Random Order Weblog - Nothing’s too random!

One thing I’ve learned since I began working on my own blog is that while blogs are fun and entertaining to keep, they don’t necessarily hit the ground running for everyone.  My blog gets what I would consider to be a medium amount of traffic… some days I get only 5-10 unique visitors, while other days I get closer to a hundred.  It really seems to be dependent on whether or not I have blogged on something that is currently in the news.  When I do that, I seem to get some traffic for a little while but it shortly trickles into nothing.

Since I would like to get a little more traffic to my blog, I have spent some time looking around for tips.  With blogging being as popular as it is today, it was not a problem to find some good sites with quality information on everything from releasing a new blog to boosting an old one.  Mine is sort of new, so I’ve followed the advice for new blogs.

Right off the bat I noticed that my blog is lacking in a couple departments that more experienced bloggers believe are very important.  For example, my about us page is.. well.. lacking.  I also do not know much about RSS, but I think that since I am using WordPress as my blog software I should have that all taken care of for me.  Other good tips were to include things like a Digg or Delicious button at the end of your posts so that it’s easy for your readers to actually promote your site to other potential visitors through bigger sites .   One final good point that I have definitely been neglecting is that it is generally a good idea to visit other blogs similar to yours and leave comments so that you get the word out about not only your blog, but yourself as an individual.

Everyone says that the real estate bubble has been building for years and is about to pop.  But guess what?  This is the same thing they were sayng years ago.  Now I’m not saying that they are wrong—there very well may be a real estate bubble just waiting to explode at any moment—but I will say that they (meaning almost every major economic magazine and author) was very wrong about the timing, and it has really cost me thousands of dollars.

For example, if you were to have purchased Breckenridge real estate or Summit County Real Estate just two years ago, you would have made an excellent return on your money.  It would certainly have been higher than anything you could find in a standard or even high yield savings account.

Why do I mention Breckenridge specifically?  Because Breckenridge is a place my family and I go on a regular basis for skiing.  While I’m on the topic, I would also strongly recommend skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado, to all of my readers.  You can plan your trip easily online these days and really save a lot of money.  You can also keep tabs on important things like the latest Breckenridge weather updates, snow conditions, etc. over the internet.

Back on topic, however, despite all my ranting I am still too afraid to purchase real estate.  The market is a cyclical one—something we have had proven to us time and time again for literally centuries, and right now, if you ask me or just about anyone else, we are on a very clear up tick.  The difficult part is not recognizing that, but instead it is recognizing how far up we are.  Are things about to turn down, flatten out, or are we just beginning our climb?  The answer is worth millions…

I have been looking for a while now for someone or some company to take care of some SEO and web design work I need done, particularly on some of my smaller projects that have literally dragged on for months simply because I have not had the time to deal with them myself.  While doing this, I have been frustrated by the fact that so many companies do either SEO or web design, but not both.  It seems to me that in the process of doing SEO you would be so exposed to HTML, PHP, etc., that you would, just by contact, have learned how to do web design as well.  Unfortunately that does not seem to (at least universally) be the case.

I have however found a few companies that are capable of doing both services.  Then, the issues is to find out if the company is good at both of them.  In my opinion, even if a company is good at one side, it is not a sure signal they will be good at the other.  For this reason it is my belief that you have to evaluate a company’s SEO abilities entirely independently from its programming or website design abilities.  The two are related, as I mentioned earlier in the article, simply because of a little overlap, but I do not think they are so closely related that you don’t need to consider them separately.

The other issue is, as usual, price.  Price is always a concern simply because of the wild variations you find when shopping on the internet—particularly for services like web design and SEO.  From my experience, price is really not at all related to quality.  Sometimes the best service providers also charge the least amount of money.

Now that I have my own blog and spend what I consider to be a fairly decent amount of time blogging, I have really come to understand why blogs became so popular. With my newfound respect for blogs, I’ve begun to looking around for interesting ones I can read and enjoy. Some of my favorites are those that belong to “gurus” in their particular industry. Sometimes such blogs can reveal unique tactics, marketing techniques, web development tips, etc., that I otherwise would never have thought of in a million years.

As I have grown to appreciate blogs more, I have also started to actively search for others that may also be of interest to not only myself, by my sites’ visitors. Then I can link to these blogs either so I personally remember where they are and to check up on them, or because I feel my visitors would like to know about them.

As I was searching for other blogs I came across something very cool—a directory, similar to the DMOZ and other major directories, but one that specializes in blog sites (blogoozle.com). So basically the site categorizes a huge number of blogs by subject matter, etc., and lets people like me who are looking for blog sites find them quickly and easily. Furthermore, this is a great way to find some of the lesser known blogs that haven’t been around for ages. When I use search engines to look for blogs, I find that they are generally older blogs that have just built up an insane amount of link popularity simply by virtue of being around forever. Often times newer sites offer just as much, or sometimes even more enlightening information, yet they are buried in the SERPs. The blog directory mentioned above really helps to get those kinds of blogs some more exposure.