Rice Blogger

I have mentioned Group Blogging last week and the advantage of them but you will also need to watch out for the disadvantage or the blog will go down easily. This is now my second blog that I have started with a group of friends. My first had like 7 people and we were all quite new to blogging. We were very excited about the start and have posting scheduled for few days. But as time goes by, one by one started to give up and it demotivates the rest to continue the blog.

Here is some of the things you will have to clearly discuss before starting a blog with friends:-

• Commitment – Ensure that each people will at least contribute equally and consistently. Notify them that you will be looking for at least 2 post from each person a week. This is easily measured quantitatively.
• Income – If you plan to have advertisements, sponsors, or affiliate income from your blog. Be sure that you clearly define how will the income be divided before you guys start making some good money.
• Maintainance – The blog will definitely need to be hosted somewhere or having a domain (unless you guys are using blogspot or other free blogging platform). For example, currently I am hosting my blogs together with this group blog, but when resources goes high, I will expect that the income will at least cover the hosting fee.
• Evaluation – Be sure to evaluate each other in terms of your goals for the blog from time to time to ensure that you are going the same direction. A brake off in mindset could cause a blog to be aimeless and having no purpose. Currently I am doing this to ensure we are heading the right direction and to accept feedback about our blogging technique.

Hope that this does not scare you away from Group Blogging because it does have its advantage as long it is executed correctly.

I have recently venture into a new blog with my friends, it is a automotive blog. The main reason why I did this is because I do not have enough time to write all by myself (with my newborn baby and a new job). I believe group blogging or blogs having multiple author is a good thing because you could save time and there is more people promoting a certain blog making it more credible for the reader.

There is many reason why someone would want to form a group blog:-

• Time – This is the reason because writing a good blog with great post requires time and research, with few blogs at hand, time is really a limit to having to write a good blog.
• Expertise in that particular subject – Have you encounter times where you may share great interest in a subject but do not have enough knowledge to write post in a consistent manner.
• Variety – There will be different writing styles and coverage of a certain topic, therefore reader will find it more interesting.
• Marketing – 2 or more mouths is always better than one. Even if they are just spreading the word to their friends. They cold be just announcing it at their Facebook or MSN profile.
• Ideas – There will be different ideas on promoting the blog, writing style, or critics each other to becomes a better blogger.

The easiest way to upgrade your wordpress in minutes is through SSH. With the latest release of WordPress 2.7, you could try to upgrade your wordpress in this method. In most of the share hosting including hostgator (my hosting company), it does include SSH but it is not activated. Therefore you will have to request from them that SSH be activated and they will provide you with a telnet ip (others will be telnet to your domain).

You could use puTTy or you can use your default windows telnet by

• start > run
• telnet 182.xxx.xxx.xxx 2222 (your ip or the domain here & 2222 is the port if requires)

After telnet, you will have to do the following. ** Remember to make a backup of your files before doing update)

1. Login via SSH to your host
2. Go to a your domain directory. (most probably type: cd public_html)

3. Grab the latest WP archive (type: wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz)
4. Extract the archive contents (type: tar xzf latest.tar.gz)
5. You will see a new directory called wordpress (type: ls -l)
6. Delete wp-includes and wp-admin directories (type: rm -rf wp-includes/) (type:rm -rf wp-admin/)
7. Goto the new wordpress directory (type: cd wordpress)
8. Update your default wordpress theme and plugin (type: cp -R wp-content/themes/* ../wp-content/themes/) (type: cp -R wp-content/plugins/* ../wp-content/plugins/)
9. Delete wp-content directory (type: rm -rf wp-content/)
10. Copy all latest version of wordpress files and directories and overite your current wordpress (type:cp -R * ../)
11. Deleting the downloaded files (type: cd ..) (type: rm -rf ./wordpress/) (type: rm -f latest.tar.gz)

Careful while using telnet because command like rm-r or rm-rf will delete your folder and files without any warning and there is no way of getting them back. Backup is important and makesure you are at the right directory. Check directory by using the command (type: SSH)

Use this tutorial at your own risk, remember to backup your files before doing and upgrade and deleting.

I think everyone in the blogging community is finding for ways and idea to write the few great post I have mentioned in my previous post. I am also doing the same as much as all bloggers out there are trying to do. There are few great places whereby you could look for an answer or look for inspiration to write about a topic.

Digg
If your post is good, you will be digg (this is a easier way of thinking). Therefore, you should take a look at the method a blog post/article is written. Especially those on the front page of various category. This would only generate short term traffic, but you should know that it also provide you a link back to your homepage. If you are able to convert like 1% of the traffic to subscribe to your rss feeds or bookmark your blog to be return in the future, you are doing great.

Of course there is other website like Reddit, Propeller, Delicious and much more.

Forums
I tend to visit DigitalPoint to know what are people looking at. It is base on the simple supply and demand theory, if there is demand for certain knowledge and you could supply, you will get some traffic. There are a lot of great forums depending on what topic you are writing about. If you are blogging about parenting, you could visit some parenting forum to know what are others interested at.

RSS Feeds
This is my Google Reader or your Feed reader. It is very much advisable to keep track of those who are doing well. There must be certain things that they have done correctly to get a great deal of visitors. You could also visit their archive to see how they continuously able to keep their visitor coming back and why they are gaining visitor throughout time.

Ebook/Book/Reading
I know most of you out there may not be an expert at what you are blogging about. I myself is learning about blogging each day. This is why I blog, so that I can keep track of what I have learn and share with others. Updating yourself with the correct knowledge will give you an upperhand compare to other bloggers, as you will be able to write better and more confidently.

Be Creative
Being first to write about certain information will always give you a competitive edge in terms of readership and of course search engine ranking. Therefore those blogger that knows how to write creatively, not necessary writing from their own knowledge, but they could also compile all necessary useful information around the web as a one-stop information about a particular topic.

I am still here! There is a lot going with my life currently with a new job and 1-half month old daughter, I am still trying to catch my breath. Hopefully things will stabilized. Back to my topic about “Few Great Post”. I had nearly gave up on blogging for money because I barely earn any money from blogging even though I have been blogging for quite some time. Although the plan is not to give up entirely but to only blog for fun and not committed to blogging frequently to maintained a good readership.

I was wrong, because I have found out that you only require a few great post and once you get them. It will give you a huge boost in your income and your readership. But because posts are easily copied, you will need a good readership in order to give your good post a boost. Then you will have a great path in front of you.

Great posts are not easy to write and will need a great deal of creativity with vision about what people are interested at. You could write a post before people starts to searh for a certain topic, for example writing about “facebook template” if you have news about this ahead of most people. Once the news break, I am sure that your blog will be a huge hit, and you get a search engine advantage because it is posted earlier.