Blog Amateurs Anonymous









I belong to the Blog Amateurs Anonymous Club…

Did you join the blog world recently having just landed from the Rehabilitation Centre of Blogophobics, like me? If you are as excited as I was, you  must have gone  on and added content after content to your blog, beautified the pages, kept checking the traffic to your web and clicked on all the help and blog pages that could assist you in making the blog look like its destined to win the double trophies of “Miss Blog Beauty Pageant” and Forbes list of “Youngest Trillionnaire  Bloggers”!

Although I had started the blog in 2007, I went cold and only started posting again in September 23 2010. Before then not a single visitor had clicked on (or is it dug out) my dead and buried blog. 

I therefore began by renaming the blog to 
socialscientess (I wanted the name socialscientist but it was unavailable). I browsed through the millions of  articles, most of them advising that you write about a subject you love best to avoid the boredom torpedo that hits you as soon as you have written 3 articles.   I love community development work/International development, I have been in the not for profit world forever! Does the rest of the Internet crowd care about my passion? I am waiting and watching. I wonder how many keywords from my posts will attract advertisers! I am still thinking of which aspects of international development I should focus on. Will it be funds and grants for NGOs, fellowship for development studies, expatriate international jobs, UN polices or what?  

Being a complete novice in HTML jargon, I found myself in the Lost World. Adding links from external sources like  meta tags to blogger took me a whole day. Goodness me! That is when you discover that whoever had coined the phrase “Too many cooks spoil the broth” had visited gazillion advisory blogs in the web…  One talked of placing the link after the <head>, the other after the <title/>! The other between some characters that my eyes couldn’t spot! Still, others offered tools that malfunction on your blog. Finally I did manage. I found Blogger Tricks to be quite helpful in this area.

Next came the Adsense that didn’t make sense at all. By the time I discovered Adword and Adsense are as different as day and night, precious time had been lost! In Adsense I had to Google all the terms used. eCPMCPC? CTR? page impressions? What are these? I was dazed by all the jargon.

I finally sported an article that  summarised Adsense in one page with simple  steps on how to do it. Although Google has made it quite easy to add them, I ended up  placing the ads so badly (they are still there!), I wept the first time I saw the blog! Some ads had stretched their arms from one corner of the post to the other, hiding all the content, while some looked like they had been pasted there by my 5 year old daughter… I am still working on this and I am sure till I engage a professional, the blog will continue looking like a web storm has just passed through it… (web Superman can you hear my cry?) 

The last time I checked, little birds had their nests on trees, so what is this tweeting Twitter-bird that had the magic of increasing traffic through social networking? I am still waiting for the bird to lay its first eggs on my nest. After 20 tweets, I discovered that none of the links on my tweets worked! … Jeez! Another whole day wasted…

An attempt to join the affiliate and advertising sites that I had browsed in Affiliates Programs Directory  to  earn the blog some money was the most frustrating. After signing up for like 4 or so of them, the regrets started pouring in.. “we are sorry due to reasons listed below, your application has been rejected” !  How? after wasting all the hours looking for an alien called the Feedburner URL that you had requested me to provide? How, after you had asked me to describe the blog a thousand times and type my keywords the whole day? The easiest for me so far is the Amazon Associates but that is like asking a 4  year old her favorite story book, she will obviously settle for the most reader friendly one

Anyway so most of the blogs that recommend the money-making programs do not tell you that they are conditional! And a blog like mine that has no clue what blog traffic jam looks like will qualify when it reincarnates to a Queen Blog in the next life!  Too bad, you have already clicked on the referring blogs and with the click, earned the owner one more cent.

Today, October 8, 2010 I have a combined page visits of 563. Will I ever get to John Chow’s level of earning $ 30,000?  And if I do will I still be accepting hard punching criticism like this article by Dilip  on how he stopped reading anything with John Chow in it. Do I have the patience and zeal required like in any business?

Right now I have no real advice for you (sorry)… all I wanted to let you know is that you are not alone, we are many novices…  but together we shall soldier on; writing new and relevant content frequently, conducting cosmetic surgery on our blogs, learning the ropes of online marketing, and continuing to read more advice from the web. Lets review yours and my status after 6 months…

 So watch out though, there are very genuine blogs out there and an equal number of blog-cons.

List of ten websites that will assist a blogger- beginner



























   

Link referral

free web site traffic and promotion

Infolinks In Text Ads

Followers

About Me

10 years experience enhancing donor-funded partner organizations’ capacities in strategic planning, financial, administrative, organizational and programming management. Skilled in donor partner organizational assessments and partner capacity building. A 10 years experience in managing development donor-funded projects in the thematic areas of poverty-reduction, governance and democracy, conflict transformation and integration of Gender, Justice and Peace issues into mainstream programs (HIV/AIDS, Agriculture, Water and Sanitation, Emergency)

Total Pageviews

Add