Lessons I have learnt in my first few months blogging

I have been blogging for almost 5 months now, and there is a lot of information I have picked up during this period. I have read hundreds of articles on blogging. They range from social media, SEO, monetising creating back-links to content creation.

INFORMATION OVER LOAD - Finding someone to listen to

What I have noticed is that there is so much information on blogging out there, most of the time everyone says the same thing, there are no fresh ideas but other times there are bloggers out there who go out of their ways to show that they know what they are talking about and actually prove that their back-linking strategies work and that you can still have a successful blog in this day and age. There are successful 6 & 7 figure bloggers out there who share what others make you pay for free. It is hard to sift through all the garbage on the internet and find these guys but once you do, you never really need to listen to anyone else. There are guys out there that are supposed to teach you how to make money online and have a successful blog when they have no idea what they are talking about, when they themselves do not make any money and hardly have any real traffic and no authority what so ever.

image by graur codrin

I have learnt that you need to blog about something you know and are passionate about so that you share quality content with your readers, I was lucky enough to be a fitness junkie when I started my first fitness blog so it was not difficult for me to choose a niche that I wanted to appeal to, it was not difficult to post legit proven content because I was living it. I did not need to make up stuff and have to do research all the time because I had knowledge and experience with my topic. When I created this blog Genie Rising I wanted to post about other random things that interest me that were not just fitness, I did not have a niche in mind and I still don’t and that is fine with me to be general.

PLANNING AHEAD - Growth strategy

I have learnt that is it good to plan ahead, set goals for the growth of your blog so that you know what you are doing now and why you are doing it. When I started blogging I used to post every other day, which would result in 3 posts per week and about 12 posts a month. I felt like that was the right move but then I read to improve in search engine rankings and Alexa rankings I had to posts as often as possible, because in the blogging world it is believed that content is king. I then increased the number of posts per week to 5 and it did bring me results, exponential growth in fact my fitness blog moved from a page rank of 0 to 3.

Content creation was always my main kind of strategy for growing my blog with blog commenting here and there. I realised that I was listening to the wrong kind of advice from guys who were not in the same niche as me, posting once or twice everyday was their advice for the fastest growth and that really works but it is really difficult considering the fact that I am a one man team. When I looked at top fitness blogs they did not post that much on their blogs and yet they were getting lots of traffic from search engines and other places as well.

Quality vs Quantity

The key in the fitness world was quality more than quantity because unlike other niches, the content was more evergreen than stuff sites about blogging had to post because the internet is ever changing but working out and keeping fit does not change much. I realised that I was on the right track when I was posting just 12 posts a month. I have since decided that for my main blog I will post as much as possible but only if the article is great quality and I have decided to make my posts long since that helps with rankings. So now I put a lot more detail in my posts, I now make my posts a minimum of 400 words unless it is a video post or an update on something but preferably I will post articles of over 600 words, I have already implemented this on my fitness blog and the past few post have been averaging over 800 words.

I like to mix in list posts, motivational post and highly informational posts with the occasional post that is sort of like a case-study or experiment to show that the workouts I’m doing work. I have found the combination to be successful in bringing in different sorts of traffic.

THE HARD TIMES

I noticed that my fitness blog took a little hit in the recent update because I really was not doing enough back-linking and I managed to bounce back. I started creating a lot of strong back-links and link wheels through satellite site. I was submitting unique articles to ezine articles, Squidoo, Hubpages, made satellite sites on blogger, Tumblr and it was proving effective. A couple people used my ezine articles and I got linked to by others, everything was going great till one day on the 12 of april I lost 75% of my traffic and I could not find my blog anywhere on search engines. I was ranking on the first page for many keywords I was targeting and I had a lot of my posts on the second and third page of Google before the 12^th, but it was all gone in 1 day.

I was worried and I’m still worried about what was happening, I did not know what was happening. I Google to see if anyone has ever had the same happen to them and what they did to combat this problem, I found out about the Google dance, apparently if you suddenly start a back-linking campaign which is what I was doing your site does the Google dance because Google does not know where to put your site, it may take anything from a few days to a couple of weeks for your site to go back to normal and people say that they often see an improvement in their ranking after the dance is over.

I had just gotten adsense and was starting to make some money when this happened to me, I did not have too many ads above the fold so I did not think that I was affected by the update relating to too many ads above the fold.

The past couple of weeks have been very depressing for me; I even lost inspiration to write posts for a couple days. I enjoy blogging and find it to be addictive and I am statistics obsessed which is why I have been depressed lately because I was making such good progress. I have decided that I am going to push on and that now is not the time to give up, I have to learn from my mistakes and continue to use all of the knowledge I pick up and eventually my blog will have multiple steams of traffic not only Google traffic.

I have that I will create back-links every month but this time my link building will be more spread out, I will continue to only use white-hat tactics so that I do not get in trouble. I hope to continue blogging and hope that my hard work pays off in the end. Every blogger experiences little speed bumps on the road and maybe it’s these little hurdles that make the difference between the successful bloggers who are killing it online and those that give up before their hard work pays off.

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New generation of Cell Phones - rapid technological advancements

I have always been a fan of Nokia, but I have not been into cellphones for a while. Last I was into cell phones Nokia (for its quality), Motorola (for style) and Samsung(features) were the big guys in the Cellphone industry here in SA . Then came Sony Ericsson with it's specialities, be it for gaming (who best to make gaming phones then the makers of the playstation 1,2 3 and PSP's), photography or music speciality phones. Another one of those  mobile phone companies who have had a meteoric rise to the top of the South African Cell phone rankings and has become the most popular and home to some of the most irritating social creatures is the Blackberry be it the curve, bold.

Sony Ericcson Xperia play gaming phone

 For those people who could afford it the iPhone of late has become popular not only in SA but it has taken the world by storm especially the iPhone 4s, this has forced companies like Nokia to move to the next level and make their latest addition of smart phones  the Nokia Lumia 800/900 to operate under the Windows OS, not Symbian like its predecessors. I personally liked Nokia's style before with their N95/96/97 smart phones, those were brilliant phones, and multimedia devices, they always offered a certain Nokia style and quality as well as alot of internal memory.

What I see now with Nokia's new direction is not individuality so much so but I see them trying to keep up and not leading the way as they did in the past, they are going for the iPhone type phone which is not bad and that is in fact the direction in which phones are headed, Cell phones have just become smaller tablets, or personal computers. Soon there will be no need for people to buy tablets because the cell phones will have all tablet abilities ans more with a more compact size. The design has become simple again, with just a rectangular shape, with a big screen and an attempt to make the lame shape attractive by using fancy casing. Its following the old trend of first making big cell phones with the latest features, then who can make the smallest but in this case thinnest, lightest phone with the same features as the competitors model, then they will improve the phone slightly while keeping the price high.

Cell phones, have become centred around apps and which offers the best apps with the best functionality, before the focus on getting the best screen resolution, the best touch screen interface (usability and all other things), the biggest memory and RAM (yes these devices are slowly becoming more powerful), who had the best stylish and which phone was best for entertainment. Now it has become the war of the applications, as if we need life to be made easier then it already is. Cell phone companies have also been advertising their phones as social media devices with things like Instagram which was an elite social network for fast photo sharing for Iphone users only (Which caused a big stir in the social media world when it sold out to Facebook for a billion us dollars. Other brands like blackberry use the elitist BBM as a social network to connect blackberry users, the social network has gotten so big here that you get left out of things just because everyone, organised and talked about things without your knowledge because you do not have BBM.

These brands work very smart they create little niches of supporters splitting the cell phone users into little iPhone and Blackberry Cliques where those who do not buy into that brand get left out, its like high school all over again, with the cool kids doing all the fun stuff and the parties...Hehe I'm just saying its a good marketing ploy, kids can beg their parents to get a Black Berry because 'everyone has it' and make their parents feel guilty if their kids social life suffers because they are not following this trend.

As for me I do not like following trends any more, I used to be into following technological changes but technology changes too fast for my liking. So I will buy my technology one 24 month contract at a time.

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Be your own person - Do what you want to do

Take Back Control of Your Life

Its time to take back control of your life, that is assuming that you ever had control of your own life. At first it was your parents that controlled you, it was them who laid the foundation for who you were going to be, then it was your friends or lack of friends that made you a certain way. As you grew older it was society that controlled how you behaved through its judgement and conservative outlook. It was society who put you in a box with the rest of the people.

Image: Dynamite Imagery / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Be Different

To be something in this world you have to be different, you have to break free from the societal hold and finally express your true self. Your true-self is the only person that will leave a mark in this world, its your true self that is inside you that wants to be introduced to the world. Pleasing others by being this timid people pleasing person does not get you anywhere, its time to break free and do what you feel like doing. People have jobs they do not enjoy because they have no self belief to push hard and do what they really want to do, Guys are afraid of girls because they were never thought to communicate, their parents failed them. People lack creativity because 12 years of education ripped the creativity right out of them. What happened to the little kid who used to draw things around him, the kid who used to draw animals, trees, buildings, the kid who ran around freely with no care in the world, I will tell you what happened. As the years went by that little kid lost a part of himself until eventually he was like everybody else.

Do What others are not willing to do

When someone is a deviant everyone including the people you call your friends try so hard to make you like them, but what they do not realise is that we are not meant to be the same. As long as no laws and hearts are broken you can do what-ever you feel like doing. Some of us were not meant to work in offices and live in the same place till we push daises, people say the world is your oyster and yet they restrict themselves to what they are comfortable with. The many people who are successful are not successful because they have some special gift, they are successful because they were willing to do what others were not willing to do. In many things in life if you put in the hard work, if you sweat, fail and rise even stronger and smarter from your failures surely you shall conquer.

If you want something in life you work your butt off now so that you will have the comfort you seek later and then some...

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