I was becoming a slave to one of my blogs, trying to find the time to blog every day and sometimes going so far as to skip meals just to keep up with my daily updates. My reasons for doing this were that I assumed that people had come to expect daily posts from me. I thought that my readers would be online every day and would therefore be disappointed if there was something fresh up every time they logged on.

It was obvious that I couldn’t keep up such a schedule with the amount of other work I have on at the moment, so I took a step back and started updating that particular blog every few days. To my surprise, my RSS count actually went up and has stayed up by about 20 readers, hovering a bit below the 200 mark. Search-engine traffic stayed the same, of course.

You don’t need to become a slave to your blog to make it work. It’s a different game if you have thousands of RSS subscribers because if you are in that position, your blog is something people rely on. For most of us, however, we don’t need to push ourselves that far. Granted, we may never reach pro-blogger status, but you have to seriously question what your time is best spent doing.

The only reason to update a blog every day is for your RSS subscribers, but I have already proved to myself – and now to others – that RSS subscribers don’t always need daily content. If you can write something that incites discussion and is of value, people will keep coming back to it for two or three days before they need something new.

How many of us have tried to get our blogs off the ground by writing religiously, wasting valuable time when we could have been doing other things?

Every blogger’s focus should be on providing quality content. If you can do that daily, without sacrificing other projects, then you probably don’t have much else to do, but very few of us find ourselves in that situation.

Have you ever felt like your blog was taking over your life?

Tags: Bloggers starting by Angel
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The top bloggers are making decent money. If you’re not one of the top bloggers then your readers are going to understand that you aren’t making the big bucks just yet. Imagine how you felt when you read John Chow’s earnings for last month. That’s hot, right? Now reverse that and imagine how you would feel reading a blogger promoting the fact that he made $3 on Adsense and got a free pen from Azoogle Ads last month.

Bloggers are killing their blogs in front of their readers

When you write a post that says “I didn’t make any money last month”, you may as well throw the towel in and scream “I FAILED” at the top of your voice. Small-time bloggers have their place, but the negative impression you give a blog when you draw attention to your lack of success will turn away new readers.

The Feedburner button that tells you how many RSS readers a blogger has is a great tool… if a blogger has a decent number of readers. I went to a blog today and was curious about the content, but as soon as I saw a button in a prominent spot telling me there were only six RSS readers I left the blog. If nobody else is reading it, why should I?

Walk before you can run

You won’t be able to fool people into believing that you a six-figure blogger, but by being smart about what information you share with your readers you will instill confidence in your abilities, which will lead to more return visitors, more RSS subscribers and more money. It’s a gradual process that needs all the help it can get, so don’t blow your chance before you’re even halfway up the hill.

Tags: Bloggers starting by Angel
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The cost of hosting your blog can often be a sour point for many first-time bloggers. Depending on who you’re with, your hosting fees can eat up a big chunk of change, and there is always the chance that the host you’ve picked is going to let you down.

Free hosting sounds like a great idea to me. I’m always on the lookout for good, cheap web hosting services, and I’ve found one that won’t cost you a penny. So what’s the catch? Really, there isn’t one. You get 100MB of space and 1,000MB of bandwidth and free hosting for life. You also get a cPanel, which makes managing your website so easy a child could do it.

The company offering the hosting is Tech Entrance. By signing up for the free service, you receive a lower priority than somebody who pays, but what the heck – you’re getting free hosting for life.

Tech Entrance will not give you a domain, meaning that you need to go somewhere like Register.com and get your domain for $20 (sign up, make an inquiry, get to the payment page where they offer the domain for $35, close the page, and wait for an email offering you the domain for $20). Once you’ve done that you can use the DNS nameserver info Tech Entrance sends you to get your domain up and running with them.

I’m going to try Tech Entrance and have registered a domain to work on as a side project. Tech Entrance guarantees 99.9% uptime, and if they can keep to their word then they will stand head and shoulders above many other cheap hosting services.

Sign up for Tech Entrance here. This is not an affiliate link, so I don’t get anything for recommending you. If you want to make money online, then a good place to start would be to save money on your hosting costs, and this removes them altogether.

Tags: Bloggers starting by Angel
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