Coming back to Blogging after a Long Illness

I have literally become sick and tired of writing in different blogs that I have been suffering from long illness for the last 7 months. It was like 1 July 2009 to 31 January 2010. Yes, long 7 months. I had to do a very nasty teeth treatment (root canals in 7 teeth) and my health became very weak as a result. Then gained 10 KG weight in just 2 months and I started to suffer from obesity. Then, I had to try to lose that 10 KG in 2 months thanks to some vigorous weight loss dieting. I am still fighting with my excessive weight.  

At last, today, I feel some fresh. So, from tomorrow 1 February 2010, I hope to make a strong come back to full time blogging. I am a blogger and this is my full time work. Really, I feel very happy to be back to my health again. In my mind, I feel very fresh too. I was taking a look at the blogs and I felt satisfied with the fact that somehow, I could keep on going despite the fact that I could not work that much.

Before, this blog (South Asia Blog) was my main blog and I used to work hard for it. It was tragic that I had to change hosting in June and changed blogging platform from WordPress to Blogger in June 2009. After doing that I became sick and in July and August traffic decreased substantially. However, since September, things became better. Even in January 2010, the blog received 66,000 page views. Last month, it was 90,000.

I am very happy with the way things are going on. Well, I have to admit that revenue suffered but it was mainly for economic recession. I am hopeful for 2010.

I started the blog with the goal to write quality entries about South Asian business and economy. I live in Bangladesh and I love to read about everything and anything of this region. This is my favorite place on earth and I cannot be happier in any other part of the world. I again want to write good entries about South Asian business and economy. Yes, sometimes, I will write off topic entries for two reasons: getting traffic (earning money) and taking a break from business and economy. However, I will mostly stick to my original topic and try to produce content on this field.

This long illness has done one good thing for me. It has given me a lot of time to think and contemplate. I started the blog 13 months ago in the right way and did everything write but it was my bad luck that I did not have any idea of shared hosting and it suffered a very big blow. I did a big mistake by changing topic in the middle and going towards sports and entertainment instead of focusing on business and economy. Yes, I got some quick traffic but I realized that it was not a good way.

In the last two months, I discovered that it is possible to get traffic even writing about South Asian business and economy. All I need is to be regular, dedicated and give my best effort. This experience has given a lot of boost to my confidence.

I discovered one thing that when you make a come back to blogging after a long illness then the first thing you suffer from is mental strength. I never have shortage of it and I like to feel that compared to the average people, I have stronger will power.

Still, I feel a bit shaky and I lack mental strength to write in the blog. However, I have to try and things will be all right after few days of trying. They always get brighter and God has really helped me at the right moment. Yes, I have noticed when things become darkest and all hopes get lost then bright time comes. So, I am again hopeful about this blog.

In the end, I like to thank each and everyone of you for your support and I like to specially thank the Feedburner Subscribers, Blog followers and returning visitors. In the last two months, the blog received nearly 200 comments. I like to thank all the people for their comments too.

So, back to business as usual for me and this blog. 

Evergreen Entries: How they can help your Blog?

Yesterday, I wrote about evergreen entries and if you have read that entry then you must know that by evergreen entries I meant that kind of topics that are always fresh and you can always read and write about them. On other words, they never lose relevance and they are not time based. I also wrote that these kinds of entries are popular among many bloggers for different reasons. In this entry, I am going to talk about the main reasons of the popularity and the good sides.

Before anything, let us talk about the problems of evergreen entries. The first problem you have to face is that you have to give a lot of time to write them and sometimes, it may take ten or fifteen hours or even more than that to write a really quality entry. In Blogging, most of the time, we can not sell out writing and in stead we have to depend on getting tragic and page views. So, spending an entire day sometimes is not economically feasible for many of the bloggers.

Especially if you live in a Western country and you have to earn a lot of money just to have a middle class life style then it can become a problem to give so many hours. The second problem is that they do not bring traffic in a very short time. In fact, you have to be very patient with evergreen entries. It takes a lot of time and some people really can not afford to have this patience. Well, I do not blame them because I am also like them in some ways and like others I want, a lot of traffic in a short time but after years of experience in Blogging I have realized that Blogging simply does not work that way.

Now, I am going to talk about how evergreen entries can help your blog and your blogging career. The first thing that can happen when you focus on writing quality evergreen entries is that they will help you to make you famous. They are very easy to bring a brand name for your blog and for you as an expert blogger. Here, I like to talk about the example of Problogger that Darren Rowse who had many blogs in the past. I remember that he had a number of blogs on different topics like digital camera review, printers, camera phone review etc. However, these days I find him focusing on two or three blogs: Problogger and Digital Photography School. These two blogs consists of mainly quality entries and because of his effort for quality, the Problogger have more than one hundred thousand Feedburner subscribers. This is quite amazing. Another shining example is Steve Pavlina.

Evergreen entries are always helpful in getting links from other blogs and websites. When you are blogging, this is a very important factor in everyway. If others link your entries then you always get some traffic but more than that your blogs become more powerful in search engines. Especially Google gives a lot of value to backlinks. In the past, I have noticed that when I wrote evergreen entries, I got links from very respectable websites and blogs. This is very helpful if you are a new blogger. When you are a new blogger then it is very difficult to get links from others. I have also noticed that if you write quality article then some bloggers and websites will happily link to you and even if you may not know about it unless you search in Google.

Evergreen entries are also attractive for social book marking sites like Digg, Reddit, Fark. I remember that once, one of my blog entries received 40,000 page views in just 24 hours when it hit the front page of Fark. Some people even get one hundred thousand page views in a day if they can make into the home page of Digg and get enough votes. When you write a good entry then its possibility of getting featured in a popular book marking site only increases.

Many people think that evergreen entries will not increase your traffic. I agree with them that these entries will not boost your traffic all of a sudden and you have to be very patient. I have already said about this matter that this is one of the draw backs of evergreen entries. However, it is not true that there will be no benefit as far as getting traffic is concerned.

In fact, when you write a long entry and quality entry which is time less it will get traffic from many key words. Sometimes you will get from key words that you even could not imagine. It happens to me and others bloggers all the time.

These types of entries are always good for getting more comments and some people would like to discuss about it. One of the entries written by my co-blogger Biplob Kishore Deb generated more than 120 comments and many of there were very annoyed with him because of his selection of animation movies. Many of them did not agree with his view and they were not shy to let their views be known.

When you are blogging then perhaps one of the dreams that you have in your heart is to get more and more comments. Evergreen entries can help you to get more comments and started discussion in your blog.

Again I like to come back to the point about traffic. Evergreen entries will help you to get regular traffic on some entries. I could successfully implement this matter in one of my blogs Techtainment in which we wrote some evergreen entries and they still bring traffic for us and although these days we do not update regularly or we don’t give so much important to it. Still, we get everyday more than 1200 page views. This is quite a good traffic if an old blog brings regularly without much effort.

In conclusion, I like to say that if you are a blogger and if you want to become successful in this field then you should always consider writing some evergreen entries on a regular basis. 

Seven bad Habits in Blogging: I wish I could Leave Them

In Blogging37, I just uploaded an entry: One entry at a Time: How to Overcome Stress in Blogging?

Needless to say that as a professional blogger, I suffer from mental stress every day. Anyway, I have given some thought and I have realized that the sources of my stress come from my daily activities. So, I am writing about some of the bad habits that I have related to blogging and this career.

1. Sitemeter: I am a Sitemeter addict and perhaps obsessed with it. I check stats almost every hour. It is not bad at first of a blog because the stats can be very helpful in guiding you. They help you to get a good idea about your blog’s condition. However, excess of anything is bad. I waste a lot of time after Sitemeter stats of my blogs. This reduces my time for more important works.

2. Adsense: I have perhaps the same problem about Adsense. I check the stats every hour and sometimes several times in an hour. It also takes away a lot of time and my main activity of writing blog entries suffer as a result.

3. Competitors: I also check a lot about the blogs of my competitors in my niches. I check their keyword condition in SERP, back links, Sitemeters (if possible), Alexa ranking, Google PR etc.

4. Digression: When I am writing an entry for a blog, I think about many other things. I also browse Internet and read other news, other things. This way, my main focus gets lost and productivity suffers both in terms of quality and quantity.

5. Google: I love Google and it is the best thing in Internet. However, what I do is to search a lot about my entries. One of my favorites hobbies is to check how fast an entry gets indexed in this search engine. Another favorite thing is to check SERP on the entries of my blogs.

6. Forums: I spend a huge amount of time on two forums every day. This is good because I learn new things but again, it curtails my time of actual blogging or creating content.

7. Sleeping: Thanks to blogging, I have developed a very odd habit of sleeping. I enjoy covering live events and since I live in Asia, major sporting events in Europe or America take place at or after midnight of my local time. This way, I have lost my normal habit of sleeping. For example, it is now 6:40 AM local time here. Unfortunately, I could not sleep and sat on laptop to browse and write.

Perhaps, none of my habits (except sleeping at day time and waking up whole night), is bad and they are helpful for professional bloggers. However, excess of anything is really bad and even dangerous. I need to focus first on writing content for my blogs and then any other thing.  

Trakkrz: A New Blog Directory to Try Your Luck

I am not a big fan of blog directories simply because most of them require that you give them a link and this way they do not care whether your blog is good or not. That is why, it gives me a lot of hope to see that a new blog directory called Trakkrz has come out and they are claiming that they will review each and every blog that is submitted and then they would include the worthy ones.

From their FAQ:

What inspired trakkrz.com?

We were tired of all the blog following sites that include any and every blogger out their regardless of quality. We wanted to build a community where visitors could come and see the latest from popular bloggers on a particular topic, get to know the bloggers themselves, and be able to comment on and highlight the best that these bloggers have to offer.

 

I had applied for this blog and I will let you know the result. Really, I do not care that much if they do not select because my blog has already got some decent amount of traffic and page rank of 6 according to Google. 

Blogging37: A new Blog from Razib Ahmed

I am Razib Ahmed. So, it is like blowing my own trumpet- sorry for that. Well, I know that some of my visitors are bloggers too and some of them want to open their own blogs sooner or later. Good thing is that blogging ha really revolutionized publishing. If you are passionate about something then you can open a blog at free of cost and share your ideas. If you are dedicated and can really produce quality content on a regular basis on almost any topic then you are bound to get some name and fame and some money from your passion. However, you need to be some disciplined and must know some basic rules.

Blogging37.com will contain mainly tips about blogging. For example, today I wrote this entry: Ten Things Every Blogger Needs to Start a Blog

If you are new to blogging and do not have that much knowledge about it then this entry can really save you some hours. Anyway, if you have time then please visit the blog.

Why So Few Successful bloggers from India?

India is the land out outsourcing and it has many of the ingredients that are helpful for success in blogging. First of all, it is a country with over 1 billion people. Thousands of graduates come out of the Universities every year who are skilled in English language. Their expected salary is just a fraction of America or Europe. High speed Internet at an affordable price is available in most of the cities. India has a flourishing media industry: newspapers, TV channels, FM radios. So, the media culture is there. There is hardly any complain about freedom of expression as it is a democratic country. Still, there are very few successful bloggers in the country. In fact, except Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration, we know of hardly any other blogger from India who is very famous in Blogosphere. Just to be clear, I am talking about the bloggers who are now living in India not the bloggers of Indian origin living in USA or UK.

Here are some reasons Why So Few Successful bloggers from India:

1. The Language Thing: Blogging is something personal and many people love to write in their own mother tongue or first language. The main problem for Indian bloggers is that the language support for their mother tongues just came within the last 2-3 years. Before that, publishing websites or blogs in regional languages was very difficult.

2. Small Market Size: Two things to talk about here. First of all, suppose if you write in Hindi or any other Indian language, the market is very small in Internet. Earning money is a distant thing. Even finding enough readers will be a difficult thing. As a result, motivation does not come easily. The same way, writing about topics related to India in English language does not bring enough visitors or money either. Don’t believe me? Just tell me the names of 10 successful blogs on Bollywood and Cricket (I don’t need to remind you that these two things are like religion in the country).

3. Indian Traffic Does not Bring a lot of Revenue: India has a flourishing middle class and it has perhaps one of the top 3 largest economies in Asia. Still, e-commerce has not taken off in the country. In other words, not a lot of money is transacted online daily here. As a result, major Advertising programs like Adsense are not keen to give good revenue from traffic of India. In fact, Chitika even do not accept traffic from India.

4. Absence of Entrepreneur Mentality: I think that of all the reasons, this should come as number one. When you are in professional blogging then you are on your own. You have to take care of everything- from writing content to uploading, promoting and even finding advertisements. The reality is that for the first one year, you just have to dedicate and sacrifice without much return. So, there is a big risk and that is why, we can find that most blogs from India are not updated after sometimes.

5. Large Companies not Interested: I still remember the day when AOL decided to buy Weblog Inc for $25 million. That happened in 2005. Very few people in India at that time were active in professional blogging. I have never heard that big Indian companies like Tata or Reliance are keen on opening a blog network despite the fact that they can easily afford to invest a few million dollars in this field.

6. Traditional mentality by the old generation: Blogging became very popular among many US companies because they felt that with this medium, they can at last communicate with the customers or potential customers in a very easy and inexpensive way. In India, most decision makers in the big companies are in their 50s and I am afraid that they still have not been able to realize the full potential of blogging as an effective tool for customer service.

7. Blogging not the Attractive Career: India is not a rich country. In fact, most people here are poor. You can find poor people living just next to very posh buildings. So, career is a very important thing for most people here. Hardly any parents dream that their children become a blogger some day.

8. What is blogging: I guess that many people in the country still do not know what is blogging. The media hardly talks about it. People know more about entertainment and sports than blogging.

9. Absence of role models: It is like a vicious circle. Because there are not many successful bloggers in India, so, most young educated people are not willing to take the risk. As a result, there is not many success stories.

10. May be Outsourcing is the Villain: Some how I feel that most Indian educated people have become addicted to like outsourcing. They want that some American or European companies would outsource their works to them and they will earn some dollars. This has taken away the mental attitude of trying something on their own or competing against the American people.

Well, I have tried to put all the reasons here that I could think of. Do you agree with me?

By the way, if you are suffering from Writer’s Block then you can read this entry: Blogger’s Block: Some Tips about How to Defeat It

Blogger Forum Suspended Posting for Spammers from India!

When I started professional blogging, one of the important things I did was to join in Blogger Forum. It was one of the best places for me to learn about the art of blogging. In fact, I gave a lot of time there and as a result, I could get a lot of benefit for my blog: SouthAsiaBiz.com. I got a lot of comments and links from the members there and it gave a great boost to my career. So, naturally, I have special feeling and memory about the site.

A few weeks ago, when I visited the site, I found that they have suspended posting and it happened because spammers from India caused a lot of problems. I am quoting their message from the home page:

“Folks, the real problems started when we passed 78% as the visitors here from India.

To hell with being politically correct at this point. Virtually all of our spam comes from India and China. There was never a problem before we hit a tipping point and most visitors started coming here for ways to make money.

There are many members from India who are productive and we value their contributions. However, that is just the way it is.

There is really no way to fight spammers who want to take the time to join, confirm their email address, manually enter the captcha symbols, and then manually post spam with 2 minute delays between posts. We put a higher value on human time then they do.

We will be back when and if a cure for this problem is found.”

I am not from India but I am from South Asia it gave me a lot of pain to think that people from my region created this problem for a very popular forum. I wish that the owners decide to bring the site again and allow members to post.