I’ve given myself all sorts of excuses for not blogging more often. My favourite excuse is that I don’t have a mobile device good enough for me to use and blog in a mobile manner.

I had a netbook three years ago, which made blogging a little bit easier on the go, but I thought it was too bulky. Then, I had a Windows 7 phone, which wasn’t that bad, but I lamented that it wasn’t going to be as good an experience as using an Android phone.

Not long after, I finally owned an Android phone in the form of HTC Desire, and soon after, HTC Flyer.

Wow, I cannot overstate how DIFFICULT it is to blog on a smartphone, or even a tablet for that matter. Not in the way I’d like to, at least (the copy-pasting, featured images, attaching Flickr images, annoyingly incorrect spelling corrections, screenshots, those sort of things). I guess I have yet to get used to blogging on a smart mobile device.

So I was going to state that maybe HTC phones are not as good as Samsung phones, that it may have been easier if I was blogging using Samsung Galaxy Tab. But truthfully, I’m out of excuses, and it’s time I stop making anymore.

My regular postings in WebGrrrl.net shall resume now, with at least three posts a week. And what better way to kick-start my blogging groove than by doing a meme? (wait, did I not, once upon a time, swear that I wouldn’t do another meme, ever?)

With all these said, I am officially announcing the start of my 30-Day Blogging Challenge, Day 0.

Stay tuned for Day 1 later today.

day 0: the 30 day blogger challenge explanation & description
day 1: introduction. recent picture of yourself. 15 interesting facts
day 2: meaning behind your blog name
day 3: your first love
day 4: your parents
day 5: a song to match your mood
day 6: a picture of something that makes you happy
day 7: favorite movies
day 8: a place you’ve traveled to
day 9: a picture of your best friend
day 10: something you’re afraid of
day 11: favorite tv shows
day 12: something you don’t leave the house without
day 13: goals
day 14: a picture of you last year. how have you changed?
day 15: bible verse
day 16: dream house
day 17: something you’re looking forward to
day 18: favorite place to eat
day 19: something you miss
day 20: nicknames
day 21: favorite picture of yourself of ALL TIME. and why?
day 22: what’s in your purse?
day 23: favorite movie
day 24: something you’ve learned
day 25: put your ipod on shuffle, first 10 songs
day 26: your dream wedding
day 27: original photo of the city you live in
day 28: something that stresses you out
day 29: three wishes
day 30: a picture of yourself this day and 5 good things that happened since you started the challenge

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Now that I own a smartphone with broadband capabilities, blogging from anywhere and at anytime should be a cinch.

Shouldn’t it?

And yet, this is the second time that I’ve missed my blogging deadline for the PostAWeek challenge.

So here I am, sitting and having my favorite lunch of toast and milk tea (with fried noodles and fish cakes to go), putting my best effort to contemplate where I have gone wrong.

Toast and Tea for lunch

I can give you a million and one reasons why I can’t keep up. Work, home, kids, the Top Commentators widget, distraction, lack of focus, etc. But they are all just excuses.

One thing I clearly am with this challenge is feeling frustrated. I checked my Google Analytics recently and found that my blog readership and bounce rate did not improve; in fact, it got worse.

What?! Even after the hoopla I made about PostADay / PostAWeek, and tweeting about it and joining the Facebook PostADay community? I would think things would be a little different.

Then I remembered my post on how my lack of blog updates led to better visitor retention. And, also the fact that blogging through this WordPress app for Windows Phone is ridiculously tougher than my geek self would like to admit, is making me think twice about my strategy.

So now what? Do I focus on organic traffic by just posting sporadically, or do I post often to feed my blogging interest in the expense of worsening search engine results?

I’ll think about this later.

BTW, here are some blog posts from WebGrrrl.net readers who are taking on the PostAWeek 2011 challenge:

• My history with Unix by LaViaP The Geek

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

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As I’m typing this post, I am sitting drinking milk tea and munching on crunchy toasted bread in my favourite cheap cafe. I have learned early on that it is a hopeless endeavour to try and blog at home. My kids would jump onto (and on) my lap, expecting me to open PlayHouseDisneyChannel-Asia.com (an address which even my 2-year old could memorize), play their favourite music video (right now they’re into Korean artists, either Wonder Girls’ “Tell Me” or 2PM’s “10 Points Out Of 10″), or something else, like going to the loo, getting them a glass of water, opening the packets of their favourite crackers, dinner, lunch, snacks… you know, the whole parental duties and other things that either make you sigh or pull your hair out.

Drinking tea and eating toast in this particular cafe actually helps me focus. Within two hours, I was able to finish three 1,000-word articles. And now I’m in the middle of finishing this blog post.

When I’m focused, it takes me another 15 to 30 minutes before my creative vibes kick in. The hustle and bustle of this cafe only adds to the excitement of completing my writing assignments (did you know that JK Rowling also prefers the cafe when writing her Harry Potter books? Coincidence? I think not! SHOW OFF!)

Now, programming is another thing, for some weird reason. My environment needs to be very quiet and office-like before I can totally commit to my coding. This is why my home office has to be very de-cluttered and bare-bones; I prefer just my netbook and wireless mouse in front of me — I don’t even need a PC. My WiFI printer/scanner/copier would be another thing sitting at the corner of the office. But even when no one is at home, my home office is one very distracting place. It’s too convenient for me to get a quick snack, or to run off to do my laundry (a one minute load-into-the-washer thing often turns into a 15-minute dry-hanging and folding of clothes to top it up), or do the dishes, or quickly make dinner 6 hours in advance. Or maybe just an hour of Oprah. Then an hour to catch up on House. Add another hour of Lie To Me.

You see that?

I really don’t know whether this is the state of mind I condition myself into, or that the environment is what shaped my mindset.

Distraction and focus is the main theme here, I guess. Whichever affects either or both of these will determine whether I can blog or write or finish whatever’s in my to-do list that day.

Do you have your favourite place to blog? Does blogging at home work for you?

BTW, here are some blog posts from WebGrrrl.net readers who are taking on the PostAWeek 2011 challenge:

• 1 ring to rule them all! by LaViaP The Geek

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I know that the original challenge is intended for WordPress.com users, but, hey, it doesn’t hurt to join in the fun.

I’ve done a 30-day blog challenge before, so I know how difficult it can be for some of us to keep up. It’s not so much because we’re out of ideas, but rather the fact that we’re pretty much swarmed with so many other commitments in our life that they force you to put your blogging efforts in the back burner.

WebGrrrl.net is a perfect example of that. 2010 has been almost non-existent in terms of posts in this blog. As a comparison:

• 2006: 9 posts
• 2007: 88 posts
• 2008: 114 posts
• 2009: 37 posts
• 2010: 11 posts

Pathetic, isn’t it? As a result, my blog traffic suffered.

OK, so maybe I lied, a little — the traffic wasn’t that bad up until a month or two ago (proof of my SEO prowess *snorts*).

But that’s not the point.

The point is, I need to get my behind off the ground and actually blog again, if I were to live up to my lame tagline (no offence to Asimov).

Therefore, I’m taking the WordPress PostADay challenge, albeit in a slightly modified form. You do notice in that challenge that there’s a weekly version of it called PostAWeek? That’s the one I’m taking. Instead of one post a day, I’ll do a weekly post, type each one in 250 words or more, then tag each post as “postaweek2011″.

You should join me. It’s good for your blog’s SEO, and for sharpening your writing/typing skills.

Or how about this — let me give you an incentive. If you decide to join the WordPress weekly challenge with me, do what I do (post weekly, tag it, write in 250 words or more). Then, comment in my latest weekly post, add your latest weekly post URL in the comment form, and I’ll link back to your article in my next post. Instant PR3 backlink for you!

Deal? Then start typing!

Oh, and have a great 2011!

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My penchant for using long titles in my blog posts, and my now active involvement in all things Facebook and Twitter, drove me to install this nifty but challenging plugin called YOURLS. I took for granted that this was going to be one of those normal WordPress plugins you get to install through the dashboard.

But it’s not.

My number 1 mistake was thinking that all I had to do was install the WordPress plugin version of it and it will run immediately. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. You actually have to download the package and FTP everything into your web folders. Next, you need to do some manual configuration for both the database and config file, then run it the first time via the admin panel, and ONLY THEN should you install and set up its complemental WordPress plugin within your WordPress dashboard. And I’m explaining these in way too simplistic terms.

My number 2 mistake was to not understand enough the statement in the FAQ that says “You cannot install YOURLS and, say, WordPress, in the same directory” because YOURLS needs its own .htaccess file.  I ignored that and tried anyway. Didn’t work, of course.

I tried to rectify it by reinstalling everything into its own subdirectory (e.g. http://webgrrrl.net/z/), as advised in the FAQ.

Guess what? IT DIDN’T WORK, EITHER!

But then, I had a light-bulb moment — why not set YOURLS up under a subdomain instead?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, did the trick. I hazard a guess that since my WordPress was installed in my root folder, my blog’s mod_rewrite settings were waging war against YOURLS’s, which in turn causes the shortened URL not to work. In any case, I’m fully satisfied with using the domain z.webgrrrl.net for my personal URL shortening service.

I’m currently using YOURLS / z.webgrrrl.net for this blog as well as Blogging Fu. My favourite option in YOURLS is its bookmarklet ability. Whenever I’m on a web page that I want to tweet and get its URL shortened, I just click the bookmarklet on my browser, and it will automatically bring me to z.webgrrrl’s console for me to generate the short URL. Nice.

Hey, by the way, did you get it? z.webgrrrl? As in Ze WebGrrrl? Hahah, hahahah!

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*This may or may not be based on a true story*

Late 2006

Person: What’s that? *pointing at my computer monitor*
Me: Another web site I just made. It’s called a blog.
Person: *blank face*
Me: Just another online site for me to rant my stuff. And I finally got a domain name!
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: I had to spend a little, though, for that and my hosting.
Person: *you’ve gotta be kidding face*

Early 2007

Me: You know, I’ve just found out a way how I can make money out of my blog.
Person: What? (as in what’s a blog again?)
Me: Yeah, they call it paid to blog. I just post some stuff, put links in it and then they pay me.
Person: How much?
Me: 5 bucks a post.
Person: Hrmph.
Me: US dollars.
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: And it’s not like those HYIP, E-gold stuff you’re doing. There’s basically no risk involved.
Person: *you do what you want to do because I don’t care face*

Late 2007

Me: Hey, I got 30 bucks in my PayPal!
Person: *wow that’s a lot…not… face*
Me: Wow, and that’s just one program per month. If I do a few of these programs, I might just get a hundred bucks a month!
(a few days later)
Me: That PayPal money just went into my credit card account. RM100 plus. Not bad, huh?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Were you able to take out your money from your E-gold and HYIPs?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Scams again, huh?
Person: (quiet)

Early 2008

Person: Are you still making money from your blog?
Me: Yep.
Person: How much?
Me: Almost a thousand Ringgit a month now.
Person: Oh.
Me: I’m thinking of doing a few more blogs. They call it niche sites. Looks like a good way to make money, as long as I have the time to blog.

Mid 2008

Person: I wanna make a site about making money.
Me: You should try blogging. I can set it up for you.
Person: Sure.
(a month later)
Me: Why aren’t you updating your site?
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: OK.
(another month later)
Me: Are you sure you want to do this blog thing?
Person: I dunno. Looks hard.
Me: *rolls eyes* … You haven’t even started.

Late 2008

Me: Oh, my God! Check out my AdSense! USD100 finally! And that’s just from one blog! Plus my paid postings… yes!
Person: Great! How do you take that money out?

2009 – recently

Me: Where did you go?
Person: I’ve been hanging out with my friends. We went shopping for some gadgets and stuff. They say they’re spending all those with their money they get from their blogs.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Good for them.
Person: I wanna have a blog.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog + you’ve gotta be kidding face*
Person: I just don’t know what to blog about.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Just blog about anything. Like they do. Like I do. I’ll help you set yours up, and buy you your own domain while we’re at it… just make sure you update, OK?
Person: *excited* … I’m getting the digicam you wanted.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

Much more recently

Me: You haven’t started your blog.
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

——————-

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My sidebar still has the MyBlogLog widget hanging around. It’s mostly for the benefit of visitors who are MyBlogLog users; it gives their sites or blogs the extra exposure by allowing people to click on their avatars and visit their sites.

But I don’t use MyBlogLog anymore. It’s probably been half a year since I logged in, and half a year in this digital age is a very long time.

Why did I start using MyBlogLog? I thought it would be an easy way to build my blog community around it.

The problem is, I didn’t intend WebGrrrl.net to be a place for me to network; this blog is merely a place for me to share what I discover and learn. Over time, I guess this blog did kind of gotten a life of its own, and a little build-up of followers seemed to be a natural way of its evolving to be what it is today.

Like many other social bookmarking / networking sites, using MyBlogLog is hard work if you’re counting on it to bring traffic to your blog. Think about this though: do you spend more time online searching for information and solving problems, or do you spend more time networking with people?

If you’re looking for answers to your problems, a service like MyBlogLog might not be the first thing that comes to mind — you’d be going straight to the Big G or the Yoddeling search engine and do you stuff from there. However, if you can spare the time and really do enjoy connecting with other people, then you should definitely continue to work the MyBlogLog sites and such.

When it comes down to it, I’m just as happy blogging for the sake of blogging. It’s great to know new people, but I don’t necessarily need to. I’ll still keep the MBL widget, though, as a courtesy to my blog visitors. Giving back links are always a nice to do.

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Starting today, I’m going on a personal blogging challenge — to post once a day for the next 30 days, and it’s not unlike the challenge I took last year. My reasons for doing this again are:

1. To revive traffic to WebGrrrl.net. Lord knows how much neglect this blog has suffered due to my greed to make money blogging! (Though I gotta tell you, the time spent focusing on just that has been totally worth it!) My previous OPAD challenge managed to bring me a 70% surge in new visitors — I’m not sure about the subscriber conversion rate, but I’ll keep an eye on it this time.
2. To churn out content that could turn out to be gems and traffic generators for this blog. I highlighted a few of these posts when I did a 2008 review of my blog. These topics continue to give me lots of search engine hits till now.
3. To go back to what I love the most — just plain ol’ blogging on matters that don’t matter After all those effort on making money online, it’s time for me to come back as the WebGrrrl that I am and share my Web and online findings with you and anyone else who cares to read this blog.

I actually planned on starting this challenge yesterday, 1 June 2009, but seeing that it was a public holiday in my state, I thought I might as well do it today.

Before I forget, allow me to show off my latest blogging ammunition:

Consisting of a 3G modem, a laser optical wireless mouse, and my handy-dandy netbook the size of my two palms and leopard-skinned to show the Grrrl side of me (thanks, honey!). Two pesky robbers broke into my apartment and stole my old laptop, but the police managed to capture those buggers after almost a month. Sans the old laptop and RM15,000 worth of other stuff, of course.

Any-hoos.

My strategy is to do lots and lots of scheduled postings, as I’ll probably do them during the late nights when I’m not so tired from my work, house chores, kids, more money making activities, Facebook-ing, and MCSE classes. I’ll also take this chance to (honest to goodness this time) launch Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches blogs by spreading some content around there while I’m at this challenge. Who knows — I may even re-launch LornaTimbah.com with a new look and a new focus as well!

Care to join me? Leave a comment if you’re doing a similar challenge, and I might even do a review of your blog or post!

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Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

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Update: This challenge has been discontinued.

I’ve been meaning to do this ever since I received an encouraging number of participants for this project through SocialSpark. Take a look at the top of this blog’s sidebar, and you will see a link called Take My Challenge. Read through the requirements before you request for one.

In case you missed my previous post concerning this topic, Take My Challenge is a project I started in SocialSpark as a way to build links to and from WebGrrrl.net. The way this works is that if you blog about and link to a post I made in this blog, I’ll respond in kind. Pretty simple stuff.

In a way, this also prevents me from going through a “writer’s block” — you know, when your brain goes through this weird spasm, and you suddenly don’t have any idea what to blog about? This is a pretty neat way for me to warm up my thoughts and start collecting ideas on topics I’m interested about.

I have tagged my posts as IBlogUBack on those related to this project, so if you’re interested and you like what you see, take my challenge now.

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