to buy you a beer and pick your brains about your online strategy!!

Article Submissions

October 14, 2005 on 8:31 pm | In Blogging, SEO | No Comments

On the advice of Yaro Starak’s Beginners Guide to Backlinks, I have recently taken the bold step of submitting a couple of articles to
Ezine @rticles.

The main reason for this is an exercise in increasing backlinks to my web-sites - but also to experiment with writing to a wider audience.

Syndicating your work on an article submission website serves to increase your backlinks because whoever publishes your articles is obliged to also publish a link to your web-site(s). If you manage to write a very popular article, then you could theoretically be looking at an awful lot of backlinks.

The article submission site that I used - Ezine @rticles - has a whole catalog of categorised articles available for free publishing on web-sites. There is even a category for writing articles!

The whole exercise was pretty straight forward. I just signed up for free membership, re-hashed a couple of articles I had already written on my Blogs, and then submitted them for review. A day later they were approved and they are now being viewed by publishers.

I’m not sure if anyone has published them though

Here are my articles incase you are interested

The Million Dollar Homepage

October 3, 2005 on 12:37 pm | In Blogging, Etc... | 3 Comments

I have just signed up for an interesting project at at Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneurs-Journey blog. Yaro plans to purchas a 100 pixel package at The Million Dollar Homepage which will link to his website. The package costs $100, but he has invited people to pay for a $10 share in his purchase. If you pay for a share, he will link to your website for a month and also report back on the traffic that he receives from The Million Dollar Homepage.

Alex Tew - who created The Million Dollar Homepage has already raised $252,900 - so has $747,100 worth of space left to sell.

Yaro has already sold $74.95 of his pixels (including my purchase - as long as it has gone through) - so has only $25.05 left to sell.

It will be interesting to see how much traffic I get from entrepreneurs-journey.com.

Website Hosting - Dreamhost Sale

September 30, 2005 on 8:24 pm | In Blogging, Etc... | No Comments

If you are thinking of buying some shared Web Hosting, then I suggest you check out DreamHost because they are currently having a Massive Birthday Sale.

Use the DreamHost promo code “888″ and you can get the following for $10 per month with 80% discount for the first year:

4800 MB of disk storage - which increases by 40MB each week!
120 GB Monthly Bandwidth - which increases by 1GB each week!
600 email addresses
1 Free domain registration
UNLIMITED DOMAINS HOSTED!

There is also a whole bunch of other stuff which is too much to mention here.

One problem though! This offer is only available for the first 888 takers. So if you are considering it you may want to get there now and check that they offer everything that you require for your hosting.

Day 31 - The End

September 1, 2005 on 8:45 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | 1 Comment

Well it’s the end of my 31 Days to a Better Blog project.

It seems like ages sinces I started taking a serious look at my Blogging practice after Darren Rowse anounced that he would be spending the whole of August posting tips on How to Make Your Blog Better.

And now what? I think that I have learned a whole heap about a topic I knew practically nothing about 31 days ago. Now I think I’m going to re-assess my Blogging Purpose and really get into it.

I think that the thing I have enjoyed the most is the just writing the posts - as my day job is Software Development - I think that Blogging has provided something which I don’t get from my career. Not to mention what I have learned about marketing my Blog - Before the start of August, I think I was only getting a handful of visitors each day. I honestly think that the web-crawler-bots were my biggest fans! Now I’m getting an average of 175 visitors and 610 page hits per day. For the month of August I’ve had a total of 5441 vistors.

So stay tuned and we’ll see what develops!

And thanks for visiting.

favicon.ico - Typo

September 1, 2005 on 8:18 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | 13 Comments

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had the good fortune to attend a talk by Betsy Akoi on The Power of Blogging.

One of the things she said that could inadvertently increase traffic to your Blog by accidentally spelling something wrong.

Yaro Starak recently Blogged about how he is sometimes Obsessing With Traffic Logs and I am not ashamed to admit that I am often obsessed with my Traffic Logs. I just find it so fascinating to see which countries my visitors are coming from (oh the joy when New Zealand fell to the 3rd highest traffic - most of it mine!), Which Web Sites they are linking from, and the Search Queries which people are typing into the Search Engines.

Something that I noticed after Betsy’s talk, was that a few people end up here after typing ‘faveicon.ico’ - well 9 to be exact - and it had never occurred that I had mispelt faveicon.ico.

So I though that posting this might be of interest to some people - perhaps you should check if a similar thing has happened to you.

Also, you will notice that I have spelt favicon.ico correctly for this post. I’m waiting to see whether faveicon.ico or favicon.ico generates the most traffic!

Day 29 - Roundup

August 29, 2005 on 9:57 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | No Comments

Well I’m feeling pretty zombified after sitting through about 8 hours of Microsoft TechEd presentations in Auckland today - listening to MS guys talking about SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET and Betsy Aoki’s talk on The Power of Blogging.

I can’t believe it is day 29 of my 31 Days to a Better Blog project - and what is more, I can’t believe I have learnt so much about Blogging - or indeed, that there was so much to learn, and so much left to learn.

As you can see, I haven’t posted for a couple of days due to another family weekend. I must say that it has actually been quite nice taking the weekends off from the computer.

I think that I’m now going to make a start on some kind of article to document and post about my experiences of this August and my introduction to the adictable process of Blogging.

The Power of Blogging

August 29, 2005 on 9:37 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blogging | 2 Comments

I’ve just spent the whole day ad Microsoft TechEd - which is an annual conference that Microsoft puts on for IT professionals - and was fortunate enough to be able to attend a session called The Power of Blogging given by Betsy Akoi - who is the Microsoft Community Program Manager in Redmond and is responsible for the blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com sites and the ongoing rejuvenation of www.gotdotnet.com.

Betsy talked a fair bit about Community Server (Since it is a Microsoft Event) - The components that it is made of and it’s development history. She then went on to discuss her philosophy of Blogging and some tips from herself and her colleague Robert Scoble.

So I picked up my pen and started to scribble furiously. Unfortunately, there was a lot to cover, and Betsy gave the PowerPoint presentation a hammering! Here’s what I did manage to get down before deciding to ask Betsy for the presentation file after her talk:

Build Momentum

Find about 50 Blogs to read and get a feel for your topic - study the Blogrolls of those Bloggers
Comment on their Blogging - and if relevant - link back

Promote

Use Blog Search Engines such as Technorati, Feedster, PubSub. Spend a month absorbing what goes on in these sites.
Create credibility

Other Stuff

Fight comment spam.
Think about what you are posting.
Look for your typos and spelling miskates.

Apologies for this looking a bit stark and garbled but I can only just read the shocking notes that I made during the session (I’m now dreading next weeks development meeting when I have to report back to my colleagues about everything I have learned at TechEd).

I promise that when I get the PowerPoint presentation from Betsy that I will blog about it in more detail!

So thanks for the great presentation Betsy - and.. err.. sorry - I’m afraid I don’t use Community Server.