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!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Wicked Profits, a must see site

I am not an expert on any financial market or trading softwares though I have tried my hand on FOREX and I’m currently learning the basics of Commodity trading. As a beginner I’m very grateful for advisory services providing me updates on the market but unfortunately, there are so many advisory websites that I’m not sure which could provide me the necessary information I need as valuable aid in trading at a lesser risk if possible. It is very hard nowadays to know which websites are real businesses and which are scams.

In lieu to the topic, I’ve stumbled upon an advisory website called wickedprofits.com. Now, after a sentence of a warning on online scams you might be thinking I’m offering you an opportunity to be scammed so I could earn a pretty profit for myself. Hehe, never fear, I will not do such thing. Rather, I’m giving the website as an option as it posses a bit of elite difference compared to other advisory websites I’ve seen before. Check out my review of the site below:

• Wicked Profits has been around since 2000 and that is a year that internet has started to weave its way to the world and businesses are taking notice in using www as a channel to prosper their business. This could mean Wicked Profits is a pionneer in their field with regards to their online presense and is more in tune with online customer service compared to other similar services.
• Wicked Profits became successful within several months of their business. This insures the company has an immediate expert staff that could give expert recommendations to Clients.
• When you browse around wickedprofits.com you will not see even one testimonial. The reason? They don’t believe in such things. They believe performance speaks better than words. In a way, I believe that does hold some truth. I have seen websites with tons of glowing testimonials but when you research more on these urls, you’ll find out these websites are scams and are only there to get your money. I find Wicked Profits “no-testimonial” rule very refreshing and I can sense their expertise to hold such strong beliefs within themselves.
• They are not ashamed to say you could loose money. Yes, they have a great history of success rates but they are stating the truth that investments contain risks. They also have a page of their performance through the years. You will see there are negative results based from actual and honest computations and strategies by the staff. They are not making hocus-pocus calculations, nor making any modifications to show off pretty numbers for the public. That for me is strong honest quality I haven’t seen on a website for a long time.
• They are not hoarding customers as others do. Meaning? They actually had the incident of closing their doors to newcomers when necessary to insure quality service for their current members. They aren’t holding a quota but they are holding on their quality recommendations for their clients.

Quite refreshing isn’t it? I’m exploring the site more right now, bookmarking it and Googling it and I haven’t stumbled on negative side of it. Who knows, I may use it in the near future as it holds quite a strong honest marketing integrity I doubt other sites could copy.

Popularity: 4% [?]

New Year Treats!

I got myself a few treats for New Year since yesterday.

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I scourged the mall to look for his external DVD-writer, a new optical mouse and keyboard. We got good ones in relatively low prices since it is still within the holiday break and almost everything is on sale. I didn’t had any plans in purchasing anything grand but when I saw this graphic tablet, I fell in love.

For a long time, I have researched and canvassed a lot of electronic stores for graphic tablets and I ended up finding tablets that are worth 10K (in peso, $195 in dollar conversion) or more with small space area that is not proportionate in my preference.

I purchased a Genius G-Pen M609 graphic tablet worth 5500Php ($110 conversion). A great find for me! It must had been my lucky day especially its the only one in stock!


Available in two sizes, the G-Pen M609’s screen size is 9? x 5.5? (wide) / 7.25? x 5.5? (standard); while the sophisticated G-Pen M712 is a bit bigger with a screen size that measures 12? x 7.25? (wide) / x 9.5? x 7.25? (standard). The G-Pen M712 (34 hot keys) has eight more “fast shortcut keys” than the M609 (26 hot keys). The fast shortcut keys are used to access Office, the internet and Vista or Mac functions. Both come with rolling pads at the top of the tablet (scroll, zoom, volume) and hot keysthat can use when creating, writing and drawing, sketching and signing emails, and both come with stylish design, top class digital, cordless pen.


Just now, I received an email from my previous boss and he gave me this hilarious video of me being the most awaited special guest of Disney Land. Absolutely hilarious!

NOTE: I changed the name from the actual one my boss used. I can’t let everybody know my real name could I? ^^ But this is the same video used. You could have your own version of news video starring you

This year is starting out pretty well!

Happy New Year guys!

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