It’s Terrible – Throw It Out

Blog content is known to improve considerably as one gets more experience with it. Often, a person just starting out will use very simple sentences, will tend to have paragraphs that drift off topic, and will write extremely short posts. Sometimes one’s opinions will change dramatically as hindsight and new experience teach them where they were previously wrong. In light of new information, tossing out old content would seem a prudent way to “trim the fat” from your blog. After all, the more junk you throw out, the easier it will be for a reader to navigate to your newer and better posts.

It’s Still Valuable – It’s Evergreen – So Keep It

Sometimes information that you consider absurd is still valuable to someone else. Maybe you posted some of your old college papers, and someone ended up finding the insights you shared valuable. You never know who might benefit from your intellectual labors. Because of this, and the fact that some of these benefits may not be conferred until decades later (or even after you’ve died of old age), it would seem most prudent to hold onto your old content. It isn’t as if your blog is expensive to maintain, as well over 90% of blogs are free or run for minimal cost.

The Archive Isn’t Great, but It’s Useful

Even if you absolutely hate the things you’ve written in the past, they can still be valuable for a variety of different reasons. Not the least of these reasons is because you can tell who you used to be. As a person gets older, they can often forget who they were. This is valuable knowledge to keep.

Old blog posts can be a pain to read. However, they can also be beneficial, both for you and for other people who might stumble onto what you wrote in the past.

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Do I just start writing on them again and act like they never faded? Do I give up on them, and start again fresh without any of the baggage and the apparent break in posting? What do you think? What is the best way to revive a dead blog?

Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

I have been thinking about this question a bit, as I look at the new additions to the 9rules group, and at first my response was Problogger.net, but how would I do as the owner of that site? In this scenario, would I have been the original owner, and if so, would the blog still have become popular? Or if I wasn’t the original owner, would the blog have remained popular if I took it over starting today?

It is a really fun question to ponder, and there is more to think about than just the money that the site makes, as some of the highest earning sites spend much of their money on writers, and others don’t always provide the secondary benefits that a high profile site might provide.

I would probably take over BloggingPro as it is the site that people knew me from the best. It was starting to provide some secondary benefits before I moved on to PicApp, and then to my current employment with College Crunch.

Let me know which blog you would pick and why.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

My first thought went right to Darren Rowse or Chris Garrett, as they are idols in my field, but I don’t know if they could easily provide the value that my readers would enjoy. I know both of them have incredible star power online and whatever they would write would probably bring in a fair bit of traffic if it was promoted well, but would they feel comfortable with the audience I have? Would they enjoy talking about the business of blogging and making money online?

They are both brand experts, and amazing at what they do, but I think finding someone closer in line with my niche would probably have an even better effect on this blog. (Though if either of them ever want to publish a post on here, I definitely wouldn’t say ‘no’!)

It is for that reason, I would probably pick my fellow Canadian, John Chow. When he isn’t writing about restaurants, affiliate programs, or his own advertising endeavors, he can have some really insightful and powerful information. I don’t always enjoy his blog or what he has to say, but you have to envy a guy that can find ways to make more than one thousand dollars a day off his blog.

The key though to the guest post would have to be transparency and honesty, which is something that I am not sure John could really do in a blog post, though I feel like if I talked to John a year ago and got a guest post from him, it would have had truth, value, and a great deal of interest from today’s social media promotion circuits.

So the question goes on to you, who would you have as a guest blog author if you could have anyone? Feel free to be as creative as you’d like.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Web Worker Daily recently posted an article about managing kids in the home office, but it seems geared more towards children able to understand concepts such as “a closed door means leave daddy alone” and the upcoming addition of a baby probably wouldn’t be too happy if I tried to make it understand such a concept.

So what do I do? Do I rent an office share for the first year of my child’s life to give me a sanctuary to run to when I really need to pound out massive amounts of work or just head to the coffee shop or park? Do I just find the time when the child is asleep to do short spurts of work whenever I have time?

I am lucky that my wife will be taking maternity leave, and so I will hopefully be able to use that to my advantage, but if you have any advice, I am all for it. While I still have a long time before the baby is born, I really want to be prepared for the business hurdles heading my way.

I am on my third year of working at home, and I still haven’t perfected focusing on what needs to be done, and doing a large block of work efficiently. I watch a television show here or there, play a round or two on the Xbox 360, or work my way through a novel.

I know that all of these things will go out the window once the baby is born, but what about work? My current office at home is right next to the room that will become the baby’s. Even with my wife home to take care of him or her, how will I find the focus to get everything done that needs doing?

I haven’t seen too many blog posts on how well working at home and a baby go, but from the responses I have received elsewhere, it looks like finding an office share outside of home might be a smart move. If you have experiences with this type of situation, or just have some advice, let me know in the comments below.

I troll forums looking for people with the talents I need, and when I contract jobs out to them, I try to make everything as fair as possible when it comes to paying a certain percentage up front, or paying before I receive the files. This has always been a mistake.

Once people get paid, they lose interest.

I will give you an example. A few months back, I decided I was going to build the biggest web application I have ever thought of. I commissioned a person I know through the web only to do the work. He has always been great before on smaller projects, and was giving me a quote that seemed feasible and reasonable.

The payment schedule would be split up, because it was a multi-month job. After seeing and hearing about his progress, I sent the first payment to him. After he received the payment, I haven’t really heard from him since. I got an e-mail a month ago filled with excuses, but no real information on what was going on related to my project.

Another month passed, and still no updates. So today, I have had to e-mail him asking him if he is still interested. If he isn’t and I don’t get my money’s worth of work, the amount I paid him is enough to warrant some form of legal action. What a scary though!

Before I had paid him money, he seemed to be working well. He had shown me a non-functional mockup of the administration panel, and had showed excitement at getting the database schema set up in such a way that the site should work well, and not have too many growing pains when we filled it with insane amounts of data.

It really made me sad to see the whole project fall apart. Despite his professionalism at the start, his interest quickly disappeared, leaving me in the lurch.

I have had the same problem finding competent and trustworthy bloggers, designers, and all sorts of programmers. The money I made isn’t enough to allow for losses related to projects people just “decide” to drop after taking a payment. Not only does it make me angry, but I end up having to do certain things on my own to make up for their disappearance, thus costing me time on other work I could be doing.

Is it just my bad luck, or have others had the same issues? How do you find good, trustworthy freelancers without breaking the bank?

About two years ago, I was doing monthly backups on three 700 MB CD’s a month. About a year ago, I started doing them on one 4.3 GB DVD each month. Now, with the increase in the amount of computers, and the raw data I am creating, I am thinking about going to a hard drive backup system.

I have an external hard drive that I use for backing up before formatting a system, but it is only 120 GB, and I would like to keep it as that quick, one time use backup solution for getting my machine ready for formatting.

So I am considering buying two 500 GB SATA hard drives, and an external USB 2.0 drive bay. This is the cheapest way to start backing things up regularly, but not the most effective. I will have lots of space, and I could stagger my backups so that one week they are on the first hard drive, and the second week they are on the second hard drive, and back and forth. That way if one hard drive ever fails, the most I would lose is a week of work.

What I am seriously considering though is going a step further and getting a small, two bay, network attached storage device. I could put the two hard drives inside, and set them to RAID-1, which would mirror the data on both hard drives. This would give me only 500GB of space, but if a single drive ever failed, I would be protected from any data loss. This is also one of the more expensive options I have to keep my data backed up, as it requires two drives, but really only gives me one drive worth of space.

I could take my computer tower that isn’t really being used for anything, buy a serial-ATA controller, throw some hard drives into it, and using some software, change it into a network attached storage box. This could also provide me with a RAID-1 setup, as well as some other features. I haven’t really looked into doing this as of yet, but it seems like a cheaper, and infinitely more expandable option. I am not sure which software I would use to do this, and would love to hear some options if anyone knows of some.

Of course, some might wonder why I don’t consider a Drobo, despite its popularity, the device, while really interesting, is far too expensive for me to splurge on. At nearly $500 for just the four bay device, Drobo would set me back over $700, where my other options are around half as expensive.

Yes, Drobo has some interesting features, like a light that tells you the status of the hard drive, and being able to used mixed size drives, among other things, I don’t think its features warrant the current price.

The last option on my list is to get some storage online. I haven’t really investigated something like this yet, but I think it would be interesting. Either something like using Amazon’s S3 service to back up my hard drives, somehow, or a data server from some web hosting-like company. If someone has done research into using a web service as an online backup solution, I would love to hear it. My main concern though is that the cost will mount quite quickly compared to a hard drive based solution.

How do you back up all your files? Do you have an automated system, or do you have to remember every week, month, or quarter? If you were going to buy a backup system today, and your budget was under $500, what would you select? I would love some advice if you have any.

Now, with all the work I do for Splashpress Media, I sometimes don’t feel like I have enough time to spend on crafting articles. So now my posting speed has gone down, and my quality is fairly low, and so that brings up the question of posting routines and whatnot. Do you post on your blog enough? And if you do, is the quality as high as you would like it to be?

The really funny part about this whole post is that I almost want to start another blog for a subject I am interested in.

I have made some great friends, contacts, and networked with some of the best online, but I sometimes feel like the path I took in becoming a full time problogger made sure that I didn’t really get noticed.

When I first started blogging for money, I wasn’t really much better than those automated spam blogs that shoot out hundreds of posts a month that do nothing more than quote news from other sites and link back to them. I slowly got better, but writing on half a dozen to a dozen blogs meant that people didn’t really attach themselves to me, but instead to the site, and its content.

I have participated in making over a two dozen WordPress themes, about half of which have been given out into the community for free. I have written over five thousand posts, attended a few conferences, been a co-host on a variety of podcasts, and been interviewed for an article on blogging for a local paper, and so I would like to think that I have become relatively well known online.

I bring this whole insecurity up, in part because I watch as Chris Garrett, a well known writer continues to publish material on dozens of sites, and people will read those sites because he is there writing on them. He has a following.

I watch as J. Angelo Racoma, Abe Olandres and John Chow get covered by television reporters.

It makes me wonder if I have made mistakes in my career. Missteps that might have brought me more attention online.

Why is attention so important? Well, things change, especially in the online world. People change companies, change blogs, and as such, without a following, they have to start all over.

I know it is vain, and probably doesn’t seem important to anyone else, but I’d love to know where I stand online.