Blogging Way of Life

Do you use drafts for developing your posts or is it just a tool for you to save your work just in a case of computer malfunction ??
Most writers sit down, write a post till the end, read the post (many of them even don’t) and publish.  I guess this is killing bloggers creativity in a way. When we start writing and focus on one subject we can’t get our head up and look from a different angle. I think working with drafts is great for this reason. Instead of publishing a post and editing every time a new idea pops up, it’s better to save a draft and let some time pass and look at the subject from a new point. Our post will worth more like a wine waiting in the vault. (You don’t have to wait 22 years to get the taste of 1985 Bordeaux, Don’t worry:) Actually it’s natural process of writing; to take down notes, develop ideas and make a final writing but most of bloggers are amateur writers and just typing down as they feel.

I got this draft about importance of drafts (which is actually published now) and today I saw a fellow blogger (I don’t want to give names) with a Title :”Earn more with adsense” and the content was : “I will tell you ways of earning more with adsense by placing ads in different positions”.  There was one brief comment from a reader : “So Will you tell??”.

It’s shameful for a blogger to share such raw ideas. Get yourself a notebook (moleskine is a great draft book) or use drafts in your blog as a notebook.

If you like this post please add to:

It’s been 15 days of blogging; building content, improving design and mostly trying to get some traffic. Even if you find and write down the solution for “World Peace” you won’t get any visitors without some effort. There is lot of “what to do” lists to drive traffic and I applied most of them (trying to stay away from spamming) and will review the short term results.

Social Bookmarking Services

-StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a toolbar which you can use to stumble through web pages people liked and it will drive traffic to your page if you have a good content. StumbleUpon is the source of the most traffic to my blog. It is superior than other social bookmarking services because it can’t be spoiled. Most of the social bookmarking services depend on you to promote your link and ask people for votes. StumbleUpon prevents such actions because it bans your account if you submit your own pages too much. If you have a good content people will favor it by clicking “I like it!” and your page is displayed to other stumblers and attract more audience. Even if you find a way to promote your page from several accounts or stumble exchanges people who stumble your page will rate it and the traffic will vanish in time if there is no good content. To benefit from StumbleUpon you must be a good stumbler and contribute to the system. (You can start being a giver by giving a thumb up for this post if you liked:) I will write a more detailed review about StumbleUpon in following days, it deserves more attention.

-Digg

Digg is another social network service which has its own ups and downs. It has good integrating with your blog and widely used system among bloggers but I think that it’s losing it’s purpose. If you are not in the first page of digg there isn’t much chance that you will get traffic and to get into first page you must ask people for diggs. I think that this service isn’t the dream service for beginner bloggers because you have to spend too much effort for getting diggs and I beleive it is better to spend this time blogging.

-Sphinn

Sphinn is a new social bookmarking service just like Digg, but unlike Digg it is not spoiled yet. There are people actually commenting and reviewing each others submits and I think it is a great place for starters. For me it doesn’t drive much traffic but better days are to come

-Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us introduced the tag system for internet searches and still widely used del.icio.us creates traffic to your submitted posts.

-

Reddit is another social bookmarking service with a cute logo and they create some traffic. Compared to the effort you spend on other services this one is an easy to go service. Just use it.

Blog Networks

-Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine working with a voting system for submitted posts and you can fave your favorite blogs. (You can favorite BloggerDollar by the image above) Technorati is actually ranking each blog by a ranking system called authority which is actually number of links to your blog. So as a new blogger you will have a low authority which means low traffic. I had one of my topics in Hot WTF’s for days but still didn’t get any noticeable traffic. They have canceled submitting new WTF’s lately so I guess there will be a change in their system.

-BlogCatalog

Although named as a blog directory, blogcatalog has a good forum like network where you can meet new bloggers or ask for diggs and votes.

- Bumpzee

Bumpzee is a more advanced bloggers network letting you use a widget for viewing the recent visitors to your blog and they have a community system like in blogcatalog.

-BlogRush

Blogrush is an eye candy widget displaying posts from other bloggers on your sidebar. You earn credit for your traffic and your posts are displayed in other blogs. They recently started cleaning out their users for a higher quality of posts. I started receiving a little traffic from them so I try to see the light at the end of tunnel. They also have a referral system so that people who sign up from your blog earns credits for you also. So why don’t you be a good boy and sign up from here (Don’t worry it doesn’t effect your credits)

Blog Directories

There are also lot of blog directories that I signed up which you can see in the side bar. Some of them require placing their link on your blog, some of them don’t (I put them all in my sidebar to share with you). They don’t create much traffic but a good way to increase your blogs visibility in search engines.

Socializing

If you are a blogger and you want attention to your blog then you must pay attention to other blogs. Visiting other blogs and commenting on their posts will both spread out your name and also motivate people to visit your blog. As I said before don’t be a taker be a giver.

Most of the listed services won’t bring you traffic immediately (Actually StumbleUpon does) but those methods will help you in long term so participate in each service and experience it yourself. If you have any other services you want to recommend please comment.

If you like this post please add to:

In one of my latest posts I tried to explain how to change a free wordpress theme in to your personalized wordpress design. Actually it is nothing more than changing the background colors of the images used in your theme but there is more than that. You try to play around with colors for your theme and your blog still looks cheesy. (You can check my blog’s previous designs from evolution page). That’s because you don’t have an artist’s eye (It is something however, there are many bloggers who can’t even understand their blog looks cheesy). You have to look for more if you want to give your blog a professional design. You have to know how the colors interact with each other and how they will look as parts of a whole piece. Don’t Panic! There is an easy way to do that also.

If you don’t have an artist’s eye, you have to seek for an artist willing to share his/her perspective with you. Thanks to internet we can easily find many artists willing to share their highly artistic and poetic perspectives If you are looking for nice colors to get along with each other and make your blog look good than you need a colour palette. Through long searches I found colourlovers the most professional and poetic one. The colourlovers term actually stand for them because these guys are real colour fetishes. They go with the tag “Fight for love in the colour revolution.” They have many palettes and a special page for website colour trends.

I choosed a palette named “We Got the Call..” which is highly poetic. The artist defines to describe the colors with the words: “So.. I was going to try to write a poem about the sadness and anguish people must go through when they see their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and loved one being deployed to war but..” Whatever, enough of melancholia, I loved the colors and decided to use them with my blog. The palette is given with the hexadecimal colour codes for each color and you can try each color as background, title, links colours. First Start with the best background colour for your sidebar, and header then decide what colors to use as titles, sidebar text colors and etc..

After defining the colour scheme for the blog I tried to work for a banner to go with those colours and designed this banner which is done with some easy tricks with Photoshop. When you are done with setting up colours and banner don’t forget to generate a new adsense code to collobrate with your new colors. I started seeing effects of new design immediately as income.

If you like this post please add to:

Are you concerned about sleeping too much or not having a regular sleeping schedule? If you aren’t earning enough money from your blog to quit your day job and you want to keep on blogging then you desperately need time. Since there is no boss in the world to let you decrease working hours, people usually decrease sleeping hours. Is it possible to sleep 5-6 hours a day without turning in to a walking zombie??

If you have sleep related problems; you sleep to much, you can’t get a regular sleeping schedule and you don’t have the hope that you can live with less sleep; believe me YOU CAN. I am a live subject of transition from disordered sleep to a regular sleeping schedule with 5-6 hours of sleep a day. While I was student (good old days), I usually slept 10 hours a day and some days with no sleep some days with all day sleep, I was like a statue of sleep disorder. My awake hours of day always shifted. For a week I was awake during day time another week I was awake during night time. I didn’t believe that I could change this.

Sometimes you have to go the hard way. My days of slumbering have ended when the called me for military service. (It is mandatory in my country) Believe me when you wear the green uniform and boots you can’t say “moom i wanna sleep five minutes more.” For the first month I was going to bed at 10 p.m. (after a whole day of walking and exercise) and they woke us up at 4 a.m. (Every time it was like a nightmare) After getting used to sleeping 6 hours with working out whole day, at weekends an 8 hours sleep was like a gift to us. It was a good experience to see that my body is capable of living with 5-6 hours of sleep. The problem is you can do training, run, duck, shoot and other physical stuff while you are sleepy. You don’t have to use your brain too much when you are a soldier.

The things are a little different while working. When I started working I tried to get used to sleeping less hours like i did in the military but I was sitting sleepy all the day yawning and unable to focus on my work. One day I saw about a vitamin mixture that overcomes chronic fatigue. I am prejudiced about medicines actually. I try to avoid medicine as much as I can to keep my immune system up. So I made a research about this pill Pharmaton; it is mostly and vitamins (which is okay to take with pills because we can’t synthesize them in our body) and Ginseng extract. At first I taught that it was one of the killer “Lose Weight” drugs. When I made a research I saw that it is a Chinese herb (okay Chinese but not killer:) widely used and have no significant side effects.

I started taking the vitamins. At the end of first week I could feel that I wasn’t sleepy anymore and I could concentrate on my work. I can say that I could even get up more easily. (Even I got used to sleeping less waking up is always a torture) Maybe this is placebo effects playing tricks on me but I am happy with the results. I only take them on week days (I still like to reward myself with a good sleep at weekends). Even not mentioned I have to note one side effect. You get nausea until mid day (Especially if you didn’t have a good breakfast). I have the stomach of a bear and I can eat every kind of meat, vegetables, oil, sugar ,etc.. without any problem I don’t have a sensitive stomach but I get nausea with those pills. So be cautious if you are not a bear

Anyways with or without pills it is possible to arrange a better sleeping schedule to your self (Without the pills you need military discipline). The joy of staying in the bed is better than anything but if you need the time for your work, blog, friends, family then “Welcome to Hell”.

If you like this post please add to:

Default wordpress theme is eye candy and you may be loving it but you need to personalize your blog’s look. Even if the last design you made with your computer was painting a house and a tree with paintbrush at the age of six, don’t panic! Wordpress has a huge source of free themes in the internet. If you make a few Google searches you can find many free themes for your blog. (I will make a list of good free themes later) First let’s get an opinion about basic structure of wordpress themes.

The classic wordpress theme consists of a header; 2 columns (main index page and sidebar) and a footer. Before searching for themes make clear what you want. Do you like a blog with 3 columns or 2 columns, do you want the sidebar on the right or left. If you don’t want to get lost inside themes design your blog layout on paper and choose from themes which fits your blog best.

Personalize your theme: If you found the theme matching for your layout design but the images are about the life of cows. Still don’t panic! You can personalize your theme independent of the original design. When you download the theme you can see the images folder under your theme files. In the images folder you can find the images you can edit to change the themes background, header image and etc.. I have liked a theme about real estate and changed the image files to match my subject. See the difference =>

Before the Changes

 After the Changes

Don’t forget to change the background color on all images . When you finish the changes upload the theme folder to themes directory under wordpress content and select the theme from admin panel. (Important: You have to implement the adsense code again after adding a new theme)

If you like this post please add to:

BloggerDollar is an online experiment of making money from blogs. This blog is in the search of an answer to the holy question “Is it possible to earn a million dollar from my personal blog?”

This blog is starting the journey from the same point with you; “Zero Point”. I haven’t earned a dime from internet before, don’t have any knowledge of promoting blogs, earning money, SEO stuff or a huge capital to cover for all this experience. You will explore the evolution of the blog from scratch. I will explore the ways of promoting blog, implementing new methods of earning cash, improving design, expand context and share the community outcome of each action taken.

This blog is totally transparent. When this blog starts raising cash then you know the steps to take for earning money.

If you like this post please add to: