Today I just had time to get my first Earth Day post written and to write something in the Butterfly Gardening blog (which needs a lot of work). I didn’t have the time to analyze how many comments and subscribers other people have and to estimate what I should aim for. Hopefully tomorrow. Right now, I need to start on tomorrow’s post. I really wish I could get a big ahead with my posting.

I’ll start today with the recent post from Darren from April 5th: A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks.

In this post he says that if he were going to start a blog network fresh today as a single blogger that he would make it focused on a single niche.

I don’t know exactly how he defines a niche, but I’m going to say that a set of blogs all focused on issues of interest to women would count as a niche.

The advantages he lists in doing this are (1) being able to cross promote across the blogs and leverage the traffic, (2) Selling advertising, (3) SEO. I believe all 3 of those would work with my ideas for blogs.

Next section in the post: “How I’d Start a Niche Focused Blog Network”.

1)Work hard at building a blog with a good profile and traffic base on a single focused topic

He says its a mistake to start out new with a bunch of blogs all at once. Definitely agree with that. He says he would pick something reasonably wide that could be broken down further. Mine could be considered too wide, but at this point its what I’ve got. It won’t be any problem breaking it into more specific topics later.

He says he would work on this first blog for 6 months or so ‘before even thinking about launching more blogs’. That sounds good, but I’m already cheating a bit - I’ve already thought about more blogs - but then I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t been would I?

That gives me some specifics to work with. I’ve had the blog longer than 6 months, but since I went for a time without writing I’m considering myself to be starting at the beginning. But I will try to make it no more than 6 months before adding another blog.

So, 6 months to build up a “good profile and traffic base”. I wonder how he defines that? A good profile isn’t something you can quantify too well, at least I can’t think of how. “Traffic base” - I could look at 1) unique visitors a day (from log files), 2) how many feed subscribers I have and 3) how many comments on average I get per post.

1) Unique visitors. I got a new computer recently and have not installed the statistic software I used to use on it yet. I will probably have to upgrade it too. It is FastStats by Mach 5. I don’t have time now, but I will have to check into it soon and see how much it costs and how to go about upgrading.

2) Feed Subscribers. I just a few days ago got a feed burner feed, so I don’t have many subscribers yet. I think the feedburner subscriber number would work well as an overall way to gauge how many people I have though. I’m too embarrassed to say how many at this point. But it can only go up at this point. How many subscribers should I have before launching another blog? I’ll look around the next few days at how many other blogs have and make an estimate for what would be a good goal for me.

3) Comments. Not doing too well here yet either. I’ll come up with a number to shoot for in a few days with this too.

Well, that gives me some homework to do! And meanwhile keep writing at the other blog. I have plans for the posts for this week, but don’t have anything written yet, so I will be busy!

Back when I had a regular job, one time we had to write goal documents and they made us come up with ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals. Which turns out not to be just some silly thing the company had made up to annoy us and waste our time. Well, it did annoy us and waste our time, but it has some usefulness too. So, I thought I would try the ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals approach to what I’m doing here.

Each of the letters in ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ stands for something but it seems to vary a bit. According to Wikipedia:

“A SMART objective is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.”

Where I worked I believe we used ‘trackable’ for ‘T’, I don’t remember what else was different.

Anyway, I’ll give it a try. The goal I’ll use it for is creating a small blog network. In the bigger picture though - what I want is a successful web site, one that could be sold for a decent amount of money and to get there I see building a community around the site as a good first step. And an blog network is a good way to start the community building. That’s kind of goals within goals within goals I believe. Nevertheless for this exercise I will stick with the creating a small blog network as the goal.

Specific - “Is there a description of a precise or specific behavior / outcome which is linked to a rate, number, percentage or frequency?”

Yes.

Oh. I guess I’m supposed to actually say what the specific objective is. Ok - I’d like to add 8-10 blogs to this site. I already have a good idea of what the topics will be about, although I realize that could change. I could go into more detail, but I think it best to wait until I’ve gone through the blog posts I mentioned a few posts ago in more detail (A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks, How to Launch a Blog Network and 46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network).

Measurable - “Is there a reliable system in place to measure progress towards the achievement of the objective?”

Not really much to measure here - I count the number of blogs added.

Achievable - “With a reasonable amount of effort and application can the objective be achieved?”

Yes, but can it be achieved by me is another matter. Am I capable of it? I don’t know that anyone can answer that. I think all I can do is try my best and see. I don’t know how they define ‘reasonable’ either. But I’ll stick with ‘yes’.

Relevant - “Can the people with whom the objective is set make an impact on the situation? Do they have the necessary knowledge, authority and skill?”

Yes, it is relevant to me and I can make an impact on the situation. But do I have the knowledge and skill? I don’t have all the knowledge and skills, I expect to have to learn a lot along the way. But hopefully it is something I am capable of doing.

Trackable - “Is there a finish and/or a start date clearly stated or defined?”

Well, its starting now, that’s easy. A clearly defined finish date? How do I come up with that? Maybe asking other people how long it took them. But everyone’s situation and skills are different so I don’t know if that would be very helpful anyway. How about I say 1 year?

Ok, so this ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals thing may not have been very useful. I don’t know that I got any more out of it than what I already knew. Maybe I’ll come back to it later once I’ve fleshed out some more details from the blog network posts I mentioned above.

Today is my birthday - I am now the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything! For a year anyway.

As I said before, another reason why I decided that now is the right time to start blogging here is that ‘I’m getting too old to not take a chance and move out of my comfort zone’. This birthday coming up was kind of the last straw and I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.

So, today I officially relaunched my blog at Ideas For Women. (And I think the post topic I chose was quite fitting!) I had hoped to have posts pre-written for today and tomorrow done yesterday. So I am already not doing so well. But I did get the post up, even though it took until the afternoon. I know very few people well enough to even let them know of the relaunch. I can count them on one hand. So I wasn’t expecting a flood of traffic. Although, I had planned to have networked enough before I relaunched, but again, that didn’t work out so well either. And not even one comment yet - isn’t that pathetic?!

Oh well, I won’t give up! I can’t.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention another blogger who has inspired me: Wendy Piersall. She wrote a post last October titled: What Have I Learned in 6 Weeks of Running a Mini Blog Network. That made me really think about it as a possibility, although it also left me thinking ‘Is this something I really think I am capable of?’.

In one place she says “there is no doubt that I have to move into entrepreneurial territory that once seemed like the big kids playground.”. Am I ready to play with the big kids? Not yet, I don’t think, but I still have quite a ways to go before getting to her level.

She also said: “I feel like it’s time for me to put up or shut up. With tens of thousands of people watching… failure isn’t exactly an option, eh?”.

I feel that way too - I’m getting too old to not take a chance and move out of my comfort zone. Of course I don’t have ‘tens of thousands of people watching’ either - but by blogging about this here maybe enough people will take notice and that will help keep me motivated too.

Recently I read a few posts about starting a blog network. For quite some time now I have thought that I would like to do something like that with one of my sites. Those posts kind kicked me in the butt to really take this seriously and get started with it so that I can actually realize the goals in life that I have set for myself.

So I decided to start blogging about it here.

The site is : Ideas For Women.com.

Ideally I would like to build this site up to become something of value and sell it. I know that won’t be easy and maybe not even that realistic, but I’m going to try my best to do it.

Part of my plan to do this is build up a community around it – starting with a mini-blog network. I have one blog on it now: Ideas For Women News Blog . I haven’t done so well with it though. But I am relaunching it soon and am determined to make it work.

The blog posts I read that inspired me are:

A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks

Which led me to these two posts:

How to Launch a Blog Network

46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network

I have also been inspired by Caroline Middlebrook’s blog and the blog Building My Empire.

So my next steps will be to map out my goals and then I will start following the above “46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network” as well as following Darrens advice and blogging about it as I do it.

I had a dream last night where at first I was in grade school still. The dream was about and had the general feeling of technology that at the time was very new but would now be regarded as obsolete.

It ended with Daron holding up a little blue pill.

I woke up and thought - what is the new technology now? Or what works now for SEO and general web site success? What is thing that is the way to make money now, but will not work later? The thing that I will look back on and realize I should have taken advantage of at the time but didn’t? Is it Adsense? Blogging? Anything other than a large corporations site getting SE referrals?

Either way I woke up with a lot of energy and realized I really needed to get to work and make use of the opportunities that are available now.

(I swear the dream was real. And just for fun - go to Google and search for: [pill blue daron]

I haven’t been following very much of what’s been happening in the SEO world for a while - I haven’t even listened to WebmasterRadio or gone to their chat in a long time. I have been stopping by webmasterworld now and then though. I didn’t get to go to the latest pubcon either, but I heard that Malcolm Gladwell was going to be speaking. That and stuntdubl’srecent post made my think about his book The Tipping Point again.

I can’t seem get my sites to do very well - basically I don’t get enough visitors, and I don’t get enough visitors because google doesn’t seem to like my sites. I think it doesn’t like my sites because they don’t have enough links. But how do you get links naturally from good content if you don’t rank and no one sees your site? I’m trying blogging for that, but so far have not had much success with that either. Based on what the book says, I’m either a maven or an expert, but I’m certainly no connector or salesperson. I think I need to get the attention of a connector or salesperson, but I don’t know how. I’ll keep trying with blogs though and see if that works. Meanwhile I may post something about this at WMW too, if I have the time.

David Ogletree has a new tool to help people make more money - it creates affiliate links that look like Adsense ads. Pretty cool. And its free!

I may try it sometime, but first I need to figure out a good way to get Adsense on a blog without breaking any of the Adsense rules.

Stuntdubl has had a couple good posts on his blog lately, I’ve been meaning to write about them for a few days now, but just didn’t have the time.

One of them: Why I Try to Spend Less Time Analyzing Algorithm Updates - brings up some good points about how best to spend your time. As well as some great ideas about what Google may start doing soon or already be doing.

I try not to spend too much time on update threads. I try to just skim through them quickly, as most of what is posted is either off topic or just complaining (and yes I’ve been guilty of doing that too) - and not really information you can use to better understand what Google is trying to do. However, there are a few good points made in those threads, so I don’t think they are completely useless. You just have to remember to scan quickly through them, focus on the good stuff and ignore the rest. I’m not going to repeat the whole list that Stuntdubl gives in this post of things to look out for - but if you have a web site - you’d be foolish not to read it and take some notes!

His post Natural SEO Logic - Simple Standalone Variable Guidelines is also a good one to spend some time reading. He goes through several characteristic of sites and makes some estimates of what might look natural to search engines. These types of guidelines seem more important as time goes by, as doing something wrong might hurt you more than you can be helped by doing the right things. Or so it seems to me anyway.

Stuntdubl is a nice guy too, I met him last year at LV and he is good at what he does - so read what he has to say - or else! (Or else what? I don’t know, I felt like saying it!)