Online Writing Niche

Why You Should Blog About Your Life

By

importance of blogging your life
Blog is virtual venue for sharing, learning, and friendship

When you blog about your life, it doesn’t mean you are limited to writing and sharing about your personal life. It covers all aspects of your existence. It is about your passion and what makes life meaningful to you.

Let me give two significant reasons that would encourage you to blog about your life.

Finding meaning and significance through blogging

When I was still working at Central Philippine University, I would bring our 5-yr-old daughter to Kindergarten every 8:00 o’clock in the morning.

Each time we drove through Gate No. 8, I noticed an elderly couple sitting in front of their house gate. They were just sitting there and feeling the warmth of the early morning sun.

I know them. The husband was manager of a big government bank for a long time until his retirement.

Well, I could just imagine, if somebody had taught him how to blog, he surely would have been able to establish an authority blog on banking and finance.

Many professionals, who are nearing retirement age, are asking, “What shall I do when I retire?”

May I suggest that over and above your planned investments and activities, you should blog about your lives. All resources such as blogging tips are found online.

I understand what the senior citizens or the elderly are going through as a pastor and son of an 81-year-old mother.

They are going through finding meaning and significance about their aging lives.

Blogging could provide the meaning and significance that they wanted.

Blog is virtual venue for sharing, learning, and friendship

They need people to listen to their stories about their many lessons in life, career achievements, parental fulfillment, and many more. However, who would listen to an aging expert, when younger professionals have already taken over?

In the Philippines, families are close knit and they don’t want to put their elderly in the hospice or elderly homes, even if they can afford.

Sad thing is, while it’s good they are living with their children with full support in terms of care, food, and medicines, most of the time their children aren’t there for them. They are busy with work and fending for their own family.

Imagine if you are in your retirement and twilight years at 60 to 100 years old, and you have established several blogs about your life?

I’m sure every day would never be a dull-moment because you have the whole World Wide Web reading your blog post of the day and interacting with you.

The web offers limitless opportunities for establishing links, forging friendships, and knowledge sharing. Your powerful access to it is the blog that you have created.

You need not wait for ages to come before you realize the importance of blogging.

Blog about your life now!

PHOTO CREDIT: Jade Mark Jarbadan

 

Blog About Your Life Now!

By

Blog about your life

Whenever I meet people and they would ask me, “What keeps you busy these days Jonan?”

I would smile and reply, “I blog about my life.”

Then my answer would spark a conversation on blogging, what I blog about, why blogs are important and how I do it.

This post answers some of the basic questions about blogs.

What are blogs and why are they important?

The word “blog” is a combination of the word “web log”, which is simply similar to your journal or diary, except that it is written and published through the web.

In today’s era of the World Wide Web, it is important that you are able to establish your online presence through a blog.

Having a blog allows you to freely express your opinion about your expertise, politics, or current events. Your blog will enable you to feature your hobbies and interests, such as travels, food, pets and collections through online writing.

Isn’t it wonderful that besides your office-to-home routine and weekend activities, you have your own home in the web where you can blog about your life?

Also, having your own blog opens you to many opportunities in the web to connect with other people, oftentimes, with similar interests or topics that you are blogging about.

Furthermore, when you are blogging about your expertise and experiences, you will become source of authority in the World Wide Web. You will be surprised that soon you find yourself getting invitations for consultancy about your expertise, guest blogging, online writing, and blog mentoring.

From just a simple blog about your life, you are able to touch and influence other peoples’ lives. With this and the possible monetary benefits, you add great meaning to your life when you have a blog.

How I Succeeded in Gaining for My Blog the PageRank of 3 in Less than 4 Months

By

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote this post in 2011 and since then, there have been a lot of changes in Google Algorithm, making obsolete the tips to getting PageRank.

Nevertheless, this is worth reading as it would provide a glimpse of SEO dynamics two years ago.

I am happy to relate how I succeeded in gaining PR 3 for my blog in less than four months.

Of course, PageRank is not everything and not the ultimate goal for creating a blog.

For those who are experts, gaining PageRank for a site is a simple feat. In my three years of being a blogger, attaining PR 3 for my site is quite an achievement.

I started Central Philippine University Blog on March 8, 2011 with the introductory page as its first post.

I also created pages and categories but these are all blank pages, which I reserved for future blog posts.

I never expected that PR 3 could be attained in just four months considering that my two other sites, From Worry to Glory earned PR1 in 21 months and Online Writing Niche, PR2 in nine months.

I am not knowledgeable about how PageRank is computed and I am not aware of the specific elements and requirements that would facilitate the achievement of PR for a site.

Just like what a blogger does, I wrote and posted contents.

With my SEO knowledge, I built inbound and outbound links and promoted the blog through social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook.

I bought the domain centralphilippineuniversity.org in March 2011. I decided to have the blog remain its free hosting with WordPress.com.

After posting initially the introductory page in March, Central Philippine University Blog became idle for a month. In May, I made additional posts and from then on, I supplied fresh blog contents regularly.

In the last week of July 2011, less than four months after I created Central Philippine University Blog, I noticed that the PR checker on my toolbar showed the number “3”. I was quite elated to find out that Central Philippine University Blog earned PR3.

So, what did my blog has when it gained PR3?

  • Between March to July, I posted 18 articles composed of 450-500 words average.
  • Google had indexed 176 pages.
  • Back links numbered 156.
  • Traffic or number of visits averaged 35 per day.
  • I posted 10 videos.
  • Photos enhance the blog articles.

Well, I’m not saying that these are the exact bases that caused Google to give Central Philippine University Blog PR3. I listed these elements of my blog when it gained PR3 so that it would serve as benchmark.

I believe that as long as you are committed to posting quality contents, building internal and external links to enhance your article, you will succeed in gaining traffic and following. Sure enough, PageRank would follow.

Tags & Tag Cloud – Its Importance to Online Writing and SEO

By

TAG CLOUD

When I started writing online, I don’t know anything about tags and tag clouds.

Later, I learned that the articles and web contents that I was writing need to be tagged so that it could be searched and located easily.

Then, I knew that the group of tags that are displayed at a blog site’s sidebar or footer is called “tag cloud”.

What are “tags”?

Imagine yourself going to a department store to shop and buy clothing or any merchandise. For you get to find these items and know its price, you look through the product or price tags that are usually “tagged” or attached to the item.

The same principle applies to online writing and blogging. In order for readers to find your write up and get initial impression on what you wrote about, you need to generate tags and display these tags in the tag cloud.

The article “The Role of Tags in Information Retrieval Interaction” that Yong-Mi Kim of the School of Information, University of Michigan wrote, states:

“Tags are descriptive terms people attach to online content, either their own or other people; tagging is the practice of attaching tags. Tagging has been rapidly adopted on the Web, particularly by sites based on user-contributed content, such as blogs and photo sharing sites. According to these sites, tags make it easier to find tagged items later, make tagged items more findable by others, and also help organize collections of items.”

Facebook is one of the popular social media sites that uses photo tagging application to make it easy for friends and other people to share their uploaded photos.

 
What is a “tag cloud”?
 

My first encounter with the term “tag cloud” was when I started my first blog, “From Worry To Glory”, where the “tag cloud” is one of the widgets in every WordPress theme.

By the phrase itself, you can easily say that a “tag cloud” is the collection of tags, which are grouped either alphabetically or randomly, with varying font sizes depending on the usage popularity of the particular tag.

A “tag cloud”, according to Wikipedia is “a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualize free form text. ‘Tags’ are usually single words, normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color. This format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence. When used as website navigation aids, the terms are hyperlinked to items associated with the tag.”

 
What is the value of “tags” and “tag cloud” to SEO?
 

Much has been said and written about “tags” and “tag cloud” as a search and navigational tool when you are browsing a particular site.

For example, when you are at a homepage of a blog and you noticed the tag cloud, which is usually positioned at the sidebar (sometimes at the site’s footer or bottom, too), click on any of the hyperlinked word or phrase. You will then be redirected to the blog site’s title or page where the tag was mentioned.

But the question of the day remains, what is the value of “tags” and “tag cloud” to search engine optimization?

Why should you display the tag cloud on your site, even if it gives some sort of cluttered appearance to your homepage and other pages?

 
I discovered that Google indexes the tags that are displayed in the tag cloud.
 

I accidentally learned this when I analyzed a jointly owned blog site that I haven’t touched for several months. Using Market Samurai as my website analysis tool, I was surprised to discover that the number of pages that Google indexed exceeded numerously the number of posts and media attachments that I uploaded to the site.

Sad to say, the domain of that blog expired and I can’t open it anymore to illustrate my discovery. I had this learning since last year and I have been aching to make a post about it. Nevertheless, I would always coach my clients to display their tags on their sites because doing so increases the number of pages that Google index.

To check whether or not this particular part of Google algorithm still exists, I started a new blog, “Central Philippine University” Blog on May 23, 2011, wrote a couple of posts and displayed the tags through the “tag cloud” widget.
 

Know the result of my curiosity test next post…

 

[box type=”info”] PLEASE SHARE THIS POST THROUGH THE SHARE BUTTON BELOW. ALSO, LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE WRITING NICHE BY FILLING UP THE SUBSCRIBE FORM AT THE UPPER RIGHT SIDEBAR OF THE PAGE.  THANK YOU. [/box]

OUR LOCATION

Timaru, New Zealand 7910

TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROJECT

We'd love to know. Come and tell us about it by filling out our contact form.

Or, give us a call at +64 021 184 9974

CONNECT WITH US