Postcards from the Funny Farm

photo credit: funny hub

Shelly Tucker wrote another great post today about the quandary of a blogroll. I think this is such an important subject to discuss. She raises and makes some very good points. I thought I’d link back to her and continue my thoughts on the same subject here.

At the beginning here, (this is only my opinion) I must say I firmly believe that most blogrolls are unkempt and unattended junk-drawers of random blogs that hold mixed levels of meaning to the blog owner. This is also true for most Technorati rolls I run across. It has become sort of an obligatory thing for many people to add and be added to each other’s blogrolls. I encourage every blogger to use the potential of a blogroll by going down their list and developing a criteria for deletion/retention. Regular maintenance of your blogroll helps you, it increases the value of a link on your site thereby helping your blogrolled folks, and it keeps your integrity high as a host of links on your blog. Your criteria should be based on what helps YOU! That may sound selfish but let’s face it, there are a bazillion blogs out there and you can’t be all things to all people. You can however, be something very helpful for networking to some people that belong on your specific blogroll.

1. If the blog belongs to a friend of mine or if I read the blog regularly they make the blogroll.
2. After that, some standards must come into play … here are mine:
3. A certain rating standard (I won’t reveal mine but it’s an either/or thing based on several measures … must be the assessment teacher in me coming out).
4. Even if 3 is true, if they consistently don’t communicate at least once every 6 months or so in at least a comment or 2, I usually will drop them. My blogroll is a valued spot and if a blogger doesn’t care to touch base with me, there are others who do to fill the space.
5. I have some more, but you tell me? What are your criteria?

The most important point here is that you develop a criteria. You can bend and break the rules anytime you choose but by choosing to have a criteria and “pruning” your blogroll you help your blog and the whole blogosphere.

Would you be likely to prune your blogroll?

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It’s the end of the month and time again to see how I did with my blogging goals. Setting goals is an effective way to improve a blog and feel a sense of accomplishment when you meet them. This month I will be placing less of an emphasis on money but I feel strongly this will only be a temporary change. The non-monetary goals I am focusing mostly on will translate into more income but it will probably take 2-3 months I predict. Developing an online voice and presence is a surefire way to gain an audience. And everyone knows that audience translates into advertising success. By summer I will hopefully be talking about money as the main thrust of this series, but first things first. I broke down my goals into three categories:

1. Traffic Goals,
2. My Web Publishing Goals, and
3. Monetization Goals.

First, let’s look at last month’s stats:

Feb 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,028 Visits: Goal exceeded by over 1,000 visits!
   93 Visits/Day avg.: Goal of 70 visits/Day exceeded by 23/Day!
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   One of my main goals with my blog is to establish more of a name and an online presence through multiple online locations. I set goals to guestblog, write for BlogCritics, and always be open to writing for other blogs and websites. Below are the external articles I had published. These also help with backlinks and Technorati authority.
   *Guest Blog at Dad Balance
   *Guest Blog at The Outboard Brain of a Geek
   *BlogCritics Review
3. Monetization Goals:
   PayPerPost $69
   Total earnings for February: $69. Exceeded goal by $39
   In every category I exceeded my goals in February! That is a great feeling. Now, my goals for March:

March 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,500 Visits
   100 Visits/Day avg.
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   *2 articles for BlogCritics
   *1 guestblog post. (HINT HINT, I am available!)
3. Monetization Goals:
   PayPerPost $30

Think I can pull it off? I am very confident I can. You might consider subscribing to my feed so you don’t miss an update! March should be an exciting month of meeting these new goals. Oh, and if you are interested in getting traffic from this blog, I would like to do a guestblog or interview for you on your blog. Let’s talk! Thanks for reading Postcards from the Funny Farm.

What do you think of these 3 blogging goals?

I’ve officially become a “regular” contributor over at Edublogs magazine which is edited by Lorelle VanFossen. This is an enormous sense of arrival for me in my writing career since education is my life and coming up fast behind is blogging.

Lorelle has been a hero of mine in blogging for quite a while now. She has designed some amazing themes that I have copied and learned form. She has offerred challenges to the blogging community to certain topics. These have helped me create some of my best posts at Postcards. Now, I have fallen into working with her at edublogs magazine: dedicated to furthering the cause of blogs in the classrooms. It is one of those senses of arrivals that one never forgets.

I have started a series today there on technology in the classroom. My second post is now up:

Powerpoint as Teaching Tool
I encourage you to read it and leave your comments over there. We’re trying to create buzz for this new magazine. even if you aren’t in education as a profession, your comments and opinions are valuable there and very welcomed to building a community! If you do comment there, I will stumble-review a post on your blog by way of thanks. This will bring you some nice traffic stats.

Respectfully requested by,

Your Damien Riley (the guy from the funny farm sending you postcards each day)

This is a continuation of my prior article on categories. It seems I’ve gathered more information on tags and I feel it would be helpful to my readers’ seo if I shared it. We are moving toward a tagging net generation more and more it seems. Wordpress now has internal tagging and I read about it being on other platforms. So what is the difference between tags and categries? The simple answer is: tags are a lot of work!

As a Problogger article points out: Categories are linear filing of your blog posts and tags are “granular.” This means your posts have better seo if you category and tag them as opposed to just categorizing them.

If you look at human communication from a distance you hear dissonant terms pop up within any given conversation. Someone may be talking about transportation and throw in Osama bin Laden as a related anecdote. Someone searching for a post on him might not reach that article in a transportation category unless it was tagged. I hope that made sense.

Since Wordpress 2.3 came out I have started the often tedious process of tagging all my old posts (well, the most popular ones anyway). The simple tagging plugin as well as the advanced tagging plugin are a big help for this since they generate clickable suggestions. From what I can gather, Google will crawl up to 50 tags without flagging. This means you shouldn’t worry about having too many tags. I would be concerned #1 in the tags’ relevance to the content. After that I would look for the most common tags both internally and externally as suggested by the plugins. Do you spend time tagging your posts?

Tonight I was going back through some of my posts in an extensive series I wrote about blogging tech and tips and I thought they ought to be brought back to the front page. If you are a beginner, this long series I wrote last year might be like gold for you. It’s the results of my blood sweat and tears teaching myself blogging and web-design over the course of a year. You’ll find the Table of Contents for this series linked above. The one that helped me especially tonight and inspired this linkage was: “Blog Writing, Look Before You Leap.” I had forgotten about a certain Google resource to help with getting popular blogging ideas that get traffic. Sweet resource.

Another new idea I tried today after reading my post on 41 recommended plugins was to add the “Popularity Contest” plugin and create a “top 50″ page linked in the sidebar menu. This allows my readers to scan a list of my 50 most popular posts of all time (as determined by a set of criteria such as comment count, hits, etc.) , assembled on a dedicated page. It’s nice after a year of writing so much content. The only problem is, some of it never gets to the forefront. For this reason, my blog might not get the chance it deserves to be read by millions and get a higher rating. A blog rating is like a hairstyle: everyone has one but only a few are happy with it. Anyway, maybe these posts of the past year will help somebody out there get a better hairstyle. I could use your tips too, after all I am bald.

Our waiter came over and told us that while he didn’t work there, he’d be glad to take our order. WHAT? This was getting better all the time! The kids were becoming fearful of eating anything there, but I insisted on staying. I could tell this place had adventure potential.

-Life is RANTastic!: He Works Hard For The Money

Here’s a story by Jessica the Rock Chick about finding a little podunk hole in the wall pizza place that rocked. I love real life blog posts like this, with pics! It’s very descriptive and highlights the use of a GPS TomTom to find a restaurant in a strange town. Hmm, maybe the TomTom folks should cut her a check! I really love this post so I wanted to share it. We are now making plans to go to pizza tonight instead of our previous plans. Maybe I’ll do a photoblog of our trip! Nice writing Jessica.

Another distinguishing feature on the new models is face-recognition technology that allows users to instantly log on to their computer by looking at the screen.

-Lenovo Puts Style in New Laptop

It has been an amazing 2007 for me at blogging. I have become comfortable with the craft and learned valuable lessons that help me communicate better with my audience. One thing I regret is not getting on the ad bandwagon up to now. I have even criticized it once or twice publicly which I see now was just plain arrogance.

I wanted to share the things I am doing this year from the get go to improve my rating and to hopefully make money on my blog. I still treasure the art of free-form blogging, so don’t expect that to change, but my wife and I both think it would be ideal if we could somehow generate revenue while we do the writing and networking that we love so much.

If you haven’t noticed already, there are now small ads at Postcards from the Funny Farm. I started with Adsense since they were the first to accept me. I am also currently waiting to see if Text Link Ads can sell anything on my site. As income is generated, I will pay back the community by a breakdown of where it came in from and how I did it. Right now there are no earnings.

With all the name, rss, and theme changing in the past months, my Technorati and daily traffic stats have suffered greatly. Some folks who used to comment everyday don’t show up as much, and I understand change freaks people out (I freak myself out in fact!) but the results are always very gratifying in blog content and visual presentation. To those on my blogroll who haven’t stopped in (btw thanks again to the regular die hards who never stopped) I say this: Things are gonna remain static for a while and as much as you can link to content my blog is highly appreciated. As you know, this increases Google “Page Rank” (mine currently is a 4/10 which is pretty good considering) and thereby, advertisers see me as a good investment. Plus, it gets content to a wider audience which, as far as goals go, was my “first love” with Postcards from the Funny Farm. Now, the question of all my posts in a day.

Does this new trend bother you? If so, please let me know. I highly enjoy my blog now as a “Tumblelog” where I am entering short posts throughout the day from various locations (even my phone and camera). I do see one potential problem with it however, finding the longer, more thought out prose articles may not be worth the effort to passersby and they might miss the good writing in between the tumbles. Here’s my solution: A new blog I named after my favorite plate: Cheese Enchiladas. I have back dated posts there from this blog that I see as my best writing and I am future dating new posts to be released on a weekly basis. To those who are bothered by the Tumblelog style of Postcards … but still like my writing and want to keep up, I recommend going to Cheese Enchiladas and subscribing there. You can always check in to Postcards when you’re feeling artsy or just looking for some non-traditional inspiration.

Okay, now for the grand finale as I move into te new year: my projected routine to achieve my personal blogging goals in 2008:

1. Write one amazing post per week on Cheese Enchiladas.
2. Publish once a week on BlogCritics (currently I am working with an editor on a post about the writers strike, I will always link these at Postcards when they are published.)
3. Write on PayPerPost a week (I will host these on Postcards)
4. Post a note or clip on 9Rules each week.
5. Reevaluate earnings with Adsense and TextLinkAds after 6 months (June 2008 - My 39th birthday)
6. Do interviews and guestblogs on other blogs wherever folks will have me.

For reference sake, here’s a list of my online “condos” where you’ll always find me hanging out this year:

Postcards from the Funny Farm
Online diary, Tumblelog, and Photoblog by Damien Riley
postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com

Cheese Enchiladas
A Weekly Column by Damien Riley
postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com/ecolumn/

BlogCritics
Author Page and Featured Posts
blogcritics.org/writer/damien_riley

Helium
Bio and Featured articles
http://www.helium.com/user/show/47930

9Rules
Author Page and Profile
9rules.com/my/rileycentral/

Damien Riley Tunes
My Original Recorded Music
myspace.com/damienrileytunes

To everyone who reads my stuff: God Bless and have a great last few days of 2007! Keep it fun and relaxed.

Damien

* To interview me or have me guest blog on your site, just email me the idea at: rileycentral at gmail dot com