How to know what to blog about – a journey to Personal Blogging

For anyone who wants to take blogging into a passive income generator, number one predicament is to identify what to write about.

In any blog tutorial, the first step to create a successful income generating blog is to have a niche. Having a niche will help in focusing the kind of posts you will place in your blog. You will need to recognize what topics you are passionate about in order to not run out of ideas to post. Being passionate will guarantee fun and playtime even while working.

But what if you cannot think of a niche.

Been there, done that. You have no idea how much trial and error (on many subjects) I underwent to arrive on my topic. Before I tell you what my topic is, let me take on a short background of my blogging journey.

Many years have I been blogging about stuff that interests me. I believe I started to blog regularly using a Wordpress framework early 2005. I blogged for fun and for archiving of memories. I didn’t even see the need for categories because I perceived my thoughts to be so random I would have too many categories than necessary. I blogged about anything and everything under the sun! My rants, the food I ate, the happenings in the office, my chats with officemates, the ads I saw, etc. Posting was fun and I hardly gave any notice to typos and misspellings. It was my blog anyway. My blog so I am the boss!

Then, I learned all about Google Adsense. From Google ads placed strategically within your blog pages, you could earn money from visitor clicks and page impressions. Naturally, my eyes turned into dollars. I have been blogging for a long time and I knew I had enough blog posts to have search engines notice the existence of my blog.

Boy was I wrong!

Indeed, I had enough posts but they were not quantifiable enough to gain enough traffic for good Adsense output. I researched on how to resolve this issue and I learned the most important part of blogging…

(Good) Content is King.

It was the same time I learned about niche marketing. I also learned about usage of public domain, which anyone could use since content has expired copyright issues, and place it on their site for additional content.

I found public domain for herbal plants and (psychology) of making and saving money.

I made blog categories on herbal plants and money tips. Then I literally copied and pasted each content I found valuable (which are a lot) into my blog.

Sure enough, my blog traffic ranking increased. I registered my blog into some Text Link services and I got to earn a small income every month. It was happy time!

After a few months, an article about Google looking down at duplicate content made me afraid. Duplicate content is a major boo-boo on search engines. It may come to a point a site using duplicate content be banned from search engine (SE) index, which may result to the complete death of a website and any recurring income from it.

My blog has sentimental value to me. Even without high page rank, I didn’t want my blog to be removed from SE’s index page. So to ensure my blog’s safety, I removed all duplicate content I placed in it. With it went the small recurring income I had and my blog ranking went down.

I knew I had to seriously to work on a niche if I ever want to have a recurring income back. I tried to focus on blogging about herbal plants and making money but I realized I easily ran out of steam writing the same subject over and over again. Other than that, I get depressed reading other blogs of the same subject and seeing their high ranking value.

I realized I had been focusing on subjects that weren’t for me.

Many months went by and I couldn’t think of a niche I am passionate to write about. It was a frustrating time. It was drummed in my head I should have a niche if I ever want to take blogging in to the next level.

A few days ago, I leisurely went through blog feeds I subscribed into my Google Feeder. I regularly read updated feeds under category ‘Design Blogs’ since my job entails I should recognize latest web design trends. My other categories are ‘General Blogs’, ‘Money Blogs’, and ‘Winglica’. I only get to read feed updates on these latter categories when I have the time. Under ‘General Blogs’ are feed updates on mostly personal blogs I find interesting to read.

Then I realized, some of these blogs don’t necessarily have a niche topic. They owned personal blogs and yet they were earning extra income that was enough to pay most of their bills! I regarded this as a sign that I was somehow on the right track and I just needed to know how to optimize my posts to gain back higher traffic and bring my ads back.

I researched on ways on how to do this and I landed on these tips:

NOTE: You do not have to follow all of these tips to the letter. Some are optional if you deem them not that important to implement on your blog.

1. Use a search engine optimized theme
For Wordpress, there are many SE friendly themes to g o around to. Having a SE optimized team easily makes a “bot”, a SE’s algorithm , to judge if a blog has good data to get into the first page of SE results.

2. Join in communities, forums, and other blogging community
Interacting with other communities will also give traffic to your blog. Talk to other people, gain friends and convert them to become your blog visitors. You can also learn things from them to blog about. Social networking (using Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and other similar tools) can aid with this method.

3. Write! Write! Write!
This is the number one rule in blogging! Content is King! Make sure to write interesting and informative articles so you could have regular followers. Use video and good pictures to add more “jive” to your posts. You could also write an article on your local papers and put a link back to your blog within the author’s bio section. Socialize offline and online and let everybody know of your blog!

4. Make use of “trend” keywords
You may know what keywords to use to optimize your post via Google Trends. A good tip is to use keywords with high traffic rank but with low density value. If you do a keyword search in Google, look at the number of Search Results found at the top-right section of Google search results. Usually you find this results in this following format:


Results 1 - 10 of about [number of competition] for [keyword search]. (time generate for SE results, usually accomplished in seconds)

Look at this for an exact Google Search example:

Google Search Result sample

If your keyword search results in millions of competition, then chances of your post or article to place high in SE results is very slim. So you have to research well on your keywords before making a post.

5. Know the basics of SEO
Whether you like it or not, learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) will aid in structuring your post and easily permit a ‘ bot’ see how informative your post is for a specific keyword.

6. Blog on what you are passionate about
This is already self explanatory. To stress the importance of this tip, if you do something you enjoy, work will seem like play. It will be fun and it will help your creative juices to do more and not be frustrated if the outcome is not what you intended it to be. It’s working in a positive note and that is the most important part of all.

7. Blog Frequently
People like constant information on what are interested on. If they feel your blog has become ’stagnant’ from a long time of ‘blog-sleep’, they might think your blog has died and will not expect anything anymore.

8. Blog for people
Blog for people not for search engines. Also, try to blog with a ‘personal touch’ as if you are directly taking to a person in front of you. People like to feel a sense of companionship and they will stay if they feel that with you. Generating relationship is a good thing to be successful in blogging.

9. Patience is a Virtue
Blogging is NOT a SCAM. Meaning, this is no get-rich scheme. This is the same as any other business venture. It will start out small, slowly build its way up. You will need to work, sweat and maybe spend some sleepless nights on it. When it reaches that level of stability, that is when success will come in. ^_^

If we look at these tips, we can see the progress of correct blogging as so:

- You will write good content for your readers.
- You will optimize your post on search engines by getting some links.
- People will find your post in SE and the links you made.
- People will like your post.
- When people like your post, they will link to it.
- Your post will gain higher ranking for search engines.
- More people will find your content on SE and from links and writings of other people.
- More people will like your post! Woohoo!
- More people will like your content!
And the cycle goes on! Here we go! \o/ (cheers!)

I believe I have found the start of a new path. I need to work on this now and set my goals straight.

Personal blogging it is!

I believe anybody could get a substantial income through blogging even WITHOUT a specific niche in mind. It definitely took me a lot of failures (and a lot of time) to realize this but at least I find a source of inspiration to continue what I’m doing. So don’t be frustrated if you are on the same path as I am. There is still hope!

If you think I missed out a few more tips on optimizing a post for successful blogging endeavour, please do share!

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Getting Organized

Belle de Jour 2010 planner

I always needed a tangile evidence of my plans.

Something to look at a whole, at a glance, then per detail…

I need an Organizer -slash- Planner -slash- Journal…

I already placed an order for the Belle de Jour 2010 planner. It will be delivered to the office on Monday! Yay!

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Ivertise Web Puerto Galera Digital Scrapbook!

After a long time of selecting pictures, then taking time to lay them out with the right background and stickers… Finally! It’s done! A scrapbook of memories for keeps!

These album tells the story of adventures in Puerto Galera last May 2008. It was an office summer getaway for three days and two nights. I actually felt very nostalgic seeing these pictures and I’m definitely keeping this for keeps.

I’m planning on having the scrapbook printed once I get the budget. I can’t wait!

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My First Random Archive Scrapbook

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.

I guess for any creative output, the individual gets really hyped up to have a perfect product of imagination and ideas.

I delved into this digital scrapbook for a long time. Arranging, re-arranging, deleting and pasting photos, changing texts and erasing them again.

It may not be perfect to some but it is to me.

Wow! This is my second digital scrapbook. But for this one, I think I will have it printed soon to be my first creative image book on cellphone images. Neat!

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