Blogging Journal (Month 1)

Published January 23rd, 2008

Well, it’s officially been one month since launching the site. One month with a very steep, often can’t-see-the-top-of the-mountain learning curve–but I am still here. Normally I don’t write about anything time sensitive, and stick to what I know well, but thought there would be some benefit to keeping a log of happenings with the site: I’m positive that there are other people out there going through the same thing I am. In an effort to help us all grow together, I will make monthly posts about my successes, goals, and misadventures in this crazy world of the weblog.

First of all, if you are a human reading this and not a robot or spider–thanks. I started this site so that I could connect and continue to help people on a larger scale, and on my terms. I’m a veterinarian, so I come from a very different world than this. Helping people and animals, and learning a new surgical or medical procedure by reading a book comes more easily to me than trying to figure out how the heck to centre something in the middle of my sidebar!

I like the challenge. I won’t lie, and pretend that it’s not sometimes frustrating, or that not getting things to look exactly the way I wanted them in my perfectionist mind is okay with me–but this is really good for me. I think that we don’t grow unless we do things outside of our comfort zone. There are a million excuses not to do things that scare us, but to me the reward outweighs them all. In a few short weeks, I have learned much, and already have a better knowledge about the Internet and site building than the average person–that in itself is pretty amazing. More importantly, I am one step closer to making a difference. I see the logs, I see that there are a few people starting to come–and stay for a little while.

If you’ve taken a look around the site, you’ll see that it’s a little bit different. I really wanted to have a whole site rather than just a blog (which stands for weblog for those that don’t know). When I do something, I invest a lot of time and effort to do it properly. I want to develop a long term, in-depth relationship with most of my readers. That’s why you’ll generally see longer more detailed articles, but posted less frequently. It’s also why I took the harder route initially and decided to host my own site. I don’t care about getting the most hits, or instant gratification. I’m willing to be patient and have fewer quality readers who care, keep coming back, and want to enrich their lives as well as those around them.

In order to attain my goals, I am purposefully trying to build a high traffic website, increasing my chances of finding people who have similar interests. If you have just started a site, you’ve heard about topics like search engine optimization, traffic building, and monetization. I am and will be doing those things to help me achieve my goals. Here is a brief rundown of what I am currently doing in these areas:

Search engine optimization is important in the sense that it’s necessary for many of your readers to find you. Things like having “pretty” permalinks ie. a permanent address for an article that has the actual title of the article in it, are important to help search engines and ultimately readers figure out what it is they are going to read. I use a platform called Wordpress to write and manage my content, which has features that make it much easier for your work to be found and placed in an orderly fashion in the search engines. There are also things called meta-tags that further help to describe your site and pages to readers in their browser. I’m getting fairly good results with what I’ve done so far.

There are many good articles out there about how to drive traffic to your site. I guess it totally depends on what kind of subject matter you have on your site, and what kind of readers you want to attract. I have a few of my articles published at Ezine Articles, which are getting a lot of reads, but it’s not translating into a lot of people coming back to my site. A lot of the links in the search engines go to my article but on their website first. Now this is good to get my name out there, but it remains to be seen whether this helps to attract the kind of reader that I ultimately want. I am currently going to focus on submitting some of my articles to relevant blog carnivals. A blog carnival is a gathering of articles put together by a host on a particular subject. It’s supposed to be a good way to connect and pick up readers in your areas of interest. I’ll keep you posted in the future about how effective they are for me. Another thing that we are doing is to leave the website name and address in places where we work. Not huge amounts of readers here, but it is direct. I’ve also applied to all of the search engines–apparently it can take a few weeks if it is going to happen–so I’ll keep you posted,

Monetization is an interesting subject in itself. I will be doing a couple of things monetizing my site shortly. There are a lot of ways out there that exist to make money from your site. What you do depends on you, your goals, and your site. Darren Rowse over at Problogger does a wonderful job of supporting and informing bloggers about the subject itself and the different direct and indirect methods to help you earn money. My goal with this site isn’t to make a lot of money directly, or even to earn a full income. My goal is to cover the costs of the site, and what other money I may earn I would like to cover my expenses so that I can volunteer more substantial amounts of my time to causes that I believe in such as Veterinarians Without Borders, the ALS Society, Humane Societies and local activities in my community. I have already put up a donation page for any loyal readers that wish to help me in my endeavours, and will be opening a Google AdSense account shortly. My goal over the next 6 months is to cover the approximately $110 that I had to spend up front to register the domain, private registration, and 1 year’s worth of web hosting. Eventually, it’s my hope that this site opens doors to things on my life list like writing a book about the human-animal bond, or getting to be a motivational speaker.

My goals over the next month are:

1. Figure out how to write and send out a monthly newsletter to the few supportive people that have signed up so far. (If you’re interested in receiving it, or just dropping me line, send me a quick email at valueforyourlife@gmail.com )

2. Figure out how to get a picture of me and Nauls embedded in the site

3. Email the author of the Recetas theme on my site to get some technical assistance on how to tidy up some of the style problems I’m having.

4. Participate in more blog carnivals

5. Open an AdSense account and get some ads up.

6. Most importantly, keep focusing on improving my writing, putting my best quality work on the site, and connecting with my readers.

I wish everyone reading this the best of luck in whatever they want to accomplish over the next month. I’ll check back in with you same time next month with an update.

Sincerely,

Amanda

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