I had to learn how to do these to make an advert of a product I will launch soon on one of my websites. I figured that instead of showing my attempts to my fiancé, what I usually do with anything new I create, I will use you guys as my fist audience.  :)

Creating a screencast is actually not that easy

I was really surprised with all the efforts it took to create the screencast.

First of all, I wanted to publish it through YouTube so I had to fit myself into the 10 minute limit that they put on videos.

What is more important though, I had to talk to a microphone explaining what I do. It is much more difficult than I expected. All together, with editing and uploading, creating this 10 minute screencast took me around 10 hours. I had to record myself multiple times because I was making so many errors and when you make an error on tape, you cannot just backspace it.

Then, I had to learn how to use video editing software which I have never used before.

Even after these 10 hours, you will still notice a couple of errors and things to improve, like the height of the video and the resolution. O! and of course the name of the blog which I  set up.

I still have to learn a lot, but I hope each following screencast will be better and I will create it quicker.

I will much appreciate your feedback

I see many opportunities for improvement, but you will probably see more. I will appreciate if you could give them to me in your comments. This will help me improve and give you better screencasts in the future.

Enjoy

How to install Wordpress on Dreamhost – first screencast on Blogsolid.com is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. Start a Wordpress Blog on Your Own Site – Part 3: Installing Wordpress
2. Choosing and using wordpress plugins if you’re not a coder
3. Wordpress: Solving The YouTube Problem
4. Start a Wordpress Blog on Your Own Site – Part 2: Why Wordpress?
5. Start a WordPress Blog on Your Own Site – Part 4: From Implementation to Application

Visitors

• 4015 visits:
  • 60.25% referrals
  • 19.85% search engines
  • 19.85% direct
  • 0.05% other
  • 1.86 pages/visits
• bounce rate 66%

Let’s analyze:

The visits

The visits are lower as on majority of sites in December (apart from those about Christmas maybe).

There is a drop in referral traffic. This comes from lost links from blogs, which removed Blogsolid from their sidebars when it was sold. If I were them, I might have done the same to protect my blog form the new owner. I mean, I could be anybody – I could have inserted loads of links here to some shadowy sites or I could have displayed nude pics of ladies and gents. If I did that, Google could have quickly reduced rankings of blogs linking to what it calls “a bad neighborhood”.

Even if other bloggers didn’t care about Google, they simply might not want to link to someone they do not know.

The biggest hit Blogsolid is going to get for this is not the referral traffic but loss of rankings. You can see that it already moved from PR4 to PR3. This will definitely impact it’s search engine rankings.

On the side, I’m want to add that this particular problem, just as reduction in RSS readership, is characteristic particularly for blogs. If you buy a website which does not place the significance on the editorial team but only on the content itself, you will not get such penalties.

The bounce rate

We can see the changes I expected in the first stats post – search engine traffic is increasing (by 2%) and so is the bounce rate. Although the bounce rate grew more than I’d expect from a shift in traffic source because it grew by 5%.

From the bounce rate analysis it is clearly visible that it increased a lot around the 20th Dec, which is when I made the biggest changes to the design. I’m going to leave these for a while, but if the bounce rate does not drop over the next moth or so, I will have to admit my error and consider reverting some or even all the changes.

Website optimisation is a game of trial and error..

RSS readers

To my surprise, readership did not drop that much. I lost only the initial 10%. It’s great you guys are still sticking with me.

Money

Yes.. we made some first bucks… well.. cents actually…. It’s 44 cents from Adsense in the RSS feed. I am actually quite surprised it is anything at all. Adsense is “not perfect” for a blog like Blogsolid, visited by people who know what adsense is.

In the future though, I will have to think of something more relevant, so that it actually makes sense to have an RSS ad. For now – adsense will remain.

I can also say that my first experiences with using Google AdManager are very positive. The interface takes some time to get used to but using it and pulling reports it very smooth.

I updated the budget spreadsheet. You can see that I spent 17 hours working on Blogsolid. A lot of that went into the redesign. Hopefully I will not have to do much more of that, so in the next months I can focus on posting.

We are now nose diving into costs and registering an increasing loss on the investment. This will probably continue for good next few months or even for the whole year before I can turn this around. As I indicated in the Blogsolid plan, I intend to come back to an overall zero in 2 years. Luckily majority of the cost is my time, so there is no real cash outflow. Blogsolid will not make me broke. Still, I could be doing something else with my time where I would be getting paid, so I do not take cost of time lightly.

In general, I am quite happy with the developments, maybe apart from the significant increase in the bounce rate, which I will have to investigate further.

Let’s see what future brings.

Blogsolid December 09 stats is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. The beginning
2. The plan for Blogsolid
3. Final Blogsolid design changes
4. Taking Your Blog on the Road
5. Exclusive Interview: Michael Pinto of Fanboy.com

Here’s what I changed:

Splash page is gone

…I know, I loved it as well. It’s one of the things which made Blogsolid unique.

But it was receiving 30% of the overall traffic and had a 36% bounce rate. It means that around 10% of all Blogsolid visitors were leaving before they even had a chance to lay their eyes on the content, get interested and perhaps subscribe. Now some of them will hopefully do it – the blog will be more sticky.

For those of you, who are here for the first time – untill yesterday there was a splash page on the front page of Blogsolid, which looked like this:

New posts were showing on “www.blogsolid.com/ideas”. The “ideas” page redirects now to the front page.

I added Feedburner email subscription

Usually, on my other blogs, the subscriptions statistics look like this:

The biggest piece of the pie are email subscriptions.

Currently Blogsolid has only  8 email subscriptions out of 600. This shows that there is a lot of room for growth in this area.

The pie for Blogsolid will probably never look exactly like the one above because majority of you are tech savvy and use RSS readers, but if there are those of you who prefer using email subscriptions – you can do it easily now.

I offer email subscriptions in the right sidebar and also under each post.

Related posts under each entry

I introduced related posts to the rss feed a week ago. Now these are also on the blog at the bottom of  each post.

• They gives more choices for a visitors who reached the end of a post and will hopefully increase interaction with the site.
• They are also good for SEO.

Font is bigger

I  planned to do something to make reading less straining on the eyes. Each time I  proofread a post before publishing, my eyes were getting really tired. But I wasn’t really sure what to do. It was Suzan form StarSunflower Studio, who emailed me and suggested that increasing the font size might be a way to go. Thank you Susan!

I changed category pages

Categories now display lists of posts without teasers. They also list all  posts it the category on one page, not only last 5 or 10.

I did it because:

• It is user-friendly – People click into a category, when they want to find posts grouped in it. Now they will have immediate access and clear visibility of all the posts. No more multiple clicks to get to earlier.
• One of the major SEO rules says that you should have all your content not further that 3 clicks from your front page. Untill now, this was achieved by displaying Blogsolid archives in the sidebar, but I removed them. Now each post is just 2 clicks from the front page thanks to category pages (Front >(click 1) Category >(click 2) Post).

I introduced monetization

Yes. I think it’s about time. I actually think I could have done it earlier.

You probably already noticed the “Advertise Here” button in the sidebar. I am using BuySellAds – one of the best known networks for bloggers. It’s nice, easy and quick to install. I set the price low for now – let’s see what happens.

Another ad space is below the post. I placed some referral programs there, which I particularly like:

• Chitika – an ad network, which can perform very well, without annoying your regular users as it shows ads only to visitors from search engines.
• Yaro’s blogmastermind programme. I was a participant of the first release of this programme in 2007 and it was quite satisfying. It should be even better now. It gives you solid basics.
• More to come. I will be testing various programmes to find what is it that you guys find most useful.

I use Google AdManager to rotate ads on Blogsolid. This is a change for me. Till now I generally used OpenX for all my sites, so I am quite curious to see how will Google do.

That’s about it, when it comes to design changes. Let me know what you think!

Final Blogsolid design changes is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. Five Benefits of FeedBurner
2. Has Money Killed Blog Design?
3. When you flip a website go for the quick wins first
4. The plan for Blogsolid

Today we will look at how to choose and use plugins safely.

Have as few plugins as possible

The less plugins you have, the lighter your wordpress installation is. Light installation has 2 advantages:

• Your page load times are shorter. Your server has fewer files and less code to go through and performs lower amount of querys to the database. Quick load times can positively impact your google ranking or at least you will not be impacted negatively by your websites slowness.
• Your server will not go down. Whatever hosting you use, especially if it is a shared hosting, it allocates a limited amount of server resources to your account. The more plugins you use the more server resources they require. If you are close to your servers limits, a sudden spike in traffic can overload your server and your website will become unavailable.

But don’t be shy. If you need a plugin – use it!

On the other hand, plugins give you fantastic amount of additional functionality, which can do a lot of good to your blog. Worpress was build to allow for plugins. So if you need a plugin, do not shy away from it because you worry about your server.

There are ways to limit the impact of additional plugins on your sever. The best is probably the WP Super Cache, which I already mentioned in the previous post.

Chose plugins wisely

There is a plugin for everything these days. Just type what you want to get into google, add ‘wp plugin’ or ‘wordpress plugin’, hit search and you’ll have it. Usually you can find not one but multiple plugins offering similar functionality.

But downloading and installing anything you find can be risky.

• A poorly written plugin can damage your installation. This happens more often than you would think. You upload the plugin to your server, click install… and your site goes down. Look into the “See what others are saying…” section of almost any plugin on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and you will see comments by people who got errors when they installed  plugins. This can happen even with a well written and tested plugin but if the plugin is poor, risk is greater.
• There is no guarantee that a plugin will be maintained in the future. If the developer does not continue development, the plugin might not be compatible with future versions of wordpress and you may have to discard it. If your blog was heavily reliant upon it, you will be in trouble. This happened for example to the Custom Query String plugin, which allowed to manipulate the amount of posts displayed per page in archives, categories and on the front page. It was discontinued when Wordpress version 2.3 came out and never really brought back to life. I do not know a plugin that would now give this functionality and was widely used.

Choosing plugins

The best way to manage the risk of running into troubles with a plugin is careful selection of plugins to use. This will take you not more than 10 minutes and can save you headaches later.

I’d suggest to:

Install only plugins which have been tested on the current version of Wordpress

If something is not made for the current version, then it already suggests that it’s not supported. By the current version I do not really exactly mean 2.8.6 which we use now. Changes between versions on the 3rd digit are quite small and they rarely impact plugin compatibility. Majority of 2.8.X plugins should be just fine. But then again if something still shows 2.8.2, you should get a bit suspicious.

Do not install plugins which are compatible only up to 2.7 or less.

Install only plugins which are widely used

If thousands of people use a plugin it means that:

• It is fairly well tested – by thousands of other users.
• If the developer drops it, there’s a greater chance that someone will pick it up and continue maintenance.

How to know if a plugin is used widely? Well it’s a bit tricky.

On each plugin page there’s a ‘stats’ tab (example). It shows the amount of downloads of the plugin accompanied by a nice graph. I’d suggests choosing only plugins which have at least a couple of hundred downloads a week in the recent weeks.

The trick is however that some respected developers (Yoast.com for example) offer downloads from their own websites as well. These downloads will not be included in the stats page, so for some plugins these stats will not be accurate. If this is the case with a plugin you’ve chosen, you might have to do more digging.

You can have a look at the developer’s website and his work try to assess his expertise and commitment. For example, a possible successor of the above mentioned Custom Query String could be Custom Post Limits. When you go to its author’s blog, you will notice the amount of plugins he created. It’s easy to see that he likes doing it and people tend to stick to their passions. On the other hand, Scott (the author) did not post since August, what might suggest, he’s moving away from blogging/wordpress/developing. Many things can influence this – he might have gotten a great job, which takes away his whole time, he might have gotten bored with maintenance and fixing bugs, he might have fallen in love and followed his new better half to a different country somewhere, where they do not use internet that much. Whatever the reason, if this plugin is not updated when WordPress moves to 2.9, it might simply stop working.

In general remember to consider the risks and rewards of choosing a particular plugin before you install it.

I contacted Scott before publishing this article and the Custom Post Limits plugin will be maintained, so stay calm if you’re using it. Also, I should mention, that some of the suggestions above were brough up by Scott in his reply to me. Thanks a lot Scott.

What Scott also mentioned is that sometimes even a simple thank you or a small donation can keep the developer motivated to continue. After all, developers spend countless hours coding plugins, often not hearing any gratitude, but getting only support and error tickets from users.

Using plugins

Backup and test

I cannot emphasise this too much. You should back up your site (at least the database) before each update of a plugin and each wordpress update. Getting out of a mess caused by a plugin which updated incorrectly may be a real nightmare.

If your blog gets many visits, the best approach would be to also test everything on a separate copy of your site before updating the live one, to save your readers from the downtime if an update is unsuccessful.

Of course this is even more time consuming than just doing a backup, so if you do not want to do this for each plugin update, consider doing this at least for the worpress engine updates. These can make more than one plugin incompatible.

I would actually say that there is less risk if you let your installation be out of date for a couple of days, than to decide on an upgrade without a backup.

Uninstalling plugins

When you uninstall a plugin, you should also test.

Some plugins require you to add some php code to your theme. When you uninstall, the code will display errors on your pages unless you remove it. Other plugins enable various functionality when you put custom tags in the posts. When you uninstall the plugins, some of these tags may start appearing as text within the post. Testing off-site helps you avoid all these issues.

In future posts I will show very easy methods of setting up a separate copy of your website so that you can do all the updates and uninstalls without exposing your site to a risk of downtimes.

Stay tuned!

Choosing and using wordpress plugins if you’re not a coder is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. Start a Wordpress Blog on Your Own Site – Part 2: Why Wordpress?
2. Start a Wordpress Blog on Your Own Site – Part 3: Installing Wordpress
3. Wordpress 2.3 Launches
4. Wordpress: Solving The YouTube Problem
5. Wordpress: Unleash the Slug Within

Well – that would be a mistake and here is why:

1. Time is money

With websites, just like with any other business, time is money. The longer you wait for the result, the more money you lose or at least – the less you earn. Either way, your investment is less profitable than it could be.

Really big changes will take time. They may not be ready for many months during which your new purchase will not be at it’s best potential. To get the best benefit in the shortest possible time, apply all the small changes you can and do it as soon as possible.

If you can enhance  functionality, design or  seo of the site just a little bit and thanks to that get just a little bit more traffic or revenue, your investment will pay back quicker and the additional traffic you’ll get will create a better base for growth when the really big changes are ready.

2. Many small changes are better than one big change

Design changes of almost all big websites show that people are not really into revamps (Facebook is a good example).

Imagine if I came in and completely changed all of the Blogsolid beautiful design – how would you feel? You’d probably feel that the new guy does not really know what he’s doing and has no appreciation for the fantastic looks of the blog. Hey – you might even unsubscribe not to watch further devastation.

The way to go around this problem is to do many small changes. These will go more or less unnoticed, but in the end can add up to a big change you want.

(Disclaimer: Blogsolid design will also have to change a little to enhance it’s SEO friendliness and allow for additional functionality, like an email subscription, but I will not do anything drastic. )

My quick changes to Blogsolid

Now  let me show you what changes I already made.

Easy SEO optimisation changes

In the starting post I wrote that Blogsolid has fantastic external seo (lots of links from good websites), but has ‘opportunities’ when it comes to internal on-site seo. Some of these can be introduced with just a few clicks and these I introduced almost on day one.

Before I begin though, I would like to show you how I think a website should be optimised from the SEO perspective. You can skip this part if you’re a SEO expert.

___________________________________

The super quick seo guide

To rank high in google a blogger has to:

• Provide content to which people will link (Blogsolid is already successful here)
• Help google understand what each webpage on the website is about so that google displays it in search results when someone looks for it – here we might just pull a few tricks out of the hat.

The easiest way to tell google what the site is about is to structure each to deliver a consistent message. Starting from the meta tags, through the headers dow to the paragraph the page should have a clear message saying what it is exactly about.

Say you have a website about oranges “tasty-oranges.com” and on that website you have a page about green oranges. This page should look like this:

META TAGS

<title>Green oranges – tasty –oranges website</title>

<description>Green oranges – learn about the tasty green oranges. How to peel green oranges (and some more stuff which corresponds to what is in the actual content</description>

CONTENT

<h1>Green oranges</h1>

This site is about green oranges which are tasty and all…

<h2>How to peel green orangesh2>

Peeling green oranges is easy there are 3 techniques:

<h3>Peeling oranges technique 1</h3>

….

….

<h2>Next thing about green oranges</h2>

Here goes the next thing about green oranges.

..and so on

The whole site from top to bottom is about green oranges. No mixed messages, no confusions. Good semantics (h1, h2, h3) with the major keyword for the page in each meta tag, in first heading and then in further headings. Even a robot cannot be mistaken as to what this site is about.

Of course google probably no longer uses meta tags to determine search rankings but in my opinion it’s best to play by the best rules, because:

• it makes all the important elements of each website as relevant to it’s content and as convincing as possible.
• Google still uses meta tags to display the results. What you put there often appears in the google results. Therefore, even if  tags didn’t influence your rankings, they will still influence the way your results presents themselves what can have an impact on the click-through rate.

End of the quick seo guide

___________________________________

Before my changes, Blogsolid meta tags looked like this

• Title tag: Blogsolid >> Blog Archive >> Title of the post (not pretty and not encouraging to click. Who wants to read the archive – we want up to date info!)
• Description tag: Ideas for better blogging (On all the pages across the blog the same short description)
• Keywords: blogsolid, blog, solid, blogs, blogging, tips, tricks, advice, how, ideas, better, basics, growth, power (on all pages across the blog)

In general – not too great.

First quick change I introduced– All in One SEO Pack

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack

All in One SEO Pack helps us solve the title tag problem and organize the websites title tags the way they should be:

• Title tag: Title of the post – Blogsolid
• Description tag: Will be added manually to each post once it’s written. It will summarise the content of the post, preferably including a substantial amount of keywords. Maybe even starting with the exact words from the title tag.
• Keywords: Major keywords for the particular post – you can set this to automatically display post title and forget

Second quick change – corrections to html semantics (the content headers)

This error is a common case for many, even great blog themes – they give the h1 (header 1) attribute to the blog title and then h2 to each particular blog post title even on the single post pages.

Instead, the h1 attribute should go to the title of the post as I showed it in the example above. It should emphasise what the particular post is about. Big guns have it this way: Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Daniel Scocco. I will not reinvent the wheel and will set Blogsolid the same way.

The blog title should be a picture only. If you want, you can use this code, which will add h1 attribute only on to the homepage of your blog:
<?php if (is_front_page()) { ?>
Your code for the front page (with H1)
<?php } else { ?>
Your code for all other pages (without H1)
<?php } ?>

This change is not as easy as installing a plugin because it requires editing the theme itself. You have to correctly change the code in header.php and then edit your stylesheet to make sure that the site and post titles still look good. But if you know how, it takes 10 minutes.

Further quick changes – additional plugins

WP Super Cache

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache

This is an absolute must have plugin. It allows your blog to load quicker and survive more traffic. It allows you to use more plugins and lets you host more blogs on the same server without crashing it.

It makes your blog better and hosting it cheaper.

WP-DB-Backup

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup

Another must have, especially if you get a lot of comments. You may be doing regular manual backups, but lets face it – these will not be daily.

This plugin lets you set even hourly automatic backups and send them to your email. This uses a little of your bandwidth but is much better than loosing a weeks worth of comments on your blog.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin

As a quick fix, this plugin can only be introduced half way – into the RSS. Introducing it on the blog in a good-looking fashion requires a bit of coding and I will do it later.

The related posts plugin has 2 goals:

• It encourages people to interact with the blog a bit more. It will show some older posts, what encourages people to click through and have a look. This is particularly useful in case of people reading the blog via an RSS – they would often never visit the site itself. But if an older post grabs their attention, they might just get curious enough to visit – there, they will increase the statistics (important if you sell display ads), but might also just click an ad or buy something via a referral link from your sidebar. My experience shows that with each post you publish, you will get 1 to 4 visits per each 100 of your RSS subscribers.
• It is good for seo. This plugin adds internal links between posts on your blog what hels to spread Page Rank from more popular posts to the less visited ones.

I would recommend setting the matching threshold to as low as possible. What you want to have is 5 links under each post even if they are not really exactly similar. They are all on the same blog what means they are on the same subject and might just interest the reader.

RSS footer

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer

This is solely a small step to combat copyright violations. If someone automatically republished this blogs feed on a different page, he will do so with the link pointing back.

Does it work? I am not confident. But it does not hurt to have it there. And it always reminds everyone what they’re reading… in case they’ve forgotten.

One thing you will notice is that the plugin adds a feed from Yoast.com (creator of the plugin) to your wp dashboard. Quite a smart way to promote yourself I would say.

Introducing all the described changes takes about 30 minutes, including editing the template files and the impact may in some cases be substantial.

More to follow soon.

When you flip a website go for the quick wins first is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. Choosing and using wordpress plugins if you’re not a coder
2. Wordpress: Solving The YouTube Problem
3. Wordpress 2.3 Launches
4. Wordpress 2.5 – Where Is It?
5. Final Blogsolid design changes

I will try to turn Blogsolid into a mainstream blog about blogging and make money in the process.

Goals for the next 12 months:

• Double the traffic
• Monetize – by November 2010 Blogsolid will be making over $500 a month.

Goals for the next 24 months:

• Quadruple the traffic
• Monetize – by November 2011 Blogsolid will be making over $1500 a month and the whole project will break even.

Is it going to be easy? – NO

Is it possible? – YES

It will not be easy

It’s not the best niche

“Blogging about blogging” and “blogging about money-making” niches are probably the most difficult on the web. There are many prominent blogs here with massive audiences and huge experience. Running another blog on the subject is a little like opening a martial arts school across the street from Bruce Lee’s. Building a brand name is close to impossible.

Also, there are thousands of small-to-medium blogs which try to compete, what takes away a lot of long tail search traffic.

But that’s why I chose Blogsolid. I want to see if I can make it. If I do it here, in the money-making niche, it means anyone can do it anywhere. It means that there is still plenty of room for bloggers to find success. It means that it’s not to late.

I am not a native English speaker

I live in an English-speaking environment since quite a while but English is not my first language. This poses a serious drawback. I spellcheck my posts, proof read them and all, but still – errors will happen. Also, what is probably more important, my posts might not flow as nicely. Odd grammatical structures can sometimes appear. This might discourage some readers.

It is possible

There is still room for more blogs

Even though there are many blogs about blogging out there I believe there is still room for more.

The internet is a living thing. Many bloggers abandoned blogging or seriously reduced posting rates in the last couple of years/months (Skellie, DoshDosh, Caroline Middlebrook and others). Probably in the coming years similar things will happen to other, currently active blogs. This opens a window for new bloggers to step in and take over.

I am not starting from scratch

Blogsolid is an established blog with significant readership and good backlinks. To take a new blog to where Blogsolid is would take at least half a year or even more. I do not have to do this. I just have to continue. keep my eyes on the ball and I will succeed.

I am not a newbie

I may go a little over the top here, but I actually think it’s very important – this is not my first blog and it is not my first website. I’ve been working on the internet for many years. I have experiences to share and have my own point of view.

I will not have to learn to make money from a blog in the process of blogging so my posts should be of use also to those of you who are on the web since quite a while. This blog will bring a new perspective. These will not be rewrites of Darren Rowse or Shoemoney.

Time I will to dedicate

Blogsolid is not my only venture. I will not be able to give it my full attention. This would actually be unfair. My goal is to check if an average person, which has $2000 to spare, can in a reasonable period of time turn a blog into a day job. Those of you who are blogging in their spare time, after work, would not be able to do as much as I, if I worked on Blogsolid days and nights.

I will post more or less 2-3 times a week. From my experience, such rate is sufficient to keep good contact with the audience and not make them to tired of your constant presence.

On top of that, I will:

• respond to comments
• develop and grow blogsolid
• promote (occasional guest posts etc.)

In all, I will aim for Blogsolid not to take more than 4-8 hours a week for the coming year. This should be sufficient to meet the goals I set for myself.

Watch me do it

I will do everything in front of your very eyes.You will see step by step how I try to grow Blogsolid and turn it into a big, well known blog.

To give you a detailed view of the return on the investment in this blog is, I created a spreadsheet in which I will log month by month the costs and time dedicated to it. I will also log revenues when they start.

HERE IT IS

The spreadsheet calculates:

• the net result month by month,
• the incremental result which adds all the results from the beginning of the project,
• for those of you who are more into finance, it shows the present value of the investment.

You might notice that I rate myself at $25/hour. I chose $25 to represent more or less an average hourly wage in the developed countries. I did not look for any stats to support this but it gives earnings of around $48,000 per annum (40 h/week) so should not be too far from true. If your rate is different, you can change it for yourself to see how the investment would work out for you.

Do you think I can make it?

Now that you know what my plan is, stick with me to see how I put it to action.

I also wonder what are your thoughts on my chances. Let me know!

The plan for Blogsolid is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

You might also like:

1. Blogsolid December 09 stats
2. Final Blogsolid design changes
3. Blog Growth Strategy: Evolve
4. The beginning

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

Dune by Frank Herbert

We cannot start our journey without defining exactly where we are.

Time

It’s December 2009.

From now on, every month, I will evaluate the progress of Blogsolid by presenting it’s statistics for the previous month. These monthly stats will show us if the efforts to grow this blog are successful.

By making December my first month, I am doing myself a small favour. A year will elapse on 30th November 2010. Novembers are usually good months when it comes to online business – not to many holidays add up to a lot of online activity. It will be easy to score well in November.

Visitors

I will use statistics provided by Imar for the Flippa auction when he was selling Blogsolid. These show September and October figures. I do not have figures for November (when the sale was taking place), so October will have to do.

The starting point is therefore:

• 4,891 visits/month
  • Referrals: 62%
  • Direct: 21%
  • Organic 17%
• 9,847 page views per month (1.98 per visitor)
• Bounce rate : 57.24%

These stats are actually quite strange, at least for my experience. PR4 and only 17% of visitors from search engines is something extraordinary for a website like Blogsolid, which is pretty much dormant.

I can see two reasons for this:

1. Limited amount of content – only 45 posts. Google does not have enough stuff to search for. If this is the case, we should see increase in visitors with each published post.
2. SEO opportunities. Blog solid has a very good external SEO. It has many incoming links from high quality websites. However, there are many opportunities to improve the site internally, which could help the site get more traffic. I will introduce all these changes in the future, so we will see if that’s the case.

I show bounce rate for informational purposes only. I am curious as to how it’s going to change in the future. If my expectations are correct and we will manage to increase the amount of visits from search engines, overall bounce rate will probably also grow. On all websites I own, bounce rate of traffic from search is always the highest. The lowest is from referrals – Wikipedia in particular.

RSS readers

Number of RSS readers which I will use as a benchmark is 679. This is the number with which I have acquired Blogsolid.

You can see the initial drop in the number of subscriptions (631 today). This is normal – many people unsubscribe from a blog when it’s sold. The blogger they liked to read left and they don’t see a point in sticking around.

I think these numbers will continue to fall for a while. Some of you guys, who stayed to see what my plan is, will not like my style or point of view and will unsubscribe after a couple of posts. This might last for the next few weeks after which we will probably see the bottom and then first signs of recovery.

Now we know where we are. In the next post, I will outline the plan for Blogsolid.

Till then!

The beginning is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

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5. The plan for Blogsolid

It’s an exciting feeling – kinda like taking your new car for the first ride. You’re not sure how everything works yet, but already want to get to the highway and check what this baby can do. One difference is that all of you are riding with me today. The reader shows 679. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.

Before I continue though, I have to admit that I feel also a bit awkward. I have never bought a blog before. I bought and sold websites, but never a blog. A blog is different from a website because it has much more of the “spirit” of a blogger who runs it. Taking over someone else feels as if I was invading someone’s territory, a private space created with care and dedication. I feel obliged to pay respect to all the work Imar has done here.

A bit about me

I’ve had Blogsolid in my RSS reader almost from it’s start. I am one of you – a Blogsolid reader. Now I will also be a Blogsolid’s main blogger. I will do my best to make this blog what it deserves to be and to continue the great work Imar started.

To give you some info about myself, I updated the About Blogsolid page. It will give you some hints as to where Blogsolid is now headed.

To leave all the credit for Blogsolid’s beautiful design to Imar, I have created an additional page just on this topic, where I moved most of the original “about” page.

The future

The future is bright for Blogsolid. I am working hard at the moment creating a plan to bring this blog to an even higher level. I already have good few tricks up my sleeve, so stay tuned!

You will have to wait though. The next post will not come for a while. I want to finish  “the plan” first. I was waiting to start the work on it till the transaction is completed (what happened yesterday).

This actually might be the first tip I share here. If you’re buying a website, don’t start working on it until you really have it (the files, databases, the domain and in some cases – the know-how). You’ll have all the ideas on what to do with it and how to use it’s potential – you will be burning with a desire to begin working… but stay calm. Website transactions can be unsuccessful. This can be due to technical difficulties or fraud (especially the latter). Whatever the reason, time spent on a website you’ll not obtain is time wasted. Of course I would never expect anything else than a smooth transaction from a person of Imar’s caliber, but still – a rule is a rule.

Anyway, now that I am officially the new owner, I am working hard and you can expect the first results in a matter of a week or two.

I promise it will be worth your while.

I bought Blogsolid.com is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

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I believe this site has huge potential to be developed further. Unfortunately, recently I have not found time to devote the necessary attention to running it. I think there is a “solid” foundation in place and that’s why I am looking for someone who can build forth upon it.

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5. Wordpress: Solving The YouTube Problem

If you don’t have a Google account, you will have to sign up to use GWT. If you already have one, it’s simple to add GWT to your bag of goodies, however it doesn’t appear listed with the common Google apps. You can find it at google.com/webmasters/tools/.

GWT has a no-frills interface that allows you to adjust a few SEO nuts and bolts, but there are three things you need to do to get started:

1. Add your site on the GWT dashboard
   This is very straightforward, no explanation needed.
2. Verify your site – you have two options on this one:
   • either add a meta tag within the <head></head> of your blog. GWT generates the tag and you just need to copy and paste it into your blog template. Once it is all set, click a button which tells Google to crawl your site in search of the verification tag,
   • or upload an HTML file to the root directory of your blog. You have to save this file as the name GWT generates for you.
3. Add an XML sitemap. This is probably the trickiest part, so I will try and explain two ways to do this:
   • First you have to generate a sitemap for your blog. You can do this by using an online XML sitemap generator such as XML-Sitemaps.com. Once you have downloaded the sitemap file to your computer, upload it to the root of your blog, then tell GWT where to find it by entering the URL into the field provided.
   • If you’re running wordpress, you can install a plugin to create a sitemap for you. I used the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. This plugin requires you to create two blank files in your blog’s root directory – one called “sitemap.xml” and the other called “sitemap.xml.gz”. Check the permissions on these files and make sure they’re fully writeable (CHMOD 666). Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to the options in your Wordpress dashboard and do the deed. Tell GWT about the sitemap by entering the address in the provided field.

   Phew! After all that you will definitely need a coffee break and then start exploring the Google Webmaster Tools. You can add more than one blog and monitor them all from the GWT dashboard.

As always, please feel free to add any SEO / GWT related tips, tricks and comments below.

Exploring Google Webmaster Tools is a post from: BlogSolid - ideas for better blogging

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