Working Blogger

Yehuda has a great post up on How I Became a Professional Blogger. His post shows how blogging about things that you enjoy can lead to big things, but what I liked best was that it reminded me to count all the blessings of blogging - including the indirect benefits.

Yehuda writes:

“The indirect results:

I landed a professional blogging position at a company. I went in for a programming position and offered instead to be their company blogger. And they accepted.

I have had a game published by a publisher who is one my readers.

I’ve received dozens of free games to review.

My writing is getting better all the time.

I know hundreds of great people around the world.

I’ve had articles published in professional journals around the world. I’ve even been interviewed a few times on various subjects.

I know a lot about my field and interest.

I’m enjoying myself.”

And reading through his list, I can most definitely say the same about my blogging journey - there have been a lot of indirect perks:

* I landed some great freelance blogging positions

* I’ve received a ton of stuff to review: games, books, software, ebooks and gadgets.

* I’ve met lots of wonderful people online and in person

* I met one of my best friends and co-blogger through my first blog

* I’ve gone from needing someone to help me install Wordpress to being able to easily install and upgrade Wordpress on my own, as well as tweak the php in themes.

* I get the chance to experiment with different ideas and get creative - and if something doesn’t stick, I’ve learned that it’s all okay

* I get to blog about things I’m really passionate about, and have learned that I can do it with flexibility and without worrying about whether I’m building up a readership

* I have a ton of fun every day.

That’s not to say the monetary benefits of blogging aren’t fun, too. It’s great that an increasing part of my income comes from blogging, and I see the numbers go up every day, even if it’s only slightly. That’s a pretty empowering thing for me.

And because I do make money with my niche blogs, I was able let go of the idea that I needed to build up a huge readership for the blogs that I’m passionate about, and now that I’ve been able to let that go, the fun has come back with those blogs, too.

Thanks, Yehuda, for a great reminder that there’s more to blogging than just making money.

The one thing I really like about blogging is the ease with which you can play with new ideas, explore different territory and just try things on for size.

For the past few months I’ve been trying out a long-term focus, without my usual goal of monetizing what I do.

And I’ve now come to a few conclusions.

The main one is that I have a lot of fun when it comes to focusing on making money - I get so many ideas, and I’ve been missing having those ideas lately.

And the other main conclusion is that with my new blogs - the ones with the long-term focus - I haven’t been enjoying the pressure to write regularly and consistently, even though these are areas that interest me. I love writing posts for these blogs, but I find that I enjoy it most when I’m feeling inspired.

When I push myself to sit down and blog consistently at these blogs, I’m just not having fun with any of it.

It’s far more fun to network with other bloggers when it’s not something that’s on my to-do list for the day.

In other words, I’m finding that blogging about my passions has all of a sudden taken on the feel of “a job”. Which was not my goal.

I have no problems blogging at my niche blogs, though, the ones that do make me money. In fact, I rather enjoy my daily blogging. It’s fun finding things to blog about, it’s fun checking my feeds, it’s fun watching my stats and checking the various monetizing avenues I’m employing.

My freelance blogging is also quite enjoyable, too. When I find material for each post, I get this nice little feeling of achievement.

And lately I’ve been having a run of success with some of my older blogs, ones that I hadn’t actually been blogging at very consistently. Sales are up, impressions are up. (Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Yet.)

New ideas to expand on things are now brewing. Bringing me back full circle to thinking about making money.

So I’ve decided that I’m just going to go with what feels best for me.

I enjoy my new blogs, and readers seem to be interested in what I write - I’ve been getting quite a lot of feedback, especially through email. I’m finding that I want to keep enjoying my new blogs. Not feel forced, not feel constricted.

So I’m going to commit the blogging heresy of writing when an idea comes to me, and not forcing it otherwise. At these blogs, I don’t see the point of posting “stuff” just for the sake of posting regularly. I have the feeling it’s not really what my readers are looking for.

And I’m finding that my focus has shifted back to the money. It’s just too tempting, all these new sales and the increases in traffic that some of my niche blogs have been attracting.

Not to mention, it’s prime time now to gear up for the Christmas season.

So this week, I’ll be spending time adding links to monetize old posts. It’ll be quite a chore, but I’ve been finding that there IS gold in my archives.

And I’ll be writing at my new blogs when inspired. I have this funny feeling that I’m going to be more inspired than not, now that I’ve made this decision.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind yet again anytime in the near or distant future.

This has been an interesting week so far, and I’ve learned a few things, which is always good.

1. Remember to check incoming links.

I post to all of my blogs using ecto - it’s one of my favorite things in my “blogger’s productivity toolbox”.

But posting via ecto does mean that I hardly ever log into any of my blogs using Wordpress’s wp-admin, and so I hardly ever see the Dashboard. And I find that the Dashboard is a much better way of seeing at a glance who’s linking in - better than stats, because you’ve got to click a few levels in sometimes to find anything.

But if you don’t check the Dashboard often, since it only shows the most recent links in, you miss things.

So I just discovered that I had missed Teli’s tagging me with the Five Successful Habits tag earlier this month. And as a result, I’m a little late now to join in on Aaron’s Simply Successful Secrets group writing project at Today is that Day.

The good news is that there are some great reads in the Simply Successful Secrets round-up.

(And Teli, I’ll still play, in a later post!)

2. Remember to check Adsense code, especially when you’re co-blogging with someone.

I’m still feeling a little red in the face about this one. I recently changed over the theme for GadgetChick, where I co-blog with my friend Chrissie.

We’ve been doing very well in the past couple of weeks in terms of ramping up our visitor count, and then one day she asked me how the Adsense was looking. It turned out she stopped seeing impressions for the channel she had set up for GadgetChick since I changed over the theme, and assumed that I had gone with one code to make things easier.

I said, “I’m doing okay. What about you?”

And that’s when I learned she had seen NO impressions. A hurried look at the code revealed that the publisher id that was showing up for Chrissie’s posts wasn’t her publisher id.

It wasn’t mine, either.

To make a long story short, when we had first set up the blog, another friend of ours was involved, but she never ended up blogging with us. And when I changed over the theme, I switched over the WRONG Adsense code - instead of Chrissie’s publisher id, we were using our other friend’s publisher id on all of Chrissie’s posts.

(We’re all friends, though, thank goodness. So all’s well.)

Now when I make any changes, I immediately shoot Chrissie an email. Just in case.

3. Blogging is a fast-paced world. Checking in on favorite feeds regularly is a good thing.

I’ve been busy the past few days, so didn’t get to do any feed reading for myself - which meant I didn’t touch my folder of feeds from blogs that blog about blogging (that’s quite a mouthful!).

So I was a few days late catching Darren’s post Social Bookmarking and Networking - How Involved Are You?, which was in answer to a question I had recently asked him about how to figure out what sites I should spend my energy on.

But the good news is, I’m there now, and it’s a great read. Lots of comments in answer to the question that Darren posed, and I think now that I need to just experiment with different social bookmarking and networking sites, and go with the ones that work best for me.

4. Backups are good. Backups are fabulous. Backups are incredible lifesavers.

Not entirely blogging-related, but my brand new HP desktop crashed on me over the weekend. It was quite a scramble getting set up again on my old computer while the new one goes into the shop.

(Thank goodness for warranties.)

The bad news was that I hadn’t been in the habit of backing up everything. The good news was that it was a strange sort of crash, and I was able to back up everything before it was too late.

Which is a good reminder for me to set up my database backups for my newer blogs.

So all in all, it’s been a good week. A busy week. And I learned a few things, too.

I just fattened my Google Reader (again). Daily Blog Tips has posted a list of the top 25 blogs about blogging which will be regularly updated.

The rankings are based on Google Page Rank, Alexa, Bloglines subscribers and Technorati Authority. There were actually a handful of blogs that I hadn’t subscribed to - but I remedied that pretty fast.

I don’t know about you, but I am always getting “link exchange” requests that go something like this:

Hi, Webmaster,

I just came across your site on (Niche A) and I think it would be very beneficial for you to link to my site, www.Nothing-At-All-To-Do-With-Niche-A.com. I have added a link to you on this page: Buried-Page-Four-Levels-Deep.html. You will get much traffic and nice pagerank. Please note that I will remove your link if you do not link back within 2 days.

So today I was reading Alex King’s post, Building alexking.org 2.0, part 11: Monetization, and I came across this really great idea for dealing with these kinds of “link exchange” requests:

While I use Text Link Ads to sell links on prominent pages on this site, I also offer text links on all other pages using my own system. These are fairly expensive and I haven’t sold many (perhaps I’ll drop the price a little), but it’s nice to be able refer “link exchange” requests to my link purchasing page.

I have to say, I really really like this idea. I probably wouldn’t make any money from responding to these requests with a link to my link purchasing page, but what a great feeling!

Maybe it’s time to try out the WP Text Ads plugin that Ryan Imel reviewed in a guest post over at Problogger the other day.