Road 2 Blogging dot Com
from newbie to problogger in 24 months

A couple of months ago I didn’t know what Twitter was and hadn’t a clue how much I’d be using it to interact with people and keep connected with many other bloggers.  Now, I’m not going to explain what twitter is as I’d be here until next week writing short of a few thousand words on the matter and I don’t like boring people, even at the best of times – rather, I’d prefer to send you to a resource that is well written and shows you exactly what you can do with twitter and how it can be used as another social tool to grow your reader base and your interaction with the blogging community.  Take a look over at Caroline Middlebrook’s blog and look at the Big Juicy Twitter Guide.

Watching what others are doing

I love to know what people (whether A-listers or other upcoming bloggers) are up to and what they’re surfing.  I use twitter fox and twitter bar – both add ons for firefox – to both keep uptodate with what others are viewing and reading (twitterfox) and post tweets to others that follow me as well as let them know of certain pages that I’ve just viewed that I thought were great to quickly show others in a tweet, but would be not really worth blogging about.  New stories and interesting blog posts are tweeted about on a daily basis, as well as some really funny pictures and interesting news in a whole variety of niches.

Updating people of some great stuff

Now, to me, my tweets are personal and things I’m doing at the current moment in time.  If I’d just had a 3 hour stint on writing content for a few niche blogs, or I’d been to Tesco and found some great ideas for products or niches, then that would be what I’d tweet to people.  Twitter to me is a mini update of what’s going on with me and my internet presence, not necessarily in depth, but it could be some pages I’m interested in at that time.

Networking gone mad

Now say I find a really great blog post on blogging, or on another niche topic.  I could stumble it and bookmark it on delicious, but I can also tweet about where I’ve just been and make a comment about what I saw/read.  I also could let people know I’ll be in a certain bar or cafe to meet up if they want to (not sure why anyone would want to meet up in rainy old Accrington though ;-).  I see so many communication back and forth with bloggers asking other bloggers what they’re doing and where they’re going, especially when there’s a conference on!

Three Twools I use

Twitter Fox

There’s a few main reasons why I don’t visit twitter directly and type in my tweet and press submit (see below).  Being quick about things and shaving even a few seconds off a task (making sure it’s done right of course) is always a habit for me, so, using twitter fox allows me to click, write, click – it’s that simple – open it up and write a tweet to everyone who is following me.

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Ah well, not been on holiday or anything, but have been away from the blog for a while.  The first couple of days weren’t intentional, as all of my sites went down because of a server error on the 8^th – I make sure I’m aware of any outages of the sites in my portfolio by using Internet Seer.  Not entertaining at all and the host I am with (not for long mind) didn’t actually know that my sites had all disappeared from the web – just a bunch of muppets, I felt as if I was to blame and should be sorting out the problem.  Time after time of phone calls and emails, I had to sort the problems out myself – with files not re-appearing after the server was back up and I was congratulating myself on backing up all of my files on an external hard drive.  Needless to say the call centre and email tech people were not based in the UK and had very poor English – I wouldn’t really have bothered but I am paying quite a high amount for what I thought was a quality hosting service. 

I thought all the excitement was over with technological ‘mishaps’, after I had trouble with my laptop in the previous week, but good old life had to kick me a little bit more in the crotch! 

Taking a side-road not too far

After having the above issues with my host, and after re-loading and sorting out all of the issues of my sites and blogs I began to draw away from Road2blogging.com and decided to concentrate more on some niche blogs that I had set up in October.  I did some more keyword research on them, more content and produced more articles to submit to article directories and post on Squidoo etc.

It isn’t going too bad either, I have 12 niche blogs that are pulling in around $8 a day (on average) through adsense revenue, but I’ve received nothing so far from any affiliate ads on the blogs – a really annoying fact.  I’ve also implemented the information I discussed in a post last month where I wrote about the portfolio I want to have built by the end of 2009 – how to diversity your portfolio.  Yet, I’ve been neglecting this blog to concentrate on the niche blogs, last week I thought this was sort of ironic, that I’m banishing this Flagship Blog, for other niche blogs that (in the long run) won’t be as enjoyable and making as much money as this one.  So, I’m on catch-up and have shifted most of my time to road2blogging and will apply a little less time to building other parts of my portfolio. 

Getting back on track

Posting daily has been quite challenging for me, and I’m going to tone the posts down a little on the blog.  I’m still going to be posting up the newbie blog steps at weekends and the Tuesday link posts as I feel that these are of real value to the readers of the blog, but I don’t think posting daily is going to be possible and isn’t needed, not yet anyway.  I do have loads of information to share with everyone and lots of posts saved as drafts, but I think it’s time to be realistic – my mind is working so much quicker than my two digits can type, and until I get from 21 words per minute (what I’m currently at) to my goal of 100 words per minute on the touch typing course I’m doing I won’t be writing up posts on a daily basis – I just simply don’t have the time.  It’s not because I write a few hundred words either, but because I really do like to fully explain what I mean and provide the sources where I’ve learnt and read the things I’m writing about, just now I’ve written over 600 words and it doesn’t feel that I’ve actually written that much more this post – strange isn’t it?

Whilst I had a little time off from blogging I realised that my tone has changed in recent weeks.  I’m not trying to be professional in my writing, by writing as if I was writing a blog post to a close friend or colleague and not aiming what I am writing to a speech in front of a thousand students in a lecture theatre.  Even in the 2 months that this blog has been going I have learned so much about how to write to a blog, document the information and how best to approach and engage readers.  It’s not just about promoting certain products or affiliate links (as that can be left for other keyword niche blogs), but to tell my journey to problogger, my way.

Well, there you go, hopefully we haven’t had too many casualties along the way and RSS readers have in total gone down by 1, so thanks guys for being patient.  Here’s to more niche blogs and more comments on posts.

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Photo by: Toufeeq

Recently a really big focus I’ve been getting from bloggers has been productivity (productivity blogging) – how to increase your own productivity for your blog and become a better blogger.  So, I’ve been constantly on the look out for items (books, ebooks, software and ‘things’) to help me become a more productive blogger.  With the objectives that I set myself for my online portfolio, I really needed to look at a few tools that would help me cut down two crucial areas that I do spend a lot of time on:

Reading blogs and ebooks

Writing blog posts and articles

I needed one or two tools that would solve the two issues that I had above, so that I could read and consume content at a faster rate and another (or the same tool) to help me type articles and blog posts a hell of a lot quicker than what I’m currently doing – I really am a slow typer, a two fingered drone at the keyboard type, who has numerous mistakes in their written copy and has a mind that thinks ten times faster than what my measly two fingers can type out!  I also needed a tool that would help me read blog posts and ebooks (more the latter), so that I didn’t spend hours on end reading content and then trying to process the information.  I’m the type of person that really doesn’t like to stand around and wait for the information to be given to me – I reach out and grab it and I love to read, sometimes a little too much.

How to read quicker than your old English Teacher

So, I came across a lot of different programs that would tell me I could increase this and that by doing various techniques – using a ruler when I read and printing out the copy and following it could be much quicker.  I already knew how to do this and I really didn’t think doing either of these two processes actually meant I was reading any quicker – I’d also already had some experience of this when I had been reading for my dissertations during my first and masters degree.  I admit that at the best of time I am a slow reader, I like to consume the meaning of the writing and not just get the meaning of the story – example: I still remember the story (in depth) of one of the first ‘adult’ books I read (runaway jury by John Grisham) I loved it and it took me an age to read.  It wasn’t because I spent little time reading the book, or I wasn’t interested in the story, but that I am such a slow reader.  Also, I remember becoming annoyed with myself when I would read journal articles and ebooks online during my degree, so, I was really happy when I was pointed to a resource that increased the amount that I could actually read in a specific amount of time – speed me up Scotty, wahoo!

RapidReader is software that you load onto your computer and drop in a pdf report, your email client, and even webpages – it helps you to increase the speed you read a page or email.  I tested the program out a couple of weeks ago and after the demo I really didn’t mind parting with the $50 – not because it was so low, but that I thought about how I could leverage the time I was reducing by reading faster, to the time that I could produce more content for my blogs and sites online.  The program is simple yet complex, plus the tutorial is kind of funny – it’s just like you are actually reading pages of content, but the words are coming at you individually, one-by-one, so fast that you don’t think you can cope with it, but you can!  I would really check it out if I was you.

Typing faster than a Road-Runner Secretary

If you’re like me you’ll be typing your blog posts and websites visit in the browser bar with two digits – it seems slow at first when I see other people producing a crazy amount of posts and articles on the web and I’ve always been interested how I could type a bazillion times faster like a secretary on crack.  No, I really do mean it, typing faster means that I can produce a lot more content (for this blog and others), thus allowing me to have more time for other tasks – mainly marketing and promotion.  Well, if I’m a whizz at publishing all this great content to numerous sites I’d be a little silly if I didn’t let people know about them wouldn’t ?

I’ve always been interested in how fast I can write an article, why?  Well, during my university life I was a little lazy, I used to research all the material for a project and then leave the essay until the night before handing it in (I know not well organised, what what student is?).  I would have about 12 hours to write a 3,000 word essay and it was really tuff, if I could have even typed at twice the speed I was doing, then I could complete the work in half the time couldn’t I?  This got me thinking the other week when I was reflecting how different my life was a few years later from when I was at university. 

I decided only last week to take a look around a few blogs to see if they had any hints on using a program to help them become a faster typer.  Ed Dale, over at the thirty day challenge – which I would suggest you take a trip over to as it is fab and has taught me a lot over the last 6 months.  Ed produced a blog post on how he was getting one of his daughters set up for high school.  He mentioned that he researched and asked around about how to type faster – the ironic thing is he was researching a topic of ‘free speed reading’ for the thirty day challenge back in August.  He pointed me to a resource called Mavis Beacon teaches touch typing – the program is simple but effective and it cost me £10 ($20).  I took a little look around and it is similarly priced on amazon.com and other sites – you’re probably going to want to purchase this product because it has already surprised me, and I’ve only just begun.  Hopefully I’ll be producing a lot of articles and blog posts a lot faster now, which will help me drive traffic to this and other blogs (and hopefully convert readers).  I might even have a chance at getting a few of my ebook ideas that I’ve started to sketch out, you just never know!

So, there you have it.  A few tools that I believe no one should do without, especially if you’re a blogger, writer or even a web publisher – I might go into them both a little more in later posts, but for now I urge you to not go out for that meal on Saturday and buy these two tools.  They do cost a little bit of money, but for $60 I think it is money well spent and will increase both my own and your productivity in the future – here’s to productivity blogging!

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So, another set of meaty resources for you to get your hands on, to become better bloggers – well, hopefully .  I’m going for Wednesday link love, not because I’ve changed my mind, but because I’m writing this at 5am on Wednesday morning, and thought it was a little too late to post up for yesterday.

Even though I had a few technical issues earlier last week, I’ve still managed to keep updated with my RSS feeds and blogs I visit regularly – although I have been a little shy with comments on other blogs as I’ve simply not had time.

So, enough of the babble and onto this weeks great reads:

How to Build a Newsletter List – Ok, so this isn’t a post, but a very good video of what you should be doing when you’re creating a list and how much potential revenue you could make from a newsletter list.  This is one area that Road2blogging does lack and I’m currently looking into what the hell I’m going to write about in my email list, as I currently have a blog series of newbie blogsteps.  It’s one to think about, but check out the link and sign up for the next few videos – yes, you do need to sign up to a list (to which Layne is probably as cautious as me), but I’ve learnt a lot from Frank Kern.

Starting a Flagship Blog (series) – Courtney Tuttle really inspires me at the moment and it is really quite freaky how he seems to put up a post on a subject that I’m thinking about at the time (do you ever get that?).  I’ve been a big follower of Court through his Keyword Sniper series and just think this guy has a huge amount of information to pass on.  Courtney looks into creating a flagship blog in your portfolio (mine is this one) and as I read the Flagship blog post I just kept ‘ticking the boxes’ (I find myself doing that a lot too) and realised that road2blogging is probably my true flagship blogs amongst my other keyword sniper (or adsense niche blogs) that I currently have in my portfolio.  If you’re following the newbie blogstep series on road2blogging, then the keyword sniper series is a must.

Using Persuasion Tactics to improve conversions on your blog – Trying to persuade people to sign up to my RSS, or click through to a sponsor has been quite hard to do for me; but, it’s probably because I’ve just not been headed in the right direction, or I haven’t been testing all of the different things I’ve been doing.  Dosh Dosh’s article has helped me realise that I will need to consciously evaluate and change the way that I persuade visitors to do what I want when they visit road2blogging.com.

5 quick and easy SEO tips for bloggers – SEO isn’t my strong point, but I’m hopefully getting to grips with it through developing my niche blogs.  Patrick over at Blog storm produces a quick post on optimising SEO for bloggers.  These tips sure helped me think of a few things that I’m not quite doing right now that I should – I quickly fixed that .

How long does it take to rank in google, how many hours? – Aaron Wall always impresses me with his posts on SEO and because I’ve been writing a massive amount of content lately for some niche blogs I just had to be curious and read this post.  Now, it doesn’t answer all of the questions of the title, but it does get you into thinking the amount of work that actually goes into attracting search engine traffic to a new site.  The information wasn’t new, but the comments section is worth a read.  Oh, and don’t forget to check out Aaron’s SEO book too.

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