Blogging isn’t always as easy as it looks. Now in my fourth year of blogging, things are a little different (as I’m sure many of you “old timers” can attest).

I still get a lot of ideas for posts. Sometimes, they’re thoughts that come out of the blue, and sometimes they’re good enough that I can just hang onto them until I’m ready to write them (I did that with yesterday’s post on hard work for about a week and a half). Some are inspired by others’ posts, others by my every day life or pictures I’ve taken of the kids.

Once I get a good idea, especially if it’s inspired by another post, I write up a little draft of it. Sometimes it’ll be nothing more than a phrase or a link.

And usually, that’s about where they stay, sometimes even after I write the post on that topic. So right now, I have over 100 unfinished blog post drafts.

On the one hand, hooray! I have so much stuff to write about! On the other hand, boo! I don’t want to go through 100 posts looking for something I feel like writing about today (especially not if I have to read something first!).

So today I realized, that’s where I get stuck blogging—taking it from idea/draft to post. (And it’s not like my every post is a masterpiece that I spend days crafting.)

Confession: I wrote this post a couple days ago and thought I posted it. I was all sad because I didn’t get any comments. Then I was checking something on the site and discovered . . . I never hit Publish. What a great illustration of this, LOL!

So today I’m turning it over to you for a little help. How can I take more drafts to posts? Where do you get stuck blogging? What blogging questions do you have?

Photo by Shovelling Son

Once upon a time, there was a mystique to working one’s own land. Owning a farm was considered by a large part of society to be the pinnacle of achievement—you’d “arrived” once you obtained acreage. Hard work was a virtue, and an aspiration.

I doubt that I have to tell you that isn’t the mentality today. Most of us have learned to work just enough to get by. Even in motherhood, sometimes it’s easy to let the “okay” (PBS) supplant the “good” (playing with your kids).

There’s no way around it: motherhood—maintaining the home, providing meals, rearing children to become productive adults, sometimes even providing income for the family—is hard work. Even if we do just enough to get by, sometimes the work of motherhood is emotionally and physically exhausting.

So sometimes motherhood gets a bad rap. But you know what? I think we had it right centuries ago—though it’s often not fun or even interesting, hard work is good for us. It makes us grow and makes us stronger.

And, honestly, I have to hope that anything that requires this much effort can only be worth every ounce of myself that I put into it.

What do you think? What have you learned from the hard work of motherhood? How have you grown as a mother?

Photo by Sasha Wolff

The other day I had a virulent strain of the hiccups. I groaned about it and Hayden asked, “What?”

“I just want these hiccups to be done.”

“Well,” he counseled, “they will just go away by themselves, when they’re done.”

Wise indeed.

Rebecca, meanwhile, discovered oven mitts.

Hayden has taken up “speaking” for his stuffed monkey, Marty. But since Marty’s mouth is sewn shut, Hayden keeps his lips closed and kind of hums.

We’re not sure, but this might be where Rebecca picked up the habit of squealing with her mouth closed every time she sees her favorite stuffed animal/lovey, Pinky.

Logical creatures, children.

What unexpected leaps (logical or otherwise) have you seen from your children?

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about building communities around our blogs—connecting one on one with our readers, and encouraging them to connect to one another. I went back through some of the best posts we’ve had on those topics and gathered up the best advice.

From Michelle at Scribbit:

• Commenting on other’s posts is the best way to build community–but beyond that choosing topics is the most important.
• Choose topics that are relevant to your readers. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what you’d want to read.
• Paying attention to other people’s posts and then responding to them in a post of your own is a good way to promote discussion and build community.

From MommyZabs:

• I believe that if you desire people to comment on your blog and see your comment numbers going down (over a period of time, not just one post) you need to make sure you haven’t given off signals that you don’t want others’ input. The easiest way to remedy that is to invite opinions, comments.

1. Pay attention to the types of post content that gets people talking, make sure to commit to that type of post regularly.
2. Write posts relevant to your readership.
3. Talk back, respond. No one likes to talk to someone who just stares back. That is what it can feel like when you put yourself out there on a blog comment and know one acknowledges you.
4. Post on a regular basis. This is important for 2 major reasons.
   • The more people see something the more it is on the front of their mind. If they are coming to read your blog daily because you post daily, it is less likely to creep toward the back of their mind.
   • Let’s face it, though feed readers are an excellent way to track the blogs you read, there are still those that don’t use it! If they click day after day and barely see a post, chances are they will stop coming.

From me:
I think it’s also good to let your readers know how they can connect with you. A blog community doesn’t just have to stay on one site—and neither do your friends!

Guest blogging is another way to find new readers who might like to join your blog community—people who are interested in what you’re writing about.

Finally, you can help to encourage more comments on your blog by asking questions in your posts.

And now I will: what bloggers do you think have great communities? What have you seen those bloggers do to reach out to their readers?

Photo credits: plug—Rennett Stowe; clasp—Bao Ngo

Happy Halloween, everyone! I hope you had a good one. We had fun—can you tell what we were? (Hint: we’re in a specific order here. Technically, we could use two more people, too.)

(The answer.)

How was your Halloween?

Note to self: fix the rest of the clocks. This is getting really confusing.

Hey there,

I see we have a bunch of new subscribers. But it looks like we’re a little shy. Come introduce yourself in the comments today. It takes four seconds, and you might make a new friend (me, at least!)

Introduce yourself in the comments and tell me what you’d like to see here on MamaBlogga!

Photo by ThinkPanama

One of the keys to finding fulfillment, no matter what our station in life, is to love ourselves. To accept ourselves. To recognize that we’re not perfect, but we’re not terrible. We’re trying, and that says a lot—and most of all, we’re people of value.

I think this is especially important because really, valuing motherhood begins with mothers valuing themselves. We have to set the precedent for our families. Yes, we serve them and we break our backs to keep them happy and healthy—but at the same time, we teach them to respect others, respect themselves, respect us—and respect motherhood.

We must value ourselves as mothers. We must recognize and embrace this high and holy calling, and then help our families and those around us to learn to value us as individuals and as mothers, and to value motherhood and the things we’ve done for them.

Of course, some of us have an easier time of loving ourselves:

But, then, I think this shows us what a key time childhood is. If we work to instill this value for motherhood in our children now—if we show them that we love them and serve them, but we also value ourselves as individuals, and if we teach them to value themselves—we can get a jumpstart on the negative messages that are sure to come.

What do you think? How do you show your children that you value motherhood, and yourself? How do you teach your children to value you as their mother?

A few weeks ago, Ryan (and our neighbors) took Hayden on his first camping trip.

Although he wasn’t interested in eating marshmallows that were all “mewty,” and, thus, s’mores, though he whined about coming home pretty much all night, and despite one smashed finger, Hayden pretty much loved it.

He’s asked to go camping almost every weekend since then.

Any fun firsts for you lately?

Choosing happiness. It’s been a bit of a theme for the year—one of my resolutions, one of our Group Writing Projects (oh, man, looks like it’s about time for one of those again). It’s something we hear about a lot.

And now I finally know what it means.

Surprisingly, it has a lot to do with why, when I talk about how heart-rendingly difficult stay-at-home motherhood can be, people tell me I should get a job.

It’s because we don’t know how to be happy.

Choosing to be happy does not mean that we will automatically be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we always choose whatever might make us happy right this second.

Choosing happiness means we choose the things we know are most important for our long term happiness.

The analogy that keeps springing to my mind is one of food. I like donuts and ice cream and cake and pie . . . I could go on, but you get the idea. Food does make me happy, treats especially. I do the grocery shopping, so if I wanted to, I could stock up on these things every week and eat them every meal.

But I can’t choose cake and ice cream all the time. Yeah, I’d enjoy eating it (to a point), but I would soon get sick, gain weight, and miss out on vital nutrients. (Scurvy, anyone? Oh and PS tooth decay?)

To be happy with my body (liking how I look) and happy in my body (not feeling like crap), I have to make healthier choices. I do enjoy eating healthier foods, too, though not as much as my sugary treats.

The same goes for my day-to-day activities. I could ignore my kids all day, plunk myself down in front of the computer and them in front of the TV (where we are now, thank you), but we all end up grumpy and lazy.

Choosing happiness means doing what I may not want to do most right now—it means choosing the thing that I know is right for me, what’s important in the long run.

Staying home with my children all day may not be an endless delight for me. There are diapers and housekeeping and tantrums and nap strikes. But I believe the most important contribution a person can make to the world is to raise their children right, to show them love, to give them their personal attention. I know that in twenty years, my successful marketing campaigns won’t be what warms the cockles of my heart.

By choosing to raise my children myself, I’m choosing a long, hard road—but one that leads to real, long-term happiness.

What do you think? Are you giving up treats today so you don’t vomit tomorrow?

Photo by Swamibu

Completely unrelated note: Have you heard about the FTC’s recent rule change?The changes have been coming since June, when we first discussed whether compliance and ethics lawyer, for his legal interpretation of the guidelines.

We’ve already looked at how to find keywords for your blog, and how to use them to try to get search engine rankings. Today, for the last post in our series on keywords, we’re going to learn about tracking our keywords to see our success—or find areas where we could use more work.

My favorite ways to track keywords are through my web analytics programs. I use Google Analytics for my blogs. In GA, the Keywords report is under Traffic Sources>Keywords. here, they assemble all the keywords from all search engines to show the most popular keywords for your blog.

A number of other analytics packages also list the keywords people are using to find your site—103 bees, sitemeter, etc. etc.

The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers (free PDF) has a little more on this, but here are a few new hints.

The Keywords report is found under Traffic Sources. (I’ve also added this report to my Dashboard, so I can see my top few terms whenever I log in.)

At the top of the page, there’s a nice little graph that shows off how much traffic you get from keywords. It’s pretty, but it’s not that informative. The report, below, is what we want to focus on.

Naturally, I’ve left out a lot of my “personal” data, but you get the gist: this shows how many visits you get, how long people coming from these keywords spend on your site, how many of them have never visited before, and how many of them “bounce” (leave after viewing one page). And, of course, the list of keywords people are actually using to find your site is pure gold.

But there’s way more to learn from this report. If you’ll notice, there’s a pull-down menu by the word “Keyword.” Open it and click on Landing Page.

Now, instead of the keywords people are using, you can see what pages on your site they’re going to:

(Want to know more about a specific keyword? Click on it to “drill down,” and you can even see things like where people are from that type in that keyword, what browser they’re using, how big their screen is. No joke.)

Also, if you register with Google Webmaster Tools and verify your site, they provide a report of the top queries used to reach your site—and where your site ranks for those terms. Very useful—that way, you can see how much room for improvement you have, and better choose which keywords to work on.

This report is on the default GWT dashboard for your site as well as under Your site on the web > Top search queries .

You can also find out what sites linking in to yours are using for their anchor text (the text of the link) under Your site on the web > Links to your site > Anchor text.

Also, you can learn more about how Google sees your site with the Keywords report (Your site on the web > Keywords), which lists the 200 most common keywords Google finds when it crawls your site.

Now, of course, there are tradeoffs for this. You may be granting Google access to a lot of data and tracking by using these tools. If you’re not comfortable with that, there are other solutions that don’t use Google. Yahoo Site Explorer, for example, offers lots of information on incoming links.

What do you think? What do you use to track keywords on your site? What kind of reports do you find most useful?

This series has been a simplified beginners’ guide to using keywords. It’s not a substitute for professional search engine optimization or professional SEO advice. Yeah, I can give those, but I’m a little busy these days, so I’m not really pitching my own services today.

Keys by Kit