Managing Your Blog

Look at the dates on your resulting research quarries before folding that information into what you right. Believe it or not, bloggers make the mistake of writing outdated technical instructions to their readers. Unless the reader is tech savvy he or she won't know, but they will suffer when they go to apply the instructions. It won't work then they become frustrated. When they take the issue to a professional he or she often won't realize the problem early due to there being an outdated code or some similar problem. There usually are technical things in my blogs, but I don't put them in unless I plan to take the time to break them down into tiny "understandable pieces for the reader's can consume it with some understanding of it. I go beyond what the average reader can understand. The information you read about fixing a technical problem you're about to blog about could be out of date. You should check it's date to be sure it's current. If you don't you could increase your problems by making the matter worse. Applying outdated technology or design information to newer technology complicates things on multiple levels and can detour you and your readers away from the real fix for an extended time. For example, let’s say you want to create a custom /404.php or "page not found" with a page that looks and feels like its part of your site.

A 404 is what you see when you get the old "Page Not Found" page. Sites customize those pages to look like they are a page from the website you're on. We don't want our reader left at a dead end with no way out. So we "create" a custom 404 page that looks and feels like all the other pages on our site. Your custom page might read something like this: "Oops! We're sorry about that, it's totally our fault. Here is the page you want. Delete the old one. And here are some other page we know you'll like too." So on your customer 404 page, you've placed links to other pages on your site your reader will enjoy instead of being stuck there on a dead end page.

So let us say you've decided you want a custom 404 page for your website. So you go online and Google how to do it, and the search results give you choices; you make a choice and boom, it looks like you made the right choice with your first pick! There it is, a blog with easy to follow instructions, lots of information and its right on point for what the kind of information you're looking for. 

In this blog, they tell you to create the page, then name it 404.php, go to a text editor like notepad, type the name of the file on the notepad and upload it to your htaccess/public.html located in your sites root directory. You're new at this and find these instructions overwhelming after all. You're just putting up your first site and seems complicated. There are several things to take into account that are NOT mentioned. One: shared hosting htaccess can be directly accessed on a page at your site's host without having to go to a file manager. And two, it's generally just two simple steps. Create your custom page, type the name you gave your custom page into the htaccess box and click save and your done. Your redirect has been created.

In the mean, while following the outdated instructions (outdated only because the blog you were reading was written in 2007) you not only still don't have a custom 404 page, you could have created a new problem in your root directory blundering around in there. My point is this: Most websites on the net today use SHARED hosting instead of virtual private servers (VPS) and DEDICATED servers (professional tech level stuff). 

The latter gives you the control over everything, including your SEO work and is the course taken by professionals. Example Dedicated and VPS: Let's say your site is loading slowly recently. And you happen to know that Google may penalize you for that. One way to speed it up is to set your server to cache your website and then leverage that by modifications to codes in your CMS. Site loading speed is really very important to your success on the Internet. You'll want to limit inline frames, CSS and more importantly javascript and flash above the folds on your site's pages. Well, the novice doesn't know that stuff. But that doesn't mean he or she can't accomplish the same thing right there at their level of knowledge. I go into those things in a little more detail on this blog. More on those there. You can visit Google Page Insights by Google developers and learn more about site speed for now. The fact that they address this subject means slow loading can affect your sites ranking in search results. Surfers are not as stringent about waiting for a page to load as they once were. Large sited take longer to load, that just how it is, so most web surfers of today give that a pass and will wait for the site to load. But don't push it.   

Bloggers get more motivation when their blog has a look and feel they like and their readers like. And as a blogger, you will eventually be drawn into the technology aspect of the internet and your CMS. After all, it is the medium of your coveted work. And for that reason, its only natural that you would look for new information about your website and other kinds of content management systems (websites). It can get to be expensive trying to have someone else do all the things that must be done to build and operate a blog. When I started back in 2011 (Jimisound.com was parked for two years before becoming a website) I was quite naive about blogging. I didn't know what I was in for technology wise. Of course, now things have been made easier with auto editing, drag & drop sites and thousands of new blogs to help you get started and be a successful blogger. With each passing day comes faster easier ways to set up a blogging business. But there are other things that make running a successful blogging business no easy win. Writing! You've gotta do tons of it. And the more you know about writing going in the better you're going to be. Ultimately bloggers are writers. 

There were people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month blogging but I didn’t know that back then. In fact, I didn’t know that until about a year ago when I got out of school and started researching it. And there still are, but there were also some people who for whatever reasons were not successful at all with it. Thousands of people start blogs every day but don't follow through with them. And, therefore they assumed the worst and wrote posts around the internet about how blogging was no longer a lucrative business. You may still see some those today. 

When you're starting out as a blogger it’s not money you're thinking about, its the adventure of media, communicating, writing, designing, and overall the creativity you get to experience. That how it was for me anyway, I was all about writing about the entertainment business from the inside of the entertainment business. All I wanted to do was write! And blogging gave me a way to do that under my own conditions, my own choice of subjects and to whom I choose to write to. Prior to that, it was print magazines where I had little or no control most often. Since I've started I've written for quite a few online companies and other blog sites. But before that, it was writing for newspapers and magazines. I had to learn how to blog and I'm still learning. Before it was called blogging it was called Web journaling or Weblogs. 

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz.  Call it intuition but back in 2011 not knowing any of this I actually titled some of my blogs “journal blogs” as I wrote about the stress I was experiencing during that stage of my work on Hollywoods Underground University. You can still read those blogs at archived journal blogs on jimisound.com. If memory serves they are blogs number 2-6. Becoming a blogger is a process. You'll go through stages of frustration, but you'll also go through stages of new understanding of new growth and new knowledge about the business. It takes time.

So be patient. I've been doing it a little while now and things are loosening up, clarity is setting in. But, that’s only because of the help from other bloggers and of course sticking with it. Without them, it's easy to lose faith in yourself as a blogger. After all, there are many things challenging early bloggers, many things they have to learn. It is a marvelous growing experience for character development, but I should warn you it is a great deal of work and dedication, it can be all consuming and all addictive.

There's an Internet Archive called the "Way Back Machine" which crawls the internet tagging, logging and cataloging all the websites on the internet. I use it to measure my growth in website development, writing, and my growth as a blogger. It doesn't catalog whole websites just the first page. I must admit, in my own case it's a little embarrassing to witness just how inexperienced and naive I was about designing websites, organizing and creating content, and of course developing a following. And of course, I'm still learning.

I could not focus on blogging with my full attention until about a year ago. And I found a lot of mistakes. I was in school for the past eight years or so. I was an honor student (I'm not bragging) and had to focus intently on my studies to keep that status. And proudly I'm pleased to share with you that I belong to the Golden Key Honor Society, the same honor society as Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu. That's why I chose to use a drag and drop site. I couldn't find the time to develop my blogging interest and learn to code at the same time while in school. But my gut was telling me I have to get that site up know. Somehow I knew that it would be years before the site would come to fruition. It is much harder for two people to start and run a blog that it is for five people to do it. And if one person goes it alone it is an unbearable amount of work and responsibility. It takes longer to develop traffic and income.

Weebly has come a long way since I began using their sites. And with a little imagination and creativity you can develop them into something respectable looking, but overall most professionals will not use them because of a lack of scalability. Word Press is the site of choice for techs, programmers, webmasters, bloggers, and businesses today. For now anyway. They are very SEO friendly. The early bloggers were trailblazers. They had no models to learn from, no one who had succeeded beyond just writing and sharing information. No one knew what income possibilities would be available. You just had to have faith that the internet would become a self-serving, self-propelling medium with techs, technology and blogging all working together to make it what it is becoming now.

What is it becoming? It's becoming many things all at once. It’s already the biggest and best marketplace in the world. Jeff Bezos got in on that idea early with Amazon. Entertainment, for example, is better on the internet than on television or radio; you have more choices and you get to manage them. Youtube is becoming the source of entertainment around the world over other visual mediums. Back in 2011 when I started there were 8 people per second coming online in the more developed countries.

This is what the Internet looked like when I started Jimisound.com and Blogger. 

If you look at the spinning globe on the home page you can see that even today little has changed as far as which countries have developed more, comparatively. Still, though, the more countries develop and come online more chances you have of establishing a successful business online. Based on what you're seeing here and today, the Internet is still fairly new. There are lots more good technologies on the way. Lots of new tools that will make your job, my job on the internet easier. So it's not too late to start your blog if you had in mind to start one. In spite of the fact that there are 60 trillion pages on the internet, the internet is not saturated and it will be a long time before it will be, if ever. By the way be sure to read my new SEO blogs, They've just begun and they'll have the latest information about SEO and quite of a lot of information about blogging too. I'll be drawing on five years of hands-on, four years of college-level studies of Internet Marketing and a very recent and ongoing investment in Hub Spot SEO Certification. The certification is to bring me face to face with the most recent "in the field" methodologies and technologies that I may want to apply to my services working in Internet Marketing. I write blogs in a number of categories and venues and for those reasons can only publish two sometimes three blogs a week for jimisound.com and Blogger. Another thing about blogging, make sure you do the research on what you write about. Try not to leave it all to memory. Wearing as many hats as we do as bloggers can deplete us and though we may know all about a subject, it depends on where your mind is at when you blog. You want to be accurate about a subject and a tired mind can be the reason for mistakes. So manage your time and your work activities and take the time to do the research before you blog. I will get into how you should manage your lifestyle, sleep, new information, premium information and so on in upcoming blogs. As a blogger, I think it's important to go back and read all my blogs, posts and articles regularly so I can update them and keep them updated. This practice may even help with getting link backs to my work. Speaking of backlinks to your blog, before I go let me leave you with a video tip about links and how to avoid the Google penalty box.

      

There are multiple facets to building a backlink strategy. This video is just one example of what not to do when attempting to build backlinks to your blog. I'll address backlinks and other ways to get traffic to your blog in a future post. That's it for this post. I'll see you again soon. I hope this was helpful to you,
Happy Blogging!

Gene