» Effective Blog Design
June 1st, 2010 Sammy RussoWas reading an article in the Search Engine Journal about effective blog design. Some of the tips included Prominent RSS Feed placement and Sharing Tools. Design wise what they ran home the most was don’t over clutter the site with tons of options to share with every possible network. This was part 1 and don’t thing part 2 has been published yet.
I’m going to try to pick up where SEJ left off. I agree your blog needs legs and the social sharing buttons are important. I like to use the Social Bookmarking and Share This! because they are relatively compact. Read more…
» An Hour a Day Will Keep You Blogging Away
November 18th, 2009 Sammy RussoBlogging takes time but it doesn’t have to absorb a lot of time. I recommend devoting an hour a day. This hour is NOT to be entirely devoted to writing, but an hour that focuses on the other important facets of a successful blog. To help inspire you, here are some blogging activities that can easily be done in an hour on a daily basis. Read more…
» The Number 1 Rule in Blogging
October 29th, 2009 Sammy RussoYes, I’ve been slacking and breaking the number 1 rule of blogging. A colleague of mine saw that I hadn’t posted since July and said “shame on you.” All I can say is it was a fun and very busy summer, and now that Fall is here my plans are to dig in a little and try to get on a regular publishing schedule.
Read more…
» Don’t Be So Quick To Take Down A Blog
April 2nd, 2009 Sammy RussoMy wife and I have several blogs.. hobby sites really that we run some Google Adsense on and make a few bucks each year. Sure I wish it was more but we only have so much time and we also have 3 kids that require a lot of attention.
Since the birth of our 3rd child this past October its been very hard to blog about much of anything, let alone maintain what we have. This morning it finally dawned on me that I have a micro niche blog site that really has some potential. but also needs some love too. Even though I’m not into this site anymore because it pertains to a place we don’t even live… it still has some worth… it still helps pay for the annual web hosting fees.
So today I finally took a couple of hours and made the changes to Tehachapi Realtors that I’ve been wanting to make for over 6 months now. I added Recent Posts to the homepage template, I re-monitized the sidebar and added a new post.
I know 1 post every three months isn’t going to make anyone rich… but my motivation lies with how much this site makes per click from Google. I also have a few items that I’ll be ready to add in the coming weeks like Real Estate News RSS Feeds to try and keep some fresh content on the site when I don’t have the time to do it myself.
And to think.. just a few months ago I was thinking about selling off this site and domain because traffic was stagnating and I didn’t have time to maintain. But with recent news of an slowly improving economy and a 4.7% rise in the real estate market… my Tehachapi Realtors site is starting to show some signs of life.
The moral is don’t be to quick to quit. Realize that if a site is limping along but it still makes a little bit of money.. no matter how meager… it still has potential to make more. So give it one more good shot at it before you quit.
