Blogging From Scratch

In a previous post I put out some thought on goals. I mentioned that I would give some insight on tasklists. Here I will introduce the concepts of tasklists and strategies and how they work together to reach your goals.

Tasklists.

A tasklist can come in many different forms. For me it’s a simple piece of paper with scribbled down things I plan to accomplish. I usually set this up daily although you can have tasklists that expand to longer periods of time. This sounds awfully similar to goals and many people interchange these terms. For me, I keep them separate because I believe there really is a difference.

Strategies.

A strategy is the middle man between goals and tasks. To define a strategy you look at your goal and decide on ways that you want to achieve these goals. These are then your strategies.

Tasks, Strategies, and Goals, the perfect team.

Tasks and strategies work together to obtain your goals. Think of your goal as Lego set. Think of the strategies as all the pieces in that Lego set that if put together will make that cool looking model on the box. Then, think of the instructions as the tasklist. If you use the instructions to put the pieces together your goal of having that cool looking Lego model will be done before you know it. However, say you’re missing one of the pieces, or maybe missing the instructions..reaching that goal just became a whole lot hard if not impossible.

Let me give you a quick example of how these parts can work together.

Goal: Increase RSS subscribers by 101 in one months time.

Strategies:

• Publish quality posts daily.
• Expand audience through advertising.
• Run contest.

Now that I have my goal and some of the strategies that I want to you use. I can now start making a tasklists that relate to my strategies. The following is a sample daily tasklist.

Tasklist.

• Write 3 quality posts.
• Contact 2 potential contest sponsors.
• Find 5 new websites to advertise on.

One thing I wanted to point out is that every task has to be detailed, leaving little to interpretation. The reason behind this is if one of your tasks is “contact potential contest sponsors” without giving yourself a quantity, you may reason with yourself that finding one is good enough.

The main thing to understand is that a goal may seem impossible to reach but as with all things in life if you take things step by step it you end up where you want to before you know it. That’s exactly what strategies and tasks do for us. They give us manageable steps to obtaining our goal. If you reverse it, goals give us the motivation and drive to finish these tasks, no matter how much we would rather be doing something else.

A lot of bloggers ask the question if they should monetize their blog as soon as it is set up or wait until it gets a good amount of traffic then eventually monetize it. I usually monetize my blog early. When I was new in blogging, I initially monetize my blog with PPC. But I’ve waited for about one to three days until I learned how to set up adsense. There was no one to teach me about Adsense so I had to learn about it on my own. When I finally learned how Adsense works, I signed up and installed it immediately. I only have less than 15 posts for two months and my adsense earnings was awful. It made me wonder, did I monetize my blog too soon.

Then eventually after a few months, when my blog grew, I discovered that you could sell ad spaces on your blog for more money. I began offering my ad spots for private advertisers. The ad spots sold so fast that it made me wonder, did I monetize my blog too late?

Here are my takes on monetizing blogs too soon or too late.

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In this final chapter of the Case Study: Increase your blog statistics through blog contest, I will share to you scenarios wherein you could organize blog contests. When is the best time to create a contest, how to set a contest and what you will benefit from it

Scenario no. 1: You want to promote your affiliate link through blog contests

A good example of this is the Market Leverage contests. Blog prizes are huge such as gadgets, gift cards and more. Winners are determined randomly or the person who earned the highest. I opt for the second one because this way, your referrals would strive to work to earn. And you get a percentage of earnings from your referrals.
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In this third part of my case study: increase your blog statistics through blog contest, I will discuss about contest mechanics. The contest mechanics are the cream of the crop of your blog contest. They must be based on your blog goals. For example, your goal is to increase your blog’s RSS subscriber count, therefore require participants to be an email subscriber throughout the contest period. Let’s face it, a few people subscribed and then unsubscribed after the contest is over.

Do not make the contest mechanics to be way too difficult for the participants to complete. It is advisable to make it as easy as possible. Contests are a give and take process.

There are a lot of contest mechanics and some maybe more effective than the other. Nevertheless, it all depends on your contest goals. Let us go through the contest mechanics thoroughly.

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I remember when I was just a blog novice, I was hungry for comments. I would check my site every hour or so for a comment. I was so frustrated when I didn’t get a comment right away on my first post. So i asked my friend who has been blogging for a long time. She told me that I should comment on other people’s post so they will comment on mine.

When I got my first comment on my blog, i was ecstatic. i couldn’t remember what the comment was or what I’ve posted but I remember the joy that I’ve felt. So what really drives people to comment on your blog? Here are the 8 reasons that I’ve learned.

People could relate on your post - Indeed, if people could relate on your post they too will share their thoughts or experiences. This is a good thing because you will also learn a lot from your readers. If you amazed people with something, people would truly appreciate through commenting.

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