1st Self Review of BloggingTips.org

The site is two weeks old today! In website terms we aren’t even out of our nappies yet! However, I thought it would be good to have a self review of the site so far. What do I need to do, what shouldnt I do etc. I think its very important to ask yourself these questions with your blog when you are first starting, particularly if your a first time blogger.

I currently own 4 blogs - 3 commerical and a personal blog for pics etc for my family. I am thinking of selling one blog and I am gonna concentrate on this one and the last blog.
Whilst I do run and maintain a number of sites, at the moment I am still a newbie I guess with regards to blogging. By that I mean I have yet to run a successful blog….something which I hope will change

Im from Scotland however I have moved over to New Zealand to travel and live here. Currently, im living in auckland though we are moving to Queenstown soon. There will be times when I just cant update the site so it has raised a lot of questions and problems which I will need to address. Im sure many bloggers have encountered these problems so I hope by posting this I hear from some of you.

As I said, I do still answer emails and maintain my other sites but apart from that I will be spending my time on this blog.

I find it very easy to update this site compared to others as any problems I encounter on my blog I can post about it here - which helps me understand the problem better and provides content for this site. I hope posts like that help other bloggers too.

BloggingTips.org is two weeks old today - I uploaded wordpress and started posting 2 days later. In that time I have made 18 posts. Some of have been simple links to good themes, others have been quick guides whilst some I spent a little more time on. During this time I have been reading alot about blogging, wordpress and maintaining a blog.

Here are some of the questions that I have been asking myself the last few days - im sure ill find the answer to these the hard way!!!

How often to Update

Successful blogs are nearly always updated on a very regular basis…at least every few days. However, I believe blogs which are primarily used for reference and not day to day reading can relax this by a few days or so (for example web development related blogs like this one).

My time online can at times be erratic. Ill spend 10 hours online working on things, the next day 7 hours and the next day ill spend two. I basically try and work when I can but make sure I dont let it take over my life where im getting stressed out etc - us bloggers and webmasters are quite lucky that we can put in a few hard days of work so that you can take the day off anytime we want.

If I get a chance to work on my blogs for a few days and write a lot of articles, should I post them all at once or space them out using timestamps? (ill talk about timestamps a little later)

Original Content VS Content Linking

By content linking I mean posting an article to a site and linking to it or just linking to it versus writing original articles yourself. This is something im not overly concerned about with BloggingTips.org but its something I have thought about a lot for my tech blog. Should I spend more time writing original articles or should I find more good links for my visitors? Obviously its best to strike a balance but for now im not sure what this balance is yet for my other blogs. Its something that might change due to my time restrictions (its much easier and more importantly quicker to just link to good content instead of writing it but your site gets less benefit from it - ie. no one will link to an article which links to an article!).

I mentioned that its something im not overly bothered about here. The reason being that I think that I will get the balance right. My plan for BloggingTips is to write my own articles and original posts etc but if I find a good article, theme or plugin im going to link to it to let my visitors know about it.

p.s. I know this article is about a review of bloggingtips but I thought the above question was still worth mentioning.

Getting the right balance of articles on your site

This is something I haven’t worried about too much with but its something I may need to in the future. It’s easier for me to write about some subjects than others on this site because I have more experience in it or whatever. I do think that adding posts to your site is always beneficial to you and your blog however I think you need to make the effort to add posts to all categories.

For example, we have a ‘Promote your blog’ category and we also have a wordpress ‘CSS’ category. I dont want the site to have 120 CSS posts and only 4 posts about promoting your site.

However, with this blog I plan on blogging about my experiences in maintaining and promoting it so when the site has a lot of content and I do start promoting it I will have more things to talk about

How to deal with not being able to get online

I mentioned at the start of this blog that im moving down to queenstown in early May. We plan on spending two weeks travelling the north island before we head down to Queenstown. ie. its 2 weeks where I will only be checking emails etc every 2 days at most.

Now this doesnt pose a major concern for me but in the future this kind of thing could be. Wordpress has a very handy feature which allows you to set when your post is posted live on the web. Ill obviuosly tell you all when I do this but before I travel down im gonna write 5 or 6 good posts and space them out during the two weeks so that the site is still updated. Theres nothing worst to a new visitor than seeing a blog which hasnt been updated in weeks.

Next year however we plan on going to south america for 2-5 months. With my tech blog its not too bad because I can pay some contacts I have to update it and I can maintain my other sites via email and logging on every now and then, but this site might suffer.

How can anyone else update what is essentially a blog which gives advice about blogging from my point of view. Sure I could hire someone to do this but it just wouldnt be the same. Im not gonna concern myself with that - thats something ill need to deal with down the line.

Summary

All in all im pleased with how the site is progressing. I still need to develop its own unique theme, I still need to add more content, I still need to promote it and after all that I can finally think about making a little cash from the site via advertisements etc.

Im looking forward to seeing traffic increase and getting feedback from visitors. I have not yet implemented any major plugins for commenting as im waiting til I have more commentators!!!

Its late, im tired, its time for bed. Thanks for reading folks