Blogging 101: 2016 Version

How would you advice a millennial friend who has just started blogging middle of this year?  Should I just tell him to forget about blogging and focus his energy on something else?

What is blogging 101 in 2016 when your contemporaries have either quit blogging or are now blogging gurus?  The internet world must be filled with all the recycled tips by now. And I... am back to being a blogging noob.

So here's my blogging tip to a friend who just started to feel like a blogger. 

1.  Plan your blog well
2.  Start by choosing a well-thought of domain name that will become your brand for a long time
3.  Choose your blogging platform and hosting.  One that fits the budget and that is easy to maintain and upgrade. The $4-$5 monthly fee suits well for his budget.  Majority of the bloggers uses Wordpress, so I suggest he follow suit.
4.  Develop a regular schedule for posting.  One or twice a week will do, or say, every Monday or Friday.
5.  Work on developing great content. If you hate work, what can I do? 
6.  Use pictures that are easy to load in the internet.  If it loads more than 10 seconds, visitors would likely go away and never return.
7.  Have a plan to promote your site.  There is Facebook and Twitter.  I am sure that with his almost 1k friends in Facebook, he can catch the attention of half of them.
8.  Join a community of bloggers.
9.  Monetize your site.  Apply for an adsense account. Explore other options too.
10. Love blogging.  It will keep you going, at least for the next 5 years.

There you go.  I guess these are also the advice for myself if I have to redo my blogs.

When A Blog is No Longer Interesting

It’s been more than 10 years since I started blogging. If you look at my archives, my number of posts is dwindling over the last 3-4 years. This is my eighth posts since January 2013.  It looks like posting an entry is a semi-annual thing for me.  But hey, where did I lose the love? 

Bloggers’ Interaction

Since I also deleted my blogroll, I lost touch of all my blogging friends.  If I’ll look for them, I’ll just go to the comments section of my posts in 2007 or prior.  I know some had evolved into some kind of blogging superstar. Others just went back to hibernation and deleted their online persona.  Perhaps because of Facebook and Twitter, blogs are no longer interesting. Anonymity in blogging has died long ago.  Most of the interactions are already in Facebook and no longer at the comment section of a blog.  If you don’t have an FB account with a real name, people just ignore you and count you as a troll.  Me, a troll?  Maybe by now you know that my real name is not exactly what this blog tell you. Please don’t count it against me.

When I happen to interact face to face with another blogger, (I’m not really that cloaked in anonymity) I’d normally tell them that I deleted all my blogs.  I let the domain expire and did not renew the hosting plan.  That is true.  They know the feeling because they too, at the height of blogging, had three or four blogs only to keep one or none at all to last up to this day.

Tip: Get interested in others first before you lead them to your site

Traffic  

Thanks to a few of my posts, I still have traffic of about one unique visitor per day. Very lame! But are these the visits that I want? At some point, I want those visits converted into cash.  But the unfortunate thing is, the blogs that brought me more dollars are the ones I deleted.  Ok, so do I want a post to go viral just to get more traffic?  I have a real FB account somewhere and over 1000 friends. What should I do? As if I don’t know.  Haha.  Traffic is overrated.  And it can obviously backfire if not properly handled.  Write against a popular figure or a popular opinion, submit it to some viral sites and you’ll see yourself obliterated and your blog crushed to the ground.

Tip: Know the traffic that you want and work hard to get them.

Boring Posts

Who would read a boring post? A real fan may, but not a new visitor.  Even your friends will not read them, because they already know you apart from your site. Your ramblings are nothing, unless you make them interesting.

At one point, I find some of the blogs I follow as boring.  There was no longer a personal touch from the blogger as they became mostly shallow reviews of something.  There are those who tried to be discreet, making up stories until a paragraph or two about the review.  Funny indeed!  I tried to do the same but failed.

There are plenty of tips out there how to make your posts interesting.  Post a picture or even a video.  Make funny faces, or crack jokes good enough to throw me off from my seat. Narrate a story and stuff it with some figures of speech.  Check your spelling and grammar.  Bad writing turns off the readers.  There are bloggers out there who shun the grammar police but are not really doing enough to improve their writing. Do not dumb down your readers, but do attempt too much just to impress us with useless gobbledygook.

Tip:  Write simply but put a little twist

Write for the Love of It

Honestly, I lost the love somewhere a few years ago. I was maintaining lots of sites plus Twitter and Facebook.  A topic keeps running in my head by I struggled to write. I can no longer type and put hours into it.  I redirected my energies towards things other than blogging.

But now, maybe I should give myself another chance.  Let’s see if I gain a new following and reclaim the love for writing.  This is just my second post this week and second for the year too.  Expect 50 more after this.

Tip: Write for the love of it.

What do you think?

The ProBlogging Experience

These are the 25 things I learned in my first 40 days as a semi-problogger.

1. Blogging on your own dotcom is better than on a free site. Opportunities are reduced 4x when on a free site. I still have to find out why.
2. You need to have at least a 90-day old blog with no less than 20 posts, indexed by search engines and with regular updates.
3. The more blogs you have, the better. It multiplies your earning potential.
4. It’s not easy maintaining multiple blogs. You’ll run out of juice in the long run.
5. PR matters: Those with nil are given fewer opportunities, and lesser payout.
6. The higher the PR, the more the opportunities, and the bigger pay.
7. Google swoops down the PR of those with too much sponsored post. Money or PR?
8. You begin to worry about your own PR. Ghee and Javi expressed their concerns about my PR.
9. Location matters. North American and European bloggers have more opportunities. It is advertisers’ preference though. We can’t do anything about it.
10. Those with high traffic blogs can earn more with google adsense than doing sponsored posts.
11. After 45 days with adsense, I still have a little over $1. I don’t have a quick-fix solution. I don’t know how others got hundreds.
12. My first 8 posts in smorty gave me $76.40. They approve posts in 5 days and pays out weekly. The fastest so far.
13. Some sites offering paid posts snub you. Or they just don’t approve your site immediately.
14. You have to regularly log in to the opportunity sites in order not to miss out on some writing tasks.
15. Some of the opps are just like bubbles. They appear and disappear before you even touch them.
16. Blogging becomes a chore when it comes to some of the paid posts.
17. You tend to skip reading the sponsored posts of your blogfriends, even failing to notice the more important ones. My apologies for falling into this. But there are those that are really good at concealing the ads.
18. You fear you might have lost some of your readers because of the paid posts.
19. Blogging for money is not on my original list on “Why do I blog”. Still, money is not my reason for blogging.
20. You don’t love some of the opportunities presented.
21. You love to blog about some opportunities you don’t qualify.
22. You’ve got to have a paypal account.
23. The good thing about paypal is -- registration is free.
24. You get excited seeing the first few dollars in your paypal account.
25. The bad thing is – you can’t withdraw it on any RP banks (except Union Bank). I’ll have to wait a little longer.

Holed In

It’s still the 4th of January and I am now on my 7th post for the year. What’s my hurry? The last two months I’ve been flooding this site with entries. I realized I really have to slow down, pause and catch my breath for a minute. There is really no hurry in writing blog posts. Those opps may not wait, but I don’t necessarily have to grab each of them. I’m taking this semi-problogging thing in stride.

Today and in the coming couple of weeks, I will be finalizing company budgets and it will mean that I’d be very very busy. None of the badminton games despite the many invites that I received. Perhaps I’ll be working again till midnight at the office or at home. There would be less of the paid entries too, as these take away my concentration. Advertisers don’t deserve haphazard posts.

But I’d write personal thoughts every now and then. You know those thoughts (attractive or whatever) that suddenly pops in your mind and won’t let go until you type it down. It’s something that’s difficult to part with despite the busyness

Exploring New Grounds

I’ve been treading on their grounds for some time now, having read about the buzz from some of my blogger friends. The grass is greener on their side, so they say, and I slowly strolled my way there to find it out for myself. This is the fun in crossing over; exploring new grounds and finding more opportunities wherever available. I did some digging on the archives of my problogging friends and used the search engine to find out more about paid opportunities.

It was exactly a month ago yesterday that my blog was approved. Yes, I signed up for payperpost in order to get paid for blogging. Joining is pretty easy. Go to their site, register an account and your blog. Wait for their approval, and when approved, a $20 awaits for your first post. That is not a small amount for a start. At the present peso-dollar exchange, that is already equivalent to more than a 3-day salary for a minimum wage earner in Cebu.


When you get paid to blog about the things you love, the financial reward is really something extra. Your own creativeness can be put to good use since you write about it your own way and your own style. Plus, they really have lots of opportunities waiting for posties.

Christmas Gift: Awards

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Kind bloggers gave me awards. I really felt unworthy with all of these. Julai first bestowed me the Egel Nest Award. The award was first given out by Bradley Egel for the blogs he felt deserving of his brand of Blog Excellence Award.

Then Ivy gave me the “Sweet Treat Award”. I’m totally dumbfounded. It took me months before I recovered from such kindness. Thank you, thank you very much!

Now I’m bestowing these awards to the following (of my personal choice):

The problogging masters: Carey, Javi and Sasha. Their blogs also served as my resource when I crossed over.

The literary masters: Rey for poetry, and Ayen for flash fiction. I just love how these guys put magic into words. By the way, Ayen’s story is included in a book. Go check out his site.

The photography masters: Ferdz and Abaniko. Awesome, amazing, exhilarating, indescribable, great! I ran out of adjectives to describe their photos.

The happy bloggers: Verns, Gypsy, Francesca and Tin-tin. Their positive outlook in life is contagious.

There you go my blogger friends. I'm sure plenty of you already received awards, as these have been in the net for sometime now. May we all enjoy the holidays and may the love of God be with us all!

A Suitable Web Host

I want my own dotcom next year and I’m starting my search for web host now.

But finding a suitable web host is no longer a problem these days. Whether you want it for business or just for personal reasons, there is always one that fits your need. If you are new to web hosting, http://www.webhostingchoice.com is a great site where you can learn and explore the basics of web hosting. In their FAQ page, they answer questions that might trouble you for sometime.

If you also have specific needs, the site has this web hosting plans directory. If you further need to drill to specifics, they have this advanced search that allows you to pick every single feature you want in your site.

Isn’t this great? Web Hosting Choice is really a helpful resource to web hosting.