Your First 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst

Darren Rowse hits the nail on the head when talking about becoming a blogger, in his short, but succinct post entitled “Your first 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst“.

Like anything – blogging is something that the majority of us are not brilliant at in our early days. I look back at some of the posts I wrote in my first year of blogging and shudder with embarrassment. The mistakes were spectacular and frequent.

However with each mistake and failure comes a lesson, with every post comes comes a new skill and with each experiment comes a discovery of a technique that works (or doesn’t work).

As always, amazing writing by THE Problogger.

Originally posted on October 10, 2007 @ 10:28 pm

Google PageRank Penalty: Text Link Ads

Well, it looks like Google is cracking down on paid links, and some people are being hit hard with their rank dropping. The Stanford Daily saw their PageRank drop from an incredible PR 9 to a PR 7.

I have yet to hear one person say that their rank has gone up. This doesn’t mean that people won’t see their rankings rise over the next while, but Google is on the warpath against paid links.

It looks like Text-Link-Ads and similar companies might have a huge issue on their hand, and if nothing else, it can’t be good publicity, since the majority of their pricing is based on Google’s PageRank, and people buy these links in hopes of gaining PageRank to their own sites.

I have yet to experience any negative side effects on any of my blogs, but I am a very lightweight advertising sales person. I think I currently have one text link sold amongst all my blogs.

So far many of the sites owners I have talked to aren’t concerned about their dropping rankings as they continue to focus on bringing good content and an abundance of traffic to their sites, but over time this could become a competitive edge for those willing to forgo selling text links, and monetizing their blogs other ways. These sites that find these alternative revenue builders, could then eventually rank higher in Google, causing those selling links to re-think their lack of concern.

The question I have been getting quite often by people just entering the world of advertising sales is, “how does Google know I am selling text links?” Well, with systems like Text-Link-Ads and other text link sales companies, they have you put code on your site, and that leaves a footprint that Google can then search for, and once identified, and probably checked by a real person, they can adjust your PageRank accordingly.

The whole paid link market has to change, Google is forcing them to. It is a very interesting time to be an Internet marketer.

Originally posted on October 9, 2007 @ 9:13 pm

7 Tips for the Traveling Blogger

I haven’t got to do much traveling this year, having instead spent my money on getting married, and buying a house, but over on Daily Blog Tips, there is a great post about being a traveling blogger and I couldn’t agree more with the article.

Here is a snippet from the post:

Don’t be afraid to use pen and paper. You may or may not have access to a computer on your trip. As it turns out, though, it’s possible to manually etch your writing onto paper with a stylus. I know it sounds crazy, but it actually works. Sure, you can’t actually post to your blog, and there’s no automatic spell check, but you can always take care of those details later. The important thing is to write, so don’t be afraid to break out a pen and paper when the need arises.

Before I bought my laptop, I did this all the time. I would write out a list of points I wanted to cover, some sentences or paragraphs I wanted to include and some other miscellaneous notes to make sure that my post would come together nicely when I sat back at my computer.

You don’t need to write out every word you will use in your post, but if you don’t record your thoughts at the time, and you are anything like me, the detail, and the emotion will be lost from the post when you later try to recollect what you wanted to say.

A great post for the traveling blogger.

Originally posted on October 5, 2007 @ 9:56 pm

Beat September Traffic in Ten Days

I am absolutely stunned by the readers of eXtra for Every Publisher. You all are amazing. In the last ten days, thanks to each and every one of you, this site has received more traffic than all of September.

In September, Xfep received 5202 unique visitors. In October, the site has already received 5205 unique visitors.

I want to thank all of you for reading, and continuing to show your support. Your comments, and readership are what makes this site so great. I hope you are all learning new things, and taking away the information you need to make your blog, blog network, or other niche related site a success.

Originally posted on October 10, 2007 @ 11:48 am

World Problogger List: Update 2

World Problogger List

If you don’t know what the World Problogger List is, please check out my previous post announcing its creation.

So, we are getting close to 40 bloggers listed on the World Problogger List, but I want to see more. I would really be happy if we could get the list up to 50 bloggers by the end of October.

So if you know someone making more than $100 a month from their blogging efforts, and are interested in adding their name, primary blog URL, and location to the list, please comment on any of the World Problogger List related posts on this blog, and after I do a quick check to make sure you are not spammy, I will add your name to the list.

Originally posted on October 5, 2007 @ 10:13 pm