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!