Pro-blogger Project: Part 3

Okay, so I’m a little behind on this project. I was supposed to start looking at lesson two at the start of the week, but here I am with week two almost over and I’ve only just re-read lesson two. Thankfully, lesson two doesn’t involve too much – at least not for me since I’ve already established my blog.

The main tasks for lesson two is to:

Pick a domain name
Identify a topic you want to blog about. Although you can research which topics are better for monetisation, the real key is to have a topic you’re interested to write about. At the end of the day, the most important factor to generating an income from your blog is to have a blog with a good flow of traffic. Traffic is the source of income.
Since we’re using Wordpress blogs, the third part is to customise our blog theme either using one of the many free wordpress themes available, or by hiring someone to create a custom theme.

Well, I already have a domain name – it’s Figur8.net. It’s probably not the best domain name for my blog project since a more ideal domain name would have something about it related to my topic. About the only thing it’s got going for it is that it’s short and fairly easy to remember. I had the domain name before I started BlogMastermind and I didn’t want to abandon it to start something new because I have a secret affinity for the name “Figur8″.

Why Figur8? Because I’ve always loved rock climbing and the figure eight knot is the simplest, most basic knot in rock climbing. It is the first thing you learn when you start rock climbing. To me, it represents going back to basics and it represents safety (because it ties you to your belayer who holds your lifeline in case you fall). Figur8 is also a play on words because it sounds like “figure it” as in “figure it out”, in other words, learning about new things which seems rather apt because my blogs are a way of reporting the things I have learned through my experiences and personal research.

Figur8.net was to be the base from which all my interests stem:

Figur8.net/baby (Babylicious) is all about my pregnancy and being a Mum.
Figur8.net/sports (Pro-Sports) is all about my love for rock climbing, running, fitness and health.
Figur8.net/wedding (The Household COO) is all about my wedding and life after the wedding (which is basically everything that isn’t about sports or my son).
Figur8.net/writing (A Writer’s Papyrus) is where I explore ideas and story-lines for that novel that I dream about writing.

But since the Pro-Blogger Project is about Babylicious, I’ll focus on how everything relates to this blog.

Although it may not be apparent to my readers, the Figur8 domain name does have some significance to the theme of the blog. In Babylicious, I’ve “gone back to basics” by choosing to breastfeed my son, attempting natural infant hygiene and using cloth diapers, among other things. Babylicious is also about safety issues – melamine in infant formula, bisphenol A in certain baby bottles, etc. And the whole experience of the pregnancy and motherhood has been one about learning. Whatever I’ve learned through experience or through what I’ve read, I’ve “reported” back about it on Babylicious. So although Figur8 might not mean much to anyone else, to me, it has great significance to everything that Babylicious represents.

Since I already have a blog – several, in fact – the task of choosing a topic was also completed. Yaro’s suggestion is to pick a topic you enjoy because your passion for your topic will be reflected in your writing which naturally helps you to keep your readers coming back. Although he suggests a tighter focus on the topic so you can make your blog a niche, he also emphasises that it is more important to start your blog than to get bogged down with blog topic research to see what would be the best blog monetisation topic to write about. At the end of the day, any blog (no matter the topic) that has good readership will make money, just as surely as a blog without readers will make no money.

Ideally, I should put a tighter focus on the blog topic for Babylicious. For instance, I could focus specifically on Sign Language for children, natural infant hygiene or green living for families which would give my blog a very strong focus. The reason I haven’t is because I can’t think of enough things to write specifically and only about those topics. If I narrowed down my focus so drastically, I think my blog updates would be so infrequent, it wouldn’t even be a blog. Secondly, the original intention for this blog is to talk about my journey through motherhood which encompasses a lot of other topics I wouldn’t really be able to write about if I were to narrow the focus of my blog topic.

The final part of the lesson is about blog themes. Well, I’m sure there are better themes I could have chosen from the free themes available and as tempted as I am to go searching for a new blog theme, I have resisted because I know I could easily spend the better part of a week tweaking my blog design and achieve nothing else. Since the more important activities are to blog and to engage in marketing activities for my blog, which I’m sure I would neglect if I was neck deep in HTML code, I think I’ll stick to this blog design until I can afford to splurge on a custom-made design which can cost anywhere from US$500-2000 if you really want a nice one.

Since I’ve completed all of these, the next thing is to populate my blog with good content and to promote my blog. Ideally, each week, I should have done at least five things to draw more traffic to my blog, so let’s make that a target for this week. So far, I’ve only submitted two blog posts to blog carnivals and published one blog post url on twitter – so I effectively have at least another two more marketing activities I have to complete before tomorrow night. It is also important to write pillar articles, which I have only written one for the week – oops, better work on another.

So tasks for this week before I start on lesson three: