One of the difference between an average blogger just starting out and another who has set blogs up numerous times is the amount of content they have starting out.

When most bloggers first start out, they install wordpress and immediately try to promote it.  They want everyone to know about their blog as they are all excited about this whole concept and start emailing other bloggers in their niche, telling them to check the blog out.  They ask for links, they tell everyone the URL of their blog but they don’t realize that the blog doesn’t even have that much content!

With like 3 posts, what impression does that give an establish blogger? What did you expect readers to feel when they go to your blog and see an empty blog?

Compare this with an established blogger who launches a blog with 50 posts.  Although the blog might be brand new, it will immediately bring value for the visitor once they decide to click pass the first page. Whether it’s the about page, the interaction of the poll or other pillar articles, a blog with established content can potentially capture visitors into readers from day one.

There’s also the reputation and brand to consider.  If we were to build a brand based on a blog, it wouldn’t be good to have people associate the brand with an empty blog.  We want the brand to be associated with something successful and positive, and a brand new blog with 3 posts absolutely doesn’t relate to anything positive.

If you are going to start a blog (or another one from scratch), seriously consider writing a bunch of articles first before making it public.

Q: This is all great but how do you have established content on the blog without it going public?

A: There are many ways to do this with Wordpress.  Stay tuned for the next article.

In theory, we all know that blogging for our passion is the way to go but in reality, the choice between money and passion is very tough to make.  Before I was born, my dad chose to change his profession because of $500 HKD (about $50 USD) a month in salary.  When I first heard about this, I was extremely surprised because he made such an important decision for not that much money, but I realized later in life that my family was having a really tough time making ends meet back then that every penny counted.  My dad didn’t make the choice because he wanted more money, he felt like he had to.

Everyone who blogs will tell you that blogging is hard work.  At the end of the day, we want something to show for it.  We want something to tell us that all our hard work was worth it, and that the time we spent is not wasted.  Some people want readership, some people want fame and most people want money.

Choosing a niche that’s profitable versus choosing a niche that you are passionate about is a question that we talk about often.  Normally, I try not to give advice with definitive answers because every situation is different but let me tell you this - blog about your passion!

You Have to be Content to Write Content
The main reason why you should write about a topic you are passionate about is because of satisfaction.  Blogging is hard work and if you aren’t passionate about the subject, then forget about it.  If you are enthusiastic about what you write about, it will show in the articles and that quite frankly is attractive.

Another benefit is that you will naturally want to dig deep into everything that’s related to something you love and the knowledge you gain will reflect on the posts that you will write about.

Think about Money and You will Likely Give Up at the Beginning
Everyone can write about any topic for a few short months but only the most passionate ones can write about the same topic day in and day out for extended periods of time.  If you pick a niche only because of the potential money you can make, it’s very hard to keep up at the beginning when no one seems to be reading your posts.

You Better Believe that Everyone Sees the Same Opportunities
When a niche seems very profitable, many people will start trying to write about it.  In a crowded niche, it’s very hard to distinguish yourself from the pack so gaining readership is extremely hard unless you have very good content.  If you aren’t passionate or knowledgeable about the subject, then chances are your blog will stay unknown.

Every Niche can be Profitable
The wonderful thing about blogging and the web in general is its widespread reach.  As narrow as you think your interests are, there are tons of other people that share the same interests.  Once you build a following, a blog on any niche can be profitable.

Blog about what you love, and people who share that love will follow you!

Final Thoughts
Not enough can ever be said about picking a niche that you are passionate about.  I see way too many people trying to write about something that they know nothing about, thinking that they will become rich because others do it.  A blog deserves and demands you to be passionate!  So respect its desires and feed it with your energy!

Some of my friends in the blogsphere are starting to believe that subscribers to their blogs are meaningless.  These readers rarely come to their site and when they do, they never click on ads that are present on their blogs.  They feel that although these readers read their content, they rarely give back.  I couldn’t disagree more.

Readers, whether they are subscribers or causal readers that type in busyblogging.com in the browser is the foundation of my blog.  These people not only give me energy to write, they also motivate and encourage me to continue doing this.

Sure, the income is nice but the main reason why I’m passionate about writing my blogs is because of my readers.

These readers comment on my posts and share their ideas for me to learn from.  They email me and allow me to help them and they share their success stories to let me know that what I’m writing about actually helps people.  What’s not to like about these readers?

Without readers, a blog is lifeless.  I’m sure we all remember the good old days when our blogs never get any visitors, the days when every post we write have 0 comments, and the same days that we spend so much time but feel like we are talking to ourselves.  We don’t miss those days, I certainly don’t.

To hear people say that a subscriber is meaningless hurts me.  It shows that the blogger is not really passionate about blogging.  All I can say to that is “good luck”.

I would go to great lengths to gain readership.   Personally, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing my subscriber count going up, to see more comments on my post and to interact and know more readers and fellow bloggers.

To me, that’s the core of what a blog is - to interact and share ideas with others.   This is the best part about doing and I love every minute of it.

Thank you for being a reader.  Thank you for continuing to support this blog as without you, this blog is nothing.

When it comes to your blog, branding should be of the highest priority.  Potential clients always have options, as there are many alternatives in the marketplace today.  If you make money by selling advertisements, your brand will help attract advertisers.  If you sell services, then your brand will help you qualify and generate leads.

Even if making money is not in the plans for your blog, building a brand will help bring in more traffic and readership! Therefore, it is important to start focusing on building your brand. If you never thought about this, the time to start is now.

Get Started

Here are a few pointers to help lead you in the right direction.

State the Facts
As a blog, the articles we write form the foundation in which our brand is based on. It is crucial that we state the facts and not guess.  Readers will quickly spot the bloggers who know the facts versus the ones that just type without reference.

Show Consistency
Eventually, there will be readers who follow your blog.  Show integrity and consistency by continually giving messages that don’t conflict with each other.  If the writing and mindset changes from article to article, it is impossible for people to build trust.

Be Unique
Be it the blog design, advices written or delivery method, there should be a level of uniqueness in your blog.  As I said earlier, there are alternatives out there.  Don’t just aim to be a “me too” blog.

Better to be Interesting to Some than Mediocre to Everyone
In order for people to come back, there should be a reason to come back. Don’t try to tailor to everyone because it is impossible. Instead, make sure that there are people who will love your blog so you can capture those readers. Give people a reason to come back, even if it’s at the expense of some others.

Be Coherent
At the end of the day, it is a blog you are writing on. Although you don’t need to be an English major, your readers will need to be able to understand your writing. Once you are done writing the article. At least read it over once to make sure it is understandable by someone other than you.

It is also not a bad idea to ask someone else to read your article and then tell you what the article is about. This will give you insight into how someone else perceives your article for you to make changes if necessary.

Be Yourself
Not that it is impossible, but it is too hard to pretend to be someone else. Your articles should reflect your true feelings and beliefs in topics you write about.

One Last Thing to Note

Be patient with brand building as it is a long (in fact never ending) journey. Keep the above points in mind and your brand will be developed, traffic will come and money will be made.

How often we should post on our blogs for maximum effectiveness is always a question that I get asked. There are many people that think posting multiple times a day is the way to go while there are equally as many people that think posting once a day is the optimal.  Here are the common arguments on each side.

Posting Multiple Times a Day

• Google likes your blog more and will send you more traffic when it’s updated often.
• Visitors will always have fresh content when they come to your blog, even if they come multiple times a day.
• Posting more frequently means there are more posts in the archives for readers to search.
• Most high profile blogs do this, I don’t know why but it must be better!

Posting Once a Day

• Consistency is always a good thing.  It sets your readers up with an expectation that you are posting regularly but not excessively.
• Posting once a day gives you a chance to feel fresh and write good content.
• As each post is up at the top of the page for longer periods of time, it tends to get more participation.
• More participation lends itself to more links from your fellow bloggers

So what should we do?  The answer lies in blog popularity, monetization scheme and the time you have for your blog.

Posting Frequency Depends on Your Time
Let’s talk about the last one first - Time.  Other than a select few of us who are lucky enough to do this full time, most people still have at least a 9 to 5 day job to keep up along with our daily lives!  Let’s face reality here.  We just don’t have time to write multiple blog posts a day and keep up with this long term.

Consistency is really important for your readers, so rather than posting 4 times a day for a week and no posts for 2 weeks, schedule the posts out!

Posting Frequency Should Be Tied to Blog Popularity
One of the most important aspects of a blog is its interactivity.  When readers come to a blog, they want to not only read great content but also great comments!  Your readers absolutely add value to your posts when they comment.  Not only will they sometimes add different perspectives to the topic you wrote about, they also send a message to your other readers that your blog is a great place to come back to.

Unfortunately though, comments are much easier to come by on high profile blogs because of the sheer traffic that they get.  If you need proof that it’s not just about the content, all you need to do is submit a guest post to a high profile blog.  Once it’s posted, you will see the difference.

Those that are starting out should post high quality articles but spread them out.  I suggest posting only 2-3 posts per week so each post stay at the top of your blog for a longer period of time.  Once you get more participation on your blog posts, you can tighten the posting schedule accordingly.

Posting Frequencies Depends on Your Plan for Making Money
If your blog makes money solely from Adsense, traffic from search engines is absolutely key to success.  In this case, you will want to post more frequently so Google will send more traffic your way.  However, if you are running ads that are charged on a per month basis, then quality of the articles should come before anything else.  Write because you feel passionate about a topic, not because you have to.

Advertisers buy ad space because of the perceive value of your blog and how it will translate to help their own business.  I will take one visitor from ProBlogger over ten visitors from another site that gets lots of traffic because I know people coming from ProBlogger are most likely bloggers who are interested in the topics I write about here and not some random visitor that was sent to his blog that then clicked through to my blog.

Advertisers have to constantly pick where they spend their advertising dollars.  A blog will be perceived to have a high value when they have:

• Steady posting schedule
• Great participation in terms of comments
• High number of links to your blog posts

Think about all those, and you will have a clear decision of how often you should post.

When my life is full of interesting events, the content of my blogs naturally become better.  Because blogging is about sharing, our content reflects our life experiences.  The richer our life experiences, the more colorful our content.

Sharing Your Life Experience
I also find that when I can relate to the topic on a personal level, I can write more passionately and often have much more ideas to share.  I can continue to write about personal finance day in and day out because I take my finances seriously.  Even without the blog, I would be thinking about my personal finances constantly so it is extremely easy to come up with topics ideas to share with my readers.

Sometimes, I really want to comment on an article that other bloggers write about but I just don’t know what to write and I often give up.  By sharing life experiences, there is a greater possibility that readers can relate to the article and thus increase interactivity of the blog.  A couple of days ago when I wrote about my experience calling my web hosting tech support, readers could commented because they had similar experiences with their hosting company.

Richer Content
Of course, just any experience is not enough.  If all I talk about is that I write blogs, it wouldn’t be too interesting would it?  In order for your articles to be engaging and interesting, your life should be interesting.  No one wants to read about what you ate if you eat the same salad everyday, but if you go to different restaurants everyday, then sharing your experience would be much more worthwhile.

What if I Don’t Have an Interesting Life?
Since many bloggers sit in front of the computer all day, it is very easy to feel like there isn’t anything interesting to share.  If this is how you feel, the first thing is to change your mindset!  Everyone actually has very unique backgrounds and perspectives.  This alone creates a great opportunity for sharing on even everyday topics.

Just stop thinking your experiences are boring and start sharing.  You will find that your blog will become livelier and more rewarding.

Other than time to write the actual article, coming up with content ideas day in and day out is one of the most difficult tasks a blogger faces.  There are times when I just sit there staring at the screen and couldn’t come up with one word, while there are others times when I can keep writing and writing.

Through the last few years of blogging, I’ve found a few ways that seems to work:

Magazines and Newspapers
Many of us already read written media every day, which creates a natural way for blog articles.  In fact, I was reading a few articles in magazines which led to the idea of this article.  If you are quoting or adding to another article’s idea, it is only appropriate if you give credit to the original article.  Also watch out for copying material (plagiarism), as it violates copyright laws.

Conversation with Others
Socializing is not only healthy but also great for your blog.  When you interact with others, you can hear different perspectives on many different issues which you can use to blog about.  Another great blogging idea is to interview someone about a particular subject that your blog covers.  People love hearing what others really think.

People Watching
There are so many different and interesting cultures in this world.  When you people watch, you can learn about how people interact with each other which is both stimulating to the mind and great for the soul.  Just remember that people enjoy their privacy so observe in a general way and don’t stare!
Once you start people watching, your blog content will be rich with personal and real life experiences!

Take a Break
Sometimes taking a break and doing something else work wonders for writing articles.  Don’t always sit in front of your desk and stare at the monitor.  Take a walk around town or go grab a bite.  It’s important to take your mind off your blog once in a while to recharge your mind full of content ideas!

Be Happy
Being optimistic and happy about life is the single most important stimulus for your mind.  If you are happy, you are more creative and our article will show.  Your content will also portray an optimistic and encouraging which is contagious!  Create a happy lifestyle for yourself and you will find that blog content will never be a problem again!

With the launch of this blog and a refocus of a few others, I’ve been addicted to tweaking blog designs. From knowing nothing about Photoshop and only very basic HTML, I can now create basic graphic designs and rearrange/add features on my blog through tweaking CSS and PHP codes. I find all this fascinating and fun but perhaps more importantly, time consuming.

Even though I’m starting to spend much more time on my blogs, I find myself running out of hours in the day. From the minute I wake up, I’m consumed with working on different things to improve my blogs. This morning might be about making the title look better on OC Golf Course, while the afternoon’s agenda might be moving the content from being in the center to the left on MoneyNing.

While all these changes turned out great and I’m glad I made them, I seem to have forgotten that content is what blogs are about. Great designs might be what initially get a visitor to read the first article, but valuable and interesting information is what turns the visitor into a reader. Insightful information is what turns the reader into a subscriber and subscribers are the foundation for readership growth.

If your blog design is always being improved without new and great content, then change your focus now and start writing already!

If you are like me, you are constantly loading up your blog and checking to see if it still runs smoothly.  In fact, I have my blogs set as my browser’s home page so whenever I load up Firefox, they show up in front of me.  Some people would find this excessive and annoying but for me, it works and here’s why.

Yesterday, I found MoneyNing and OC Golf Course taking over a minute to load while my other blogs were running fine.  It didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be the hosting company’s fault because all my blogs are on the same server, so I called my hosting company immediately.

To my surprised, tech support picked up my call instantly so I explained the situation to him.  He quickly looked into the problem and basically told me that it might be the problem with some of the wordpress plugins that I’m running because certain sites are running fine while others are not.  I was not happy about this but after thinking about it for a little bit, I realize that they are probably right.  I just have to figure this out myself.

I look through the list of plugins in my wordpress admin area instantly stopped when I got to the SezWho plugin.  It was only days since I installed this plugin and the only two blogs that have this was the two that are running terribly slow!  I deactivated it and sure enough, it was running smoothly again. Problem solved, and a few hours of down time saved because I was on top my blogs.

Another incident happened today (what a weekend) where only half of the page on the same two blogs would load properly.  Looking at the bottom toolbar, it showed “Connecting to entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com”. Entrecard related again I thought. I took the code for my Entrecard out on MoneyNing and again, it worked like a charm. As an experiment of what the effects would be since OC Golf Course is still new and doesn’t get a ton of traffic, I left the widget on and continued to let the blog be handicapped until Entrecard (or really Amazon Web Services) fixes the problem.

Here’s a chart and what I found:

As you can see, I got 11 visitors in the 7 hours window that the Entrecard service was down today when the site gets around 300 visitors a day (12-13 on average per hour). If anything, the same period should be the busiest period so as a result, I am forecasting about 1/3 of traffic lost for today which includes all potential earnings lost. Luckily I found out as soon as it went down because it would be a much bigger problem for me if it was one of my bigger sites.

Moral of the story? Monitor your blogs or else you are leaving money on the table.

This is my first post! Check out my about page for more details!