Yes, Virginia, Building a Link Worthy Blog Is Time Consuming:
Or “Can this blog survive?”
Or “Can this blog survive?”
Last, something happened that may dramatically reduce my time to blog which means: No wasting time!
Basically, the ‘big boss’ at my part-time job first transferred several new tasks to me — which was welcome. Then, he resigned! The short story is: My 5-25 hour a week job will likely explode to 40 - 60 hour a week in the short term and then, return to normal after Christmas.
I want my blog can survive the crunch! Clearly, I need to adapt and focus on using my time wisely and also be fair to my readers.
What this means for readers.
Readers will probably see a slow down. I’m going to try to focus so I can maintain some semblance of quality and support my plugins. Here’s what I’ll be doing:
- Getting my plugins tested on WP 2.3: This is essential to let permit others to continue benefit from them. The plugins that don’t work are those that use Categories, which were totally revamped in WP 2.3. These include Hide Sponsored Categories, which is fairly popular, and Kontera Control, which is useful for those using Kontera ads.
I’ll also be announcing plugin news as I solve any issues
- Verifying that other I use still work in WP 2.3. I’ll announce any problems or issues I discover.
- Installing WP 2.3 at my blog: This may include fixing the theme.
- Trying to post at least 3 topical articles a week:
Maintaining blog conversation is necessary to avoid totally losing traffic.Ideally, I will try to make one act as “pillar content” that eventually attracts search engine traffic, one be timely to remain in the current conversational flow. The other? Beats me! Maybe I’ll just apologize for not blogging?
Honestly, I’d rather just not post than start posting a series of apologies for not blogging.
To get things done, I’m going to do things “engineering way!”
That means: I’m using a Gantt Chart; squint and all will be revealed:
Notice what’s not on my Gantt Chart?
- Posts that could never become “Pillar Content”. Examples include complaining that “A-listers” aren’t linking the PR0 blog by this hardworking d-lister. Sure, maybe I could get on the front page of Sphinn with that. And then what?
- Finding and joining new affiliate programs. Sure, I need to do that to make money. I just don’t have the time to identify and monitor these right now.
- Finalizing or creating new plugins. This would be pointless before I test the old ones!
- Looking at the postie board to find sponsored ads. Google ahead and give me PR now; I just don’t have time to abuse it!
- Exploring how to use Social media. That doesn’t mean I wont’ Stumble of Sphinn. In fact, I invite my friends and visitors to recommend posts I might like. I’m pretty happy to click thumbs up. But, fun as it is, I won’t be grabbing a pre-dinner glass of wine and proactively Stumbling.
Wish me luck!
Seems to me that creating and maintaining a blog that provides quality is actually time consuming. Go figure.
I’m going to go do my real job now. With luck, I’ll work on “Hide Sponsored Categories late this afternoon”. With luck, tomorrow, I’ll explain how I built pillar content on a knitting blog, and generalize that for other niches.
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6 Responses to “Yes, Virginia, Building a Link Worthy Blog Is Time Consuming: Or “Can this blog survive?””
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Hey Lucia -
Can I just say that time management and the publish in the future option in Wordpress has helped me with my focusing. I’m doing tasks in a much more efficient way now.
Such as my thought of the day - I write 7-14 of them a time and set them to publish daily at mid-day. It takes me 30 minutes to an hour, but when I’m done there is blog content for a week to two weeks.
I enjoy your blog a lot. Perhaps the other blog post you could do would be a bloggers ask me your questions type of post?
It’s maybe worth putting a post up along the lines of - does anyone have any questions for me, it can be about blogging, it can be about me, whatever - and see what kind of questions you get?
Cheers,
Snoskred
What a nasty change over
you know you could probably write a really simple plugin quicker than a ranting post, that will probably have more long-term benefit.
@Andy: Exactly. Rather than complain that others won’t link you, you could write a plugin. You could write an interesting post an outlink to 7 people who might care.
You could even resort to borderline tasteless humor and post about Tampon blogs!
Almost anything will generally get you more long term links and visitors than complaining that A -listers don’t link you!
Gee. That sounds harsh - I hope it pays well. I find that when time is short I tend to only come up for the mroe improtant things before I stick my head back into whatever ti was I was doing. I guess this coutns as important things (commenting here).
Best of luck.
@Matt– It pays pretty well, $50/hour. I’d make more if I worked full time, but the deal is, I mostly want to have a flexible schedule, and this job normally does that!
It’s just that for the time being I need to get up to speed on some new stuff I didn’t know much about, the guy who I was counting on asking questions of, and that means I need to assemble a while passel of info.
Time consuming? The good ones are. It’s all about consistency. People who started blogging back in 2002-2004 and have been adding quality content on a consistent basis are proof.