One option is to stuff the title with all of these key phrases. This will make the title appear messy and will devalue the weight that the other keywords in the title holds.

The other option is to change the titles of the next index page to target the desired keywords. By this I mean pages like http://www.takemorerisks.com/pages/2/ which show older posts from my blog.

As an experiment I drafted up some rough code in PHP which I placed within the header.php file of another website and I then tested it out.

$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if($request == "/blog/" || $request == "/blog/page/1/") {
$title = "Buy Widgets Online. Great Widgets and Pink Widgets For Sale";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/2")) {
$title = "Free Widgets, Widgets For Adults, Widgets For Children";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/3")) {
$title = "Blue Widgets, Widgets That Bark, Invisible Widgets";
}
else {
$title = the_title('','', false);
}

My question is, would this have any beneficial effect on SEO? We’re told repeatedly that key phrases placed within the title tag hold the greatest weight on a page, so surely we should at least rank for some of these keywords? What if we used a similar technique to automatically inject unique content onto these pages that was related to the keywords in the title?

Injecting a significant amount of content into these pages could help them bypass the most lenient of duplicate content filters but probably not Google. We could maybe combat this by limiting the number of posts that appear on each of the index pages but this could be overkill for such a potentially small reward.

It’s an interesting idea but one I haven’t much experience with yet. I’d appreciate your thoughts and or experiences with this!

Update : I’ve just found the SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin which allows you to edit any of the titles on your blog, which might be useful for this.

I’d love to hear about your own responses to this too.

Hope

For me hope has lead to distraction in the past. I’ve become so excited about certain projects that I’ve lost focus entirely on them. Instead of writing any code I’ve been guilty of spending a lot of time simply planning and dreaming. Now there’s nothing wrong with planning if it serves to propel the project along. However my planning mainly revolved around how I planned to celebrate the success of the project, yet I’d barely written a line of code.

What the fuck? Talk about delusional!

Hope is meaningless unless you’re prepared to actualise the ideas you have. Ideas are delusions until they are realised or at the very least, mapped down on paper.

The biggest problem for me is that hope often casts the shadow of doubt when something fails. Instead of investigating WHY something didn’t work, I’d often just quit and return to scratching my balls and complaining about how retarded people are on reddit or digg for not upvoting my posts.

Envy

I’ve felt envious of other peoples success in the past which is ridiculous as the more time I spend focusing on other peoples success the less time I’ve spent working towards my own.

I’m now a firm believer that you should welcome success wherever you see it because by keeping such a positive mental attitude you’re more likely to attract success into your own life.

We’re all on our own individual paths, which is why trying to follow someone else is fucking stupid. You’ve gotta make your own mistakes and fashion your own way in the world. Reading blogs and forum posts should count for 10% max in terms of progressing. The rest must come from your own experience and that comes from trying shit out. No matter how insignificant it may seem.

Inconsistency / Laziness

When I’m working on a site I tend to pause once I’ve created 3 or 4 pages and then survey my work. This is when I become distracted and I start checking stats etcetera, thus disturbing any creative flow I originally had.

In all honesty I just haven’t worked hard enough to deserve success so I can have no complaints in that area, especially recently where I haven’t being doing any online stuff at all.

Much of my inconsistency stems from self doubt. I’m constantly over analysing things and putting my ideas down before I’ve fully worked them through. It’s good to be critical to an extent, we all need to have our bullshit detectors tuned to 10 at times, but it can impede productivity too much.

There comes a time when you must switch the inner critic off and just regain some focus on what you’re aiming towards.

This is why it’s so crucial to have goals, because then you have something to aim towards and the pull of the inner critic weakens. I’m aiming to be free of my own inner critic soon so that I can realise my aims of moving into my own apartment by the end of the year.

The idea of still living at home with my parents at the age of 25 is terrifying, which is why I’ve started blogging here again.

Here are a few tips that I’ve learnt the hard ways that should help you prolong the life of your blog or even make it a success. If anyone has any additional ideas about this please leave them in the comments section.

1. If you’re not entirely certain that you’ll update the blog anymore, then remove all traces of the date from your posts. In Wordpress his may involve altering your permalink structure so that it no longer includes the date in the URL, as well as removing <?php the_time(’M.d, Y’) ?> from both the index, single post and category templates in Wordpress.
2. Enable Akismet immediately. I don’t know how many times I’ve created a small blog and within a few months I’ve had 1,000’s of spam comments to moderate. A bad situation is made worse when there are legitimate comments from your readers mixed in there too. The screenshot below is taken from a blog I created only 4-5 months ago.

   

   I’ve 2 options now with this blog 1) Leave the comments as they are or 2) Study some of the contents of the spam addresses, look for common keywords within the messages and run an SQL DELETE query from phpMyAdmin on the wp_comments table using LIKE within WHERE e.g. “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_content LIKE ‘%viagra%”. (There’s probably a less primitive way of doing this. If anyone knows of a better way please get in touch!)

3. Instead of creating and publishing 20 posts immediately, set the Publish Date to sometime within the future so that if you do try to sell it later on, potential buyers will think it’s been updated more recently and are more likely to make an offer.
4. Install Google Analytics immediately on your blog so that you have a complete history of the sites traffic.  There’s nothing worse than creating a blog that eventually receives  traffic but is forgotten about. Besides having all of the statistics will increase a buyers peace of mind when evaluating whether your website is worth buying.
5. In a similar vain to number 4 it can be helpful to monetize your site discreetly early on in order to tap into the earning potential in that particular market. However you risk harming your sites reputation especially if you go overboard with advertisements. From my own perspective if I see a website is making some money I’m motivated to work on it more. By having a clear indication of how much each of your sites are earning you can then use this as a factor into the projects you want to prioritize.
6. Never underestimate the possibility of your blog becoming an unexpected hit. For this reason I sometimes set up the blog in a seperate blog subfolder in the site, instead of installing it in the root directory if I anticpate that it will be popular amongst users. That way I can build a community around the blog without much hassle.
7. Create categories for your blog as early on as possible. When I’m starting a blog in a niche I start with the Google Adwords Sandbox where I search for the niche and use the suggestions to come up with names for the categories that will appear on the site. I normally then use each of these additional keyphrases to search for more specific topics using the same tool. It’s a great way to come up with ideas for posts.
8. Following on from 7, ensure that you target at least some key phrases related to your niche that appear in Wordtracker or the Google Adwords Sandbox.  This will help increase your chances of receiving search engine traffic early on which is often invaluable, especially when these visitors are targetted and contribute to your community.

For example I built Jesus Illusion during the summer of 2007 for seemingly no reason at all. My initial intention was to monetize it through Adsense, but due to the risque nature of the content I was unable to do so. In the end, I’m left with a site that’s basically worthless and I’ve no real intention of updating it.

So from now on I’m gonna put a bit more thought into planning the site’s purpose before even registering a domain. I feel quite ashamed at the amount of money I’ve wasted by buying silly names. At one point it was almost an addiction! Nowadays I’m much more restrained. I’ve went full circle and become very conservative about business as the negatives have been outweighing the positives. I’m determined to keep at it though and to maybe even try to post here again a wee bit more regularly!

I’m gonna let all of these domains expire…….Tragic.

I’ve really missed blogging to be honest. I’ve missed all of this stuff! I’ve just been so busy with college it’s unreal!

I’m going on holiday on Monday. Hopefully I get mugged or something. Or at least kicked up the ass. Something to kickstart me, y’know?

Well it seems as though the review was much more valuable than I had anticpated! The most impressive thing is that even though my posting frequency has taken a dive recently the subscribers tally has remained steady since the post-Chow peak, even increasing in recent weeks. I was expecting subscribers to drop off like flies after February!

I think this goes to show that paid reviews can be effective if you even have a little bit of interesting content, especially if you buy a review off a blog with a readership as devoted as John’s.

I’ve been overwhelmed with the interest in the site so far! The bid currently stands at $1,200 with a BIN of $2,000 which I think is fair for a website that should consistently make at least $200 a month for the next year.

I’ll keep y’all posted on how the sale goes. Hopefully I can have it all wrapped up by early next week.

I’ll miss the bugger y’know, it’s reinstated my faith in blogging. I think it goes to prove that it isn’t strictly necessary to keep to any type of blogging schedule if the content is compelling enough. After all, I failed to write a single post between November and March and once I resumed blogging the audience came rushing back. Weird eh?

Sometimes all of the advice from the “gurus” can really take the joy out of blogging. It’s almost as if there are a set of blogging commandments that we all must adhere too!

• Thou must update x times a week.
• Thou must write in lists.
• Thou must write at least 300-500 words per post.
• Thou must not place your ads like this.

I understand that most of these are considered best practices in the blogosphere and I can see why people recommend them. However there comes a time where all of these regulations can take all of the fun out of blogging. Rather than updating because you want to, you find yourself obligated to stick to these standards in fear of failure. Little by little blogging becomes more of a struggle!

I think it’s crucial to test these things out for yourself, finding your own set of best practices. Sure enough most should overlap with what is commonly accepted in the blogosphere. But in the end of the day you should let your earnings do the talking. In short, be your own guru and find what works for you!

I couldn’t help thinking that if the ads discouraged bloggers from backlinking to my work then I would actually be losing money. How much is a link worth after all? $10? $20? My Adsense earnings over a two week period didn’t even reach $3.

I think it’s crucial that you gain a strong readership with many backlinks from reputable sites in your niche before even completing monetization. Shoemoney, for instance, generally monetizes a site once it reaches 1000 uniques/day.

I don’t think it’s wise to base this decision on unique visits alone, it might be the case that your site is well optimised for the search engines but few people are actually citing your work. You should factor in the quality and desirability of your content as well. If no one is linking to your site then all it takes is a search engine algorithm update for everything to fall on its ass.

You need to be in a position where your blog has enough varied recognition across your niche so that it can maintain it’s popularity for a many months to come. Placing ads from day one will discourage reputable bloggers in your niche from linking to your work.

Remember backlinks from such authority sites will form the backbone on which the success of your SEO campaign rests upon. Paid reviews will only get you so far and are arguably worthless until authority sites begin to link to your work.

In the meantime, develop content that will appeal to your audience and forget about the few measly beans you can make from Adsense. Your earning potential will sky-rocket if you continue to give your readership what they want.

As for the future of Take More Risks, I feel like I need to update this blog more consistently before I can even begin to justify monetization. My aim is to get back to the average of 1 post a day that I was at before the Mid-March slump.

Why I Blog 

1) Voice/Influence/Friends – It allows me to express myself to people I would normally have no influence over. It’s cool interacting with other bloggers via comments and trackbacks, I’ve made a few good friends from this blog.

2) Convienience – It’s so easy to create new content! All I have to do is login > click Write Post and start typing. It isn’t as easy to update static websites where you must integrate all of the templates yourself amongst other things. With Wordpress you can have a blog up and running within a few hours.

3) Laughs -  I love writing for my comedy blogs. It feels like second nature! I’d still create these sites even if I wasn’t making any money from them.

4) Freedom – I can write what I want when I want. It’s a brilliant medium for free space.

5) Making Money – This is probably the biggest one and it’s why I got into in the first place. I think it’s dangerous if you over-priortize money making as your main objective as it will dampen the impact it has with your visitors in it’s early formative years.

Why I Don’t Like Blogging

1) Pressure – Once you’ve started to build momentum you must continue to produce good content otherwise your audience will dwindle. Posting can become more of a chore than a hobby.

2) Finding your Voice / Self Doubt – There’s always the danger that you’ll come across as an ill informed bufoon to your audience, especially if you are new and trying to find your voice/writing technique.

3) Maintaining Consistency – You have to be dedicated to your blog over a prolonged period, even when you are going through hard times. You can’t have any days off, particularly if you are still a small-gun and can’t attract any guest writers.

4) Being Part of the “Blogosphere” – Arghhh! The next person to mention the blogosphere will receive a trout to the face The whole blogging thing can seem a bit incestious, it’s like you are part of a secret society or something. This sucks.

5) Getting a new blog indexed can be like pushing an elephant up the stairs.