Category: Blogging

Are you blogging for a long time, may be years? So I think you have a few abandoned/ dead blogs in your collection. Now you don’t know when you’ll feel creative to work on an old blog again; maybe your friend or partner have given you an old blog to re-populate it again -so how to start over again? Let’s find out!

Why working on an old blog rather than starting a new one?

The answer is, “Old is gold!” in web life, old domains and sites are much appreciated because age is one of the important factors to get higher rankings. Your old blog may already have developed some higher positions in the search engine. Chris Garrett started to blog on his old domain ChrisG.com because it’s 7 years old and has better status on search engines.

Your old blog may have lots of incoming links and this is why you should rebuild it again. There may be few but interested people who regularly visit the blog.

Start with a new commitment!

Create a new tagline for your blog and start with a new spirit. Starting it again may be difficult so you can bring on the best of your articles once again for your new readers.

Have a new design

Choosing a new design/ theme will make it look like a new blog. Set a much better looking theme and start blogging.

Cover new things on the niche

Write new articles and write regularly. When your readers will know that this blog is updating regularly, they will come back often.

Create a buzz

Email your friends and leave comments that you’ve re opened your old blog. Use social media or even run a contest to make your blog hot.

Keep your blog ad free

For the first few months, go on turbo and make your blog ad free. This way, readers will be interested in your blog and they will keep coming. Try to post more good quality articles regularly.

Free giveaway

Create an ebook with your old articles and give away for free. Give free articles, newsletters and full rss feeds. You can also give away free entrecard credits to make your readers interested.

Buy advertisements

Buy some cheap banners, reviews and links from blogs in your niche. This will help you to re populate your old blog faster.

Set a deadline!

Set a personal deadline such as achieving xxx RSS readers in 3 months, getting xxx visitors in a month and you’ll achieve it.

Are you planning on a dead blog?

Do you have any dead blogs? Are you planing to re-populate it? Share it with us and how you’re working on it?

RSS feeds or site feeds are one of the cool ways to spread your content around the web. It’s an unique way to keep in touch with a blog without even visiting. Now as a publisher, you have the option whether you want to offer Full RSS feeds or only post teasers. Let’s see what’s the best option for bloggers.

I want to bring visitors to my blog

If you set short RSS feeds, then your readers must visit your blog to read the full post. So if you’re thinking that you want real visitors who will read your blog by visiting your site, then you might want these things,

Increasing the number of site visitors
I want them to comment and participate
I want them to click on ads
I want more readership

I want to give more ease to my readers

If you want to give your readers a unique and comfortable way to read your blog, then you must offer full RSS feeds. You might want these things,

I want them to read my blog posts easily
I want them to get the updates faster
I want them to read my blog for a long time
I want more readership

No matter what you decide, you have one common goal, “More readership.” It’s harder to be ones favorite blog. Every time a new visitor comes to your site and gets interested in it, he looks for a faster way to remember the site. Most people will bookmark it and tech savvy people will add your feed on their feed readers. People who are unaware of rss feeds, they will subscribe via email.

The bad thing about short RSS feeds

When your reader tries to read your blog in RSS, he’ll see only first 250 words in his software; your email reader will receive emails with only 250 words -that means they have to click to the link to read that post. Here they will “Unsubscribe” from your blog because if they’re unable to read in RSS, so what’s the point of subscribing?

They may come to your blog within few days for new updates, but soon they will forget about your blog. And what does that means? -you just lost an interested reader.

Full RSS feed means longer lasting readership

I found that an RSS or email subscriber usually doesn’t unsubscribe from a blog. Your subscribers will still be there even if you stopped writing for a long time. This is the power of offering full RSS feeds.

The conclusion: You should always offer Full RSS feeds!

Your RSS readers are the longer lasting supporter of your blog. They are the ones who are reading from you for a long time. By subscribing, they have decided to read from your blog forever and they will promote your posts. If you want real profit in the long run, then you should always offer full feeds.

How to set up full RSS feeds?

In wordpress: Go to Settings > Reading, select “Full text” for “For each article in a feed, show”
In blogger: Go to Settings > Site feed > select “Full” for “Allow blog feeds”

Have your say

• Do you offer Full RSS feeds? Why or why not?
• Do you read blogs in your RSS readers?
• Do you love to subscribe to short feeds?

Subscribe to BlogKori’s Full RSS feed!

Yes I too offer full RSS feeds in my blog. Subscribe and read it from your reader,

When I first started to blog, I didn’t even know that bloggers can earn money with their free blogs. After reading some blogging blogs I got interested and one thing that inspired me that was bloggers sharing their revenue, checks etc. I got so much interested into blogging and to see if I can make a dollar with my blog?

After that I found John Chow Dot Com and again he shows his 5 figure earnings per month. With this entire year of blogging, I realized that earning with a blog is extremely hard and even harder when you have only one employee in your business -you!

But I started to earn a regular income from my blog within the 6th month but didn’t create a post to share my achievements. Now I always know that someday someone will ask about this. Few days ago I received this comment from Jakaria Uzzal,

“Hellow Tamal, many blogger explain ho much mony they earn after end of month. Why don’t you publish your earning?”

I posted a reply to his comment, but now the thing I want to express is why money making bloggers shouldn’t share their earnings with the world.

Income is not a metric to determine blogger’s success

If you post all about your income in your blog, then your readers will think that all you want is income, nothing else. Money can be made with jobs, small businesses and from any other ways but blogging is different. Blog is a tool to interact with the world. The things I learned in 1 year of blogging couldn’t be learned spending 20 years in a typical job. It gives an opportunity to help people and to inspire them even if they are thousands of miles away from you.

A mass audience will be discouraged

As a blogger, I target all of world for maximum chance for success. Check your Alexa data and see what are the major portion of your readers,

The main two countries that are sending me traffic are USA and India, east and west. Now these two countries have different economical status and are in different time zones.

For an example, if any blogger earns $200 a month and posts it on his blog, then visitors from India and all other related countries will increase because the average income of a person in India is $200 or less.

On the other hand, visitors from USA, Canada and Europe will go away because they are making even more per month with their jobs and business and why they want to read $200 worth blogging tip? So you should not share your earnings if you want to get traffic from both of the continents.

Earnings will spoil new bloggers

Earning reports are not inspiring everytime, sometimes they encourage people to blog even if they don’t know about it. This is why they run for the money from the very beginning and most people even quit their jobs. Money making bloggers should inspire people how to become a better blogger. Creating a better blog will bring traffic, popularity and money. When you’ll share, you made $xxx from adsesne, they will put adsense on their site and wait for the clicks; when you’ll share you made $xxx from PayPerPost, then they will apply for PPP and wait for the approvel. Different bloggers found success in different streams of income and one tip won’t help everyone.

The more you hide the more they come!

Then I found Darren Rowse from ProBlogger -the blogging idol of the world. He doesn’t shares how much money he’s making with his blogs and everyone wants to know that information. People are desperate to know his income and we imagine that he’s a 6 figure earner. So with this example, it’s clear that the more you hide about your income, the more they will be interested in your blog. People are watching that I’m earning from 6-8 different streams and also started my own web design and domain flipping business, they can imagine how much I’m making but I won’t tell the actual figure!

Have your say

• Do you think my points are valid?
• Do you share your earnings with your readers?
• Did I miss anything?

Note: This is the one year anniversary post I wrote in the year 2009. I did a minor proofing for this post in 2020.

Some context: Before blogkori, I started with another blog in the blogpost platform called blog-success.blogspot.com and got my start in blogging. Back in the day, I used to post a few articles every day. I started blogkori.com halfway in 2008. Enjoy the trip down memory lane!

Finally, it’s a whole year since I launched blog-success.blogspot.com. In this entire period, I learned lots of things, made lots of mistakes, 90% of plans were failed and the other 10% was a big hit! My greatest memories of 2008 were fantastic. Here is the quick list what I learned in my first year of blogging,

1. Be serious about blogging -no matter you want to make it as a profession or a hobby.
2. Put your eggs in many baskets.
3. Daily writing is good!.
4. Don’t try to appear on every social platform you can.
5. Don’t add people randomly: The mistake I did on Facebook, adding friends without even knowing. Now there are at least 200 people in my friend list I don’t even know them.
6. Build profile one by one: Chose a site, use it and build a great profile. Once you did it, go and use another network. In the end, you will have power user status on many networks.
7. Reveal yourself as the author: Because people will like to know who is behind the blog.
8. My first Page Rank: Yes, it’s history. Got PR 3 for blog-success.blogspot.com in March; the credit goes to regular articles.
9. Networking with your readers and friends really works.
10. I made money online (If I can make money online, anyone can).
11. I can blog on blogging (Started BlogKori.com).
12. Blog on your own domain: Currently all of my blogs are on their own domain.
13. Help as many people as you can -it costs nothing!
14. Adsense is not the only way to earn money: Now I have 8+ streams of income source and still trying new sources.
15. You have to give value before you can bring out something: Learned from Darren Rowse -ProBlogger.net
16. Readers are better than visitors.
17. I learned how to make a sticky blog.
18. Made lots of talented friends and found great blogs.
19. Don’t just bookmark your own pages (I learned from Stumble Upon).
20. Building a helpful personal image (Almost).
21. I started to blog on WordPress (The new BlogKori).

Wrote 500+ text posts, read 1000’s of emails, commented at least 500 times; received 1000’s of comments, personal emails, requests, messages, chat, and tweets.

And finally, Thank you for being with me all the time. If it wasn’t for you, then Tamal Anwar wouldn’t even existed on the internet.

Happy new year!