Hey readers, nice to see you again. Yesterday, as the title says, I had a revelation. I woke up in the middle of the night, with cold because I set the conditioned air in 10 °C and I was freezing me. I shut it down, and then I tried to sleep again but I could not. So, I took a magazine of my desktop and I read its content.

The Revelation

I was reading something about the success of biggest men and I had an idea to blog about. Immediately, I took a paper and started to write everything that was coming to my mind. The great fact is that once I finish that idea, more and more ideas about blogging started to flood my mind, and guest what? I recorded all them on the paper .

After this entry, a series of great posts will come. Yesterday, I recorded six topics to write about, and I will be writing all these posts at the waiting of my birthday contest .

Be in tune !

Blogging, although it doesn’t looks like, it is a business. In fact, more than a business, is a lifestyle which you chose once you create your blog, and probably you didn’t think about the consequences of that. In addition of writing articles, blogging includes too many activities which can consume your energy. Participating actively in social networks, reading other posts and checking your statistics, consume considerably your time plus of your energy, and 24 hours at day does not seem to be enough.

Eventually as blogger, you will be exhausted of all those activities. The next is a list of tips that will help you to overcome the fatigue and recover your energies:

1. Organize your time: many times I have sat in front my pc for hours and hours, just doing nothing! I start checking my blog’s statistics, comments and emails but after that, I do nothing! The computer consume my time and I notice it hours later. Many bloggers, don’t sleep thinking on what they can write for their readers, with the pressure of give to their readers new content daily. Taking a break to organize your schedule could help you to resolve all those problems.
2. Keep the focus: when you feel lost on blogging, you must to remember your primary objectives. Taking a break to remember why did you create your blog, could help you to get your inspiration back. Thinking about your blogging goals, benefits and satisfaction that blogging have given you in the past, surely will give you a breath to continue your career.
3. Study your environment: today I noticed that I can’t concentrate if the tv is turned on. You should study your environment, and look if it is ideal to blog. Many desktops are not optimal to do this, so you could decorate it with pictures or something which helps you to get the inspiration that you need. Remember that it is better to write with inspiration than without it, if you don’t feel good with your environment, you should go to an inspirational place for you.
4. Don’t pressure yourself: you could be being too hard with you pressuring yourself to write new content everyday. A big tip, take it easy! The world will not end if you don’t write one day, your readers will understand it. When you have nothing to write, I recommend you to give to your readers other sources of content, linking them to posts of other blogs.
5. Realize other activities: this is an excellent way to overcome the blogging fatigue. You could exercise yourself, play any deport or make something which help you to relax. Aside blogger, I’m musician, and when I’m tired of blogging I play guitar or piano. That help me to release my energies and it is very relaxing for me.
6. Ask to your readers what they want to read: this is another reason why I created the section Ask to Mr. Javo. Asking to your readers what they want to read, is a good way to get inspiration. The most of times when you are tired of blogging, you can’t find a topic about what to write. If your readers want to read about a specific topic, you have the objective set. This way, the task of writing is simplified.

Blogging is not an easy task, even when you are a full-time blogger. Organizing your schedule is the key of all, helping you to save time to do other activities that help you to release stress. I have to say that I wrote this post because I was tired of blogging. This afternoon, I took my guitar and played a couple of songs. So then, the inspiration came back to me, letting me to write this post .

Just take it easy and don’t pressure yourself .

To gain entries into the contest, just do any of the following:

– Make a comment of value (not just “i agree”, etc.) on a post = 1 entry (remember to comment on all blogs)

– Subscribe to RSS via email = 2 entries (per blog you subscribe to!)

- Write a post about the contest on your blog (must include a link to this page and the links below to participating blogs) = 25 entries

Please note: If you are already subscribed to any of the sites below, you are already earning entries. Also, to get credit for posting about the contest, your post’s link must show up in the comments below or in the comments on one of the other blogs below.

How much easier can we make it? So you can sneak in with just one entry by simply posting a comment here, you can increase your odds by reading and commenting on a few more posts here and at one of the blogs below and maybe subscribe to a couple, or you can really up the odds and subscribe to all all of our blogs (which you’ll enjoy reading anyway), comment on a bunch of posts, and blog about this contest. The more entries you earn, the better your odds, of course. If you’re going to post about this contest, just grab the image and code from here.

The deadline for this contest is 12:00 AM April 1, 2008.

Who wants to pay you?

- JoeTech.com
- Link Bait
- Gorilla Sushi
- CK Marketing
- The Big Bald Blog
- How 2 Blogger
- Jason Boom
- Mr Javo

Hey bloggers, yesterday I was with some friends and one of them started to ask me about my blog. I explained him what I do in my blog, giving to him a little idea about this big world called blogosphere. He surprised very much about what I do here , asking me who read my blog and how can I measure the success of it. That is a very good question… There are many factors that help you to measure your blog’s success giving you the hint if it’s good or bad.

This post attempts to provide how you can measure your blog’s success taking advantage of its statistics combined with its reader’s interaction.

How many people are reading your content?

Something very important in this career, is to know how many people are reading your content, and take advantages of these numbers. Using webmaster analyzers you can know this kind of statistics, knowing the exactly amount of people who visit your site daily. A good way to increase this number is using social media networks, those normally gives tons of traffic.

Amount of subscribers

This is may be the most obvious factor. Many people think that you can measure a blog’s success just looking its subscriber’s counter but really, it’s more than that. It’s truth that you can get an idea about how successful a blog is just seeing the amount of subscribers, but you can assure nothing. I going to give you a example, what about a blog with 3 years of age and only 1000 subscribers ? if you don’t know the blog, seeing 1000 readers you can think that it’s awesome but may be it’s not really. But if you take a look on Jonh Cow for example, when his blog has about 5 months of age, it had about 700 subscribers and now it has thousand of subscribers.

Moral: The number of subscribers is important, but you need to consider the time in which you obtained your subscribers.

Subscriber’s chart of Mr. Javo dot Com

In this graph you can see how my daily subscribers has increased weekly up to this date. I think it’s good what do you think?

Comments per post

The next important factor is the number of comments on your blog. The number of comments per post gives you a idea about the quality of your blog, if it’s good it will create a atmosphere of discussion between you and your visitors. Answering your reader’s questions and paying attention to their critiques you will improve you relation with them, creating in your blog a nice place to stay.

Your achievements in social networks

All the achievements you obtain in the social networks it’s very related to your blog’s success. Using this kind of networks ( digg, stumbleupon, blogcatalog …. ) you will start to make contact with other bloggers, you will start to attract their attention and they will start to visit your blog over and over again looking for new content… Doing a good role in all those social networks, you will promote your blog, make friends and gain new readers, all at the same time, definitively exploding your traffic.

Backlinks

The backlinks or links which point back to your blog are a good indicative of how popular is your blog. While more backlinks you have more traffic you will get, and traffic on the blogosphere is synonymous of success . You can get backlinks by commenting on blogs with dofollow, discussing in communities or forums, exchanging links with other bloggers for blogrolling etc etc… You can learn more about how to get backlinks in this post.

Mr. Javo dot Com Backlinks @ 03/05/2008 ~ Note: I have more than 200 reactions on technorati, that statistic is bad

To finish, you may know that first that you can measure a success, you need to set goals. Don’t public them if you don’t want, but you need to set goals weekly or monthly. This way you will always have a goal to reach, applying effort and dedication every time to reach them.

You should check all this aspects and ask you questions like: how many people are reading my blog? I’m being amiable with them? I’m participating sufficiently in social communities?…answering all those kind of questions you can determinate if you are getting success with your blog or not, and if you think that you need to focus in a determinate task, go ahead, set your priorities and don’t worry about that, everybody neglects something in the life.

Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Hello bloggers! this month is my birthday, so I want to make a big contest. This time, there will be love for everyone, this mean that I will give more than entrecard credits and I will choose many winners… Ok lets go to the point!

Prizes

The prizes listing correspond to the winner number:

1. A Review written by me!
2. A 300×250 banner in my posts for a month.
3. A 125×125 banner for a month.
4. A 125×125 banner courtesy of Jason at Jason Boom dot com
5. A 125×125 banner courtesy of Mark at Blogging Brainiac
6. A Text Link for two month + 500 E-Credits courtesy of Mattaw at Money Bites
7. A Text Link for a month + 300 E-Credits
8. A Text Link for a month + 0 E-Credits (with no extra credits ^^).
9. 300 Entrecard Credits.
10. 300 Entrecard Credits.

The prizes can change for best, I will negotiate other prizes with other bloggers, I will be updating this post so be in this frequency!

How To Enter

There are many ways to join to this contest:

• Dropping your E-Card ~ 1/3 entry.
• Writing a little review of my blog on Entrecard ~ 2/3 entry.
• Subscribing to my RSS via mail (classic!!!) ~ 3 entries.
• Adding my blog to your Technorati Favorites (kinda new!) ~ 5 entries.
• Adding this contest to your StumbleUpon Favorites ~ 5 entries.
• Adding me to your blogroll ~ 10 entries.
• Writing about this contest on your blog ~ 15 entries
• Writing a review about my blog ~ 25 entries.

Ok I couldn’t find another way to join to this contest. Doing all the things listed above you can get 64 entries!!! I really want to do this fun, so I will be very grateful if you broadcast this contest of all the ways you can.

Don’t forget to comment on this post telling me all what you did to join, this way I can take note about your entries…

Deadline

You can join to this contest up to March 23 (my birthday) @ 23:59 GTM -4, the winner will be selected randomly the next day with the service provided by random.org.

Good Luck!!

/PS: I will add an amazon wish list to my sidebar, so you could gift me something to my birthday .