Strategy

Get Your Blog Hosted for Free

March 10, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

I always encourage bloggers that want to take themselves seriously to get their own hosting, and manage their own site. The most common pushback I get is the price of hosting. You can get your blog hosted for free. It is pretty easy.

First some perspective.

Let’s say you really do have your blog hosted for free right now on a site like Blogger or WordPress.com. That’s great. If you are happy, god bless. If you want to step up you game a little, you are going to have to move on to a self hosted solution.

What are we talking about price wise? Roughly $80 – $120 per year. You can pretty easily get your hosting done for about $7.95 per month. That’s really cheap. Granted, that is much more expensive than free…I will give you that. However, it is a small price to pay for the potential increase in revenue and content flexibility that is then afforded to you.

How to get your hosting for free?

There are two easy ways, but first consider our goal. We need to come up with $7.95 in revenue every month to offset the cost of hosting. That is not a lot of money. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Technology

Don’t Tell Me About Your Business

March 9, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

That’s right. Don’t.

Bear with me on the following journey. I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year. I tend to go there because I have to go. I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business. Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It, Strategy

Cache Your WordPress Blog to Make it Faster

March 8, 2010 By Travis 1 Comment

What’s the most common problem that growing blogs always run into? Their WordPress site needs to be cached in order to handle the growing influx of traffic.

The lifespan of the common blogger goes something like this.

Blogger starts blog at WordPress.com, Blogger, or Typepad.
Blogger realizes they want more flexibility and ability to generate a little revenue.
Blogger moves their site over to a self hosted WordPress.org setup on a cheap blog host.
Blogger’s traffic continues to grow.
BOOM. Site begins to fail because their shared PHP server and database are overwhelmed.

That’s where most bloggers start scratching their head. They start to do some research about all the errors they are getting. Of course, their lame hosts have no good answers and just tell them to upgrade their hosting plans. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Technology

5 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog

March 3, 2010 By Travis 1 Comment

For most blogs, comments are the lifeblood of pageviews. What do pageviews turn into? Ad impressions.

That’s the business gold behind comments, but there are a lot more benefits including community building, site loyalty, and more. There are many ways to get more comments on your blog, and they are all very easy.

1) Just ask for them. Duh.

Did you ever think to just ask? No seriously. Most of the time it is just that easy.

Try ending your post with, “What do you think? Comment below.” Or how about, “Your thoughts? Let me know below.”

Those are some of the pretty obvious, more formal (cough, cough boring *cough*) ways to write it. Be more casual and conversational when soliciting for comments. How about, “I can’t possibly be the only one that thinks this is crazy, right? Please tell me I’m not the only sane one.”

You are phrasing it like a rhetorical question, but it actually makes the reader want to respond to you. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: Comments, Community, Interaction

Got Speed? The Problem with Slow Loading Blogs

January 5, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

Does your blog load slowly? C’mon. Be honest…we’re all friends here.

If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should. Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers. Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

The speed test

Head on over to tools.pingdom.com. This site will tell you definitively how fast your site loads. All you have to do is put in your website’s URL and run the test. It will show you the load time for every single element on your site.

Pingdom Tools 480x142 Got Speed? The Problem with Slow Loading Blogs

Then, just scroll down to the very bottom of the report to see the total load time for your site. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Layout, Strategy, Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: Theme Optimization, Thesis

New Year’s Resolution: Consistency

January 1, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

I hate New Year’s resolutions. The whole ideas is just silly to me. However, the first of the year for whatever reason feels like a blank slate. There is a new sense of possibility that only seems to come around this time of year.

I’ve decided to capitalize on it by setting a new mission: consistency.

To do anything well, you need to do it consistently. In my case, I run/manage about 26 sites year round in addition to one-off client projects. Being so busy makes it hard to write on any of my sites consistently. I’ll get a random post off from time to time, but doing it daily gets tough.

For 2010, I’m going to give it my best effort to write here on BlogCraving.com as regularly as possible. It isn’t that there’s nothing to write about, it’s just a matter of sitting down and doing it. Building and maintaining an audience only happens when a site consistently publishes new content. It can be as little as one new post a day as long as it is done on a regular basis.

I’m also going to make a solid effort to comment on my favorite sites more often. Being active on other websites is one of the best ways to get your self out there and known in the business. Posting great comments on a regular basis will get you noticed.

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: Audience, Building, strategy

Top 5 Tips for Hiring Help

December 31, 2009 By Travis Leave a Comment

When building your online business (or any business really), you’ll quickly realize that you can’t do it all yourself. You are simply going to have to hire some help.

It does not mean you have to go out and start hiring full time employees. However, you’ll probably need a few contract or project guru’s to help you along the way.

One of the biggest mistakes is second guessing yourself. Once you’ve found someone you know is good for your business, stick with them. At some point, you may hit a few bumps in the road with them, but 99% of the time, you can work them out. See what I mean by watching Sue and Steve’s video.

Here’s some more tips to make the process easier.

1. Ask a buddy

Word of mouth is king these days, and so is networking. If you are not already, get out there and make friends in the business. Hopefully you already have a few.

Ask them if they’ve used any good people. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Strategy Tagged With: freelance, quotes, staff