While watching So You Think You Can Dance last night, I got a call from my Staingirl, Kaye. She wanted to know whether I had a post for today. Of course not. I was watching one of my favorite shows. Besides with her new found obsession of David Cassidy (Serioiusly?), I figured she had plenty to blog about. Right? Oh so wrong! Oh crap, what to write about now?

Our blog is a general blog. It is not a niche so we do not have to come up with 300 articles on a microchip. We are targeting “women of a certain age”, and our interests are diverse. As a matter of fact, whenever Kaye and I are speaking about just about anything, we immediately think we have a blog post. Too bad our kids may read our musings. Oh well!

So what do we do? Here’s what seems to work for us, and a couple of additional suggestions:

1. Keep a list of topics to write about. Ideas for a blog post can crop up during a conversation or while reading for pleasure or business. They can also leave that sieve I like to call a brain. So I now keep a log of ideas that I can refer to when I don’t have something that I am burning to blog about.

2. Keep any interesting articles you run across. This goes hand in hand with keeping a list of topics to write about. During my spare time, I love reading magazine articles and surfing the web. The other day I read an item in the paper on different articles of undergarments which improve our appearance. Right away, I thought about the Staingirlz and those women with a shelf. I clipped that article, and will be reviewing the items listed from time to time.

3. Actively research and seek out topics of interest to your blog. I haven’t actually done this because our blog is relatively young and fairly general, and we currently have plenty to write about. But if I had a more specialized blog, limited in scope, which did not have a topic readily to mind on a regular basis, I would seek out trade periodicals and specialized internet sites to assist me in developing new topics for my blog.

4. Subscribe to a newsfeed, whether it’s general or specialized to your topic. A blog on politics isn’t going to get too far if it rehashes old news, but a blog that breaks the news will generate a name and a huge following. A tech blog that reviews or reports on cutting edge technology will pique a lot of interest.

Let us know what you do to fight blogger’s block.

Well, I got the go-ahead from Staingirl Kaye. We may proceed with our 30-day challenge, but there is a caveat. If I’m going to make her write so much, she gets to write about David Cassidy. David Cassidy, seriously? If we are going to write about our favorite beefcakes, what about George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Travolta or Bruce Willis before he shaved his head? And if it must be a crush from the sixties, how about Donny Osmond (And they called it puppy love), who at least has great dance moves on Dancing with the Stars? But hey, this was my idea, and unless I want to write 30 days straight, David Cassidy it is.   Well then, Kaye, you’re going to have to watch Donny Osmond dancing the tango on Dancing with the Stars.

We began this 30-day blogging challenge as an experiment. We wanted to see whether consistency in writing our great content (David Cassidy, seriously?) would lead to an increase in readership. The logic is that frequency in posting would get us noticed by the search engines, which would in turn lead to greater traffic. What do the experts have to say?

It’s a mixed bag. You have proponents and naysayers. Blogbloke referred to some chart from Technorati that showed more traffic on websites with more posts.   Several bloggers swear that writing good content often and consistently will lead to increased traffic. And then others say it’s all about the marketing.

Of course, I looked to my favorite blogging guru, Problogger. I had always read on his site that “Content is King”. So I figured he could set us straight on this topic. His take: good content is important to provide to your readers, but you still have to get readers on to your site. He actually says that “write it and they will come” is a secret to success shared by new bloggers who have yet to find success.  Ouch! I think I have given the fam more ammo for teasing me.

Well, we want to see for ourselves. For the next 29 days, we will post one blog every day. We will not join any directories or submit any articles anywhere. We will allow pingbacks and trackbacks because we always have. We will look at overall traffic and more specifically at traffic brought to staingirz.com via the search engines. We will even let you know which keywords brought the most traffic (David Cassidy?) We will report the results at the end of the 30 days.

And because we are in experimentation mode, after the 30 days we will experiment with different manners of marketing our blog. We’ll see how much our blogging traffic increases after we join directories, etc. If you have any ideas to help us in the marketing portion of our experiment, please let us know.

 Well, here’s to another 28 days of blogging, and learning way more than I ever wanted to about David Cassidy. And Kaye, I may have you listening to Puppy Love!

Hey Staingirl Kaye, I think we’ve been neglecting our blog for a while.   And it’s a little embarassing when friends ask how that blog is going.  Of course, the fam thinks it’s great they have something new to tease me about.  And I can’t have that.  So I’ve decided that it’s time we get back into this blogging thing.

But this is not just about the humiliation of abandoning our baby blog.  I’ve been looking at our Google Analytics, and I’ve noticed that our readership (not so numerous anyway) has dropped considerably.  And I’m wondering what the dynamic is.  Did our few readers go away because there’s not much going on with the blog?  Or have the search engines been ignoring us because we’re not provding any content?  If we write it, will the readers come?

Only one way to find out.  Kaye, I challenge us: 30 days straight of blogging.  I don’t care whether it’s a tome or a paragraph.  We will put something up every day for 30 days straight if it kills us.  We will no longer wait until we have made our site prettier, or until we have researched a subject for hours and days and weeks on end, or until the rest of our life is no longer in the way.  I want to see how blog traffic is affected by daily content.

And, dear readers, I promise that even though we intend to publish something daily (actually, we may be too many people – I haven’t consulted with Kaye yet), we will not slap up just any old thing.  Our content will continue to be informative and entertaining (at least in our minds).  But we also need your help.  Give us a little feedback and let us know what works and what does not work.

So here’s to our 30-day blogging challenge.

During our blogging journey, my buddy Staingirl Kaye and I occasionally have had this thing about spinning our wheels trying to figure out some blog process. And then, we would discover that whatever we were trying to do was really quite simple. We’d like you to benefit from our many hours of cogitating on some or other blog thing, so that you won’t go through the head banging. So from time to time, we will publish brief “how to” articles that will help you.

Our most recent challenge was the Amazon Affiliate button. We haven’t discussed this in depth in our blog, but it is our dream to one day have this burgeoning blog site that makes all sorts of money for us. We are starting off with the Amazon affiliate program. We had already figured out how to insert a pretty link into our blog posts (a future how-to post), but I could not for the life of me see how we could possibly place a stand-alone Amazon button on the right hand sidebar for our readers.

We use the Wordpress blogging platform and Atahualpa theme. I had looked through what I thought was the pertinent Wordpress documentation, and had checked out the menu completely. We were stumped. Somewhere I came across reference to a forum at bytesforall.com, the company that created the Atahualpa theme. I found my answer in one of the posts when I punched in “Amazon”.

1) In the Admin toolbar, click on Appearance.

2) Click on Widgets

3) On the right hand side, you will see several available widgets. On the left hand side, you will see several sidebar categories.

4) Drag the box marked “Text” in the “Available Widgets” section to the specific sidebar referenced on the left where you want to place your widget. In this case, I dragged it to the “Right Sidebar”.

5) A box will open. Copy the script of your widget into the text box. Click here to learn how to create an Amazon Affiliates Widget for your website.

6) If you want your widget to have a label, write that label in the title bar. I chose to leave the title bar blank for the Amazon Affiliates widget.

7) Close the box. You will find your widget on the right sidebar.

VERY IMPORTANT: Before this process, the right sidebar of staingirlz.com already had a couple of items, which had come standard with the platform (blogroll, recent posts, etc.); however, after placing the Amazon Affiliates widget there, those links were no longer available in the drop menu of the right sidebar. It appears that by manually inserting my Amazon widget, I had overridden the default because they all disappeared from the sidebar. The fix was simple. I dragged the “available widget” to the “right sidebar” button, and voila! Everything was as it should be, including our Amazon Affiliates button.

Whether you are blogging for money or for pleasure, there are costs involved in maintaining your website. The Amazon Associates program offers a relatively simple vehicle for bringing in some cash to cover your costs, assuming you have readers who will buy through your website. The process of getting the widget is not rocket science. But if you are a middle-aged non technical blogger like me, it can take you a while to figure things out the first time. Staingirl Kaye and I hope that the instructions below make the process easier and faster for you. NOTE: These instructions assume you have already established an Amazon Associates account.

1) Once you have signed into your Amazon Associates account, click on the “Widgets” tab above.

2) Click on the “Add to your Web page” button of the widget you select.

3) On the left hand side, review your display options as well as the color and design to see whether you wish to accept the default display. Most of the options are self-explanatory. This article will discuss the changes most likely to affect your blog: size and color.

4) First, select the desired design displayed toward the bottom in the “Color and Design”.

5) The last option within the “display option” portion is size. The drop down menu for “Select size” contains standard widget sizes.
6) If these standard sizes do not fit within the space, click on “Custom size” Select. Select the desired width by moving the arrow on the line in the “width” section or by writing the desired width in the box provided. The widget will appear in the preview section to the right in the selected size. As a matter of reference, the ideal width of the widget for our sidebar is as of this writing 180. You may have to paste the widget more than once into your webpage to verify the appropriate size. Select the desired number of columns and rows.

7) You may change some color options for your widget by clicking on “Customize it….” in the “Color and Design” section. Click on the color boxes for each area available and select the correct color in the spectrum.

After accepting the widget as is, or making your preferred changes, click on “Add to my web page”.

9) A new screen pops up, click on “copy”.

10) Paste script in the appropriate place for your blog or website.

As you may have learned by now, Staingirl Kaye and I have this thing about researching a topic to death. Kaye and I started talking about our blog in September 2008. We went to Wordpress meetups to learn more about blogging. For the first time ever I heard words such as “themes”, “skins”, and “ftp”, which flew right over my head. We incorporated and planned. Which platform to use: Wordpress or Blogspot? Hosted or self-hosting? We deliberated ever so thoughtfully about where to register our domain name.  

Fortunately, a phone call to Kaye from Michael Luo of the New York Times  got us off our duffs. Within 24 hours, we selected a webhost, our blogging platform, a theme, and posted our first blog. We even had Google Adsense up and running. And yes, it was that easy.

Don’t get me wrong, our research did pay off, and ultimately we made fairly informed decisions that we were comfortable with. We will do a separate post about selecting a webhost as there are many things to consider. But we also learned that a lot of the steps in blogging are easier than they appear. When we finally went onto the Godaddy website to set up our website, we found that we could select a website that already included the Wordpress blogging platform. When we didn’t understand how to do something, Godaddy’s customer service representative set the whole thing up for us.

From everything we had read, we were under the impression that we would have to learn html to write our blogs and load them in through an ftp (a function I still don’t quite get). And forget about those plug-ins! Well, it turns out that Atahualpa, the theme we selected, has a visual mode, which takes care of links and headers the way a typical word processing application might. And there is great support through online forums for “how tos” and troubleshooting.

Need a function for your blog? Run a search through your plug-in application, and with one click of the button you have your plug-in. Want to place an affiliate ad in your blog? Cut and paste, Baby! OK, it’s not always that simple, but we found that we learned more by doing and exploring the features on our blogging platform, than with all the copious reading we did. We also learned that very often these monumental tasks were not as overwhelming as they appeared.

We will be posting a lot of what we learned in the hopes of simplifying your journey. These posts will include our thought process as we made certain decisions in our blogging journey as well as short “how to” posts. And we hope you’ll share your experiences with us, too.

But probably the biggest lesson we learned throughout the blogging process: If you have an idea, and are itching to start a blog, don’t let the fear technical issues daunt you. Just do it!

You’ve weighed your decision to go into a business with a friend, and you’ve decided full speed ahead! Well, what are the issues specific to a blog partnership? Given that Kaye and I are just beginning this journey and have very little experience in this area, I did a little research to see what help I could get. And may I say there’s not a lot out there on blog partnerships, and even less on two friends starting a blogging business.

I found an interesting article by Darren Rowse at www.problogger.net, “How to Start a Blog Partnership”. I had a good laugh, but not at Problogger. When I first started thinking about blogging, Problogger was the first site I saw that offered helpful advice. Eventually Kaye bought the book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, and we both read it from cover to cover. And we still visit the site for advice. But I digress. No, I had to laugh because Kaye and I had never gotten around to asking the important questions when deciding who to work with.

A lot of the questions were about qualifications and credentials of your blogging partner. Neither Kaye nor I had any blogging experience, let alone credentials. Kaye was familiar with my legal documents for what that’s worth, and I knew that Kaye would be better than me at the technical. We discussed time constraints because we are both working parents. We already had a relationship, and our instant gut reaction was that we would work well together. Actually, we were very excited to find a project that we could work well together on.

In his article, Rowse’s two final pieces of advice were to get verbal, and I cannot stress this enough, and to take it slow. In Parts I and II of this series, I laid out numerous topics for discussion with your business partner. But what are additional issues which come up with blogging, especially amongst friends?

1) Blogging is a writing venture. If your partner will be posting on the blog, you will want to know that she can write. It would be a disaster to begin a business which focuses on writing, only to discover that one of the main writers draws a blank when it’s time to produce or can’t spell.

2) Ego issues need to be set aside. Writing, even on dry topics, can be personal. The writer has to be able to accept constructive criticism from her friend, and the person reviewing the document has to feel free to comment. Also, and this may occur more often amongst friends, you or your partner may find you are writing about something that has happened to one or both of you. You have to be respectful of your friend’s comfort level, or you should both be in agreement as to what, if anything, is off limits to your blog.

3) Decide on the focus of the blog and continuously reassess. Kaye and I conceived of Staingirlz.com as a website targeting a middle-aged female audience with a certain attitude. Because we are beginning bloggers, Kaye and I thought we would be providing a valuable service about beginning a blog and all of the issues which arise on our journey. However, we intend to continue with our main objective and we’ve discussed upcoming posts that align with our initial focus.

4) Coordinate your writing efforts. Kaye and I run all topics by each other. Usually, we take them separately, but we have also done separate blogs on the same topic. See our review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We have also talked about having a Kaye-Elle conversation within one blog post. By coordinating our efforts, we avoid stepping on each other’s toes, and we make sure that our blogs align with the focus of the blog business.

5) Communicate and keep on communicating. Issues will arise or you will get a stellar (or not so stellar) idea. As long as lines of communication are open both ways, your blog partnership should thrive.

This is not an exhaustive list. As I mentioned, we are just getting started in this venture. We’d love to hear from you if you have any additional ideas, tips or issues which arise when blogging with a friend/partner.