So what keeps you motivated in doing what you have been doing? Why do you keep blogging or making websites when you don’t make any money from it? Why do you blog when your user base is so low? Why do you keep blogging when your traffic is not high enough?

So many of these questions asked by so many different people on so many different blogs. Some one over at Darren Rowse’s blog asked this question, but instead of answering this question Darren put it up for other users to discuss this in the comment box, so really you would have to scan through bunch of different comments to get the right reason. But you know the truth is that there is no right reason. Due to the fact that reaons to be motivated varies from person to person making it a huge amount of reasons, the right reason would be the reason that keeps YOU motivated.

I have already told everyone Why do I Blog, and in this post I will tell you guys how do I keep myself motivated to blog every day.

While I might not have as many users in my subscriber list as many of the other known bloggers have, I still blog every day. I know that you cannot make a huge reader base in a course of months. To build a loyal reader base, it takes time, quality content (lots of it), and more time. I am certain neither of the bloggers who have over 20k subscribers had that right when they started, so just knowing the fact that every one has to start some where. I keep blogging considering this as my starting point. Hence why the slogan of this blog is Vision for Success. It is my vision that I will attract more users as the site grows and features thousands of resourceful articles written by myself.

Another reason why I stay motivated as a blogger is I am doing this for myself also. I am not a mega genius, nor that I am a memorizing god. It does not mean that when I post some codes in a tutorial post of the blog.. I have it memorized. I need references as well, but instead of looking it up in google now I can look that up on my own blog. Much more reliable source because I know it won’t be suffering from downtime like many other sites does. So everyday when I write an article, I also keep it in my mind regardless of the fact that Balkhis is a growing blog… This resource also helps me, and I don’t want to write some crappy post that won’t help me therefore I always try to keep the quality of the blog post. Believe me when I say this that when in the future I feel discouraged, I will come back and read this post and get some motivation from myself.

Once again, even the number of subscribers hasn’t hit in the thousands yet, I care about the users that I have right now. Each and everyone who is a user on this blog is much appreciated. They appreciate my posts by commenting on my posts. How can I be selfish and not post quality content on the blog? My active users, are also the ones who keep me motivated to blog. Thank you Bruce, Jeff, Chetan, Dr. Teeth, and many others who have supported this blog (Don’t take it wrong if I didn’t put your name because if I start doing that I will have a big list here :P).

Progress is what keeps me motivated. Now that Balkhis is over 3 months old, I have seen this blog grow. The progress that I have made in the past 3 months, I am very proud of. I was very proud when I saw the thousandth comment hit on the blog earlier this month. Those are the thousand comments I didn’t have when I started.

While this post is very touching and everything I am writing is coming straight from my heart, It is meant to provide a lesson that should be learnt by all starters who are coming into blogging because these can be one of the reasons that will keep you motivated as a blogger or a webmaster.

Ok. This was one of the entertaining questions that I found going through my email, and I thought to myself how will I answer this one. Let me establish one thing… With hard work, dedicated team, capital investment, and time, nothing is hard! But if you lack one of those things than there are some niches in the webmaster world that can get impossible to be successful at.

I will go ahead and rank 3 niches where it will be very hard for an individual to find success.

Webmaster Forum

When you have the big dawgs in the industry such as Digitalpoint, Sitepoint, Namepros, Webmaster-talk, and Bloggeries, I would say that it gets really competitive. Because all the forums that I have listed above already have the content your new forum will have. You will still be behind the 100,000 post that they will be getting while you develop your forum. Alot of Capital Investment, and I mean alot is necessary to start a webmaster forum and get it big. Also you must be patience. It will not be quick to get the users away from a place and bring them to yours.

Search Engines

Really and truly for all the brave heart beginners who get in the business with a goal that they are going to make a search engine as big as google. It might sound easy, but it is not. First without a real capital investment you can’t go anywhere. Even if you have that, you will need some of the best developers in the world. Even Microsoft with it’s Live can’t compete with Google.

SEO Tools

This niche is another dead end because some serious innovation is necessary. Many SEO Tools has came out in public which were good in the beginning and due to lack of support those massive user base has fallen everytime. It can be one of the easiest/hardest because it will be easy to get the users, but hard to keep them!

While I agree that there are many more niches that can be even harder in the webmaster world above are the ones that I believe are the hardest in my opinion. Feel free to add on about your opinion, and if you have a good reply such as

Niche:
Why do you think:

I will include it in this post

The title of this post is pretty self explanatory. I got this question via email. Which name should you use when you are commenting on blogs? or even expanding it to registering on forums? I have always used to wonder this when I started in the web industry. It often becomes a tough choice, but I believe one choice out weighs the other one.

Often times, I see that people are commenting on blogs with their companies names, or with their websites name. Why? Well because in the top commentators, their anchor will be shown, and they will rank high. Other people will know the brand name of their website. What could be better branding technique than this? People who think this way are only thinking short term in my opinion. I say that because not many people hold their businesses for extremely long time. Specially the webmasters who most of the time sell their sites, so when you comment on the page next, and you have a different brand name in your titles, people won’t know who you are. That is a whole new start. I think your brand should be known by your name not you being known as your brand because when you sell the brand basically you are worthless, but if people know you, and they know that Larry is the owner of Google a successful brand, so if Larry starts another company most people will expect him to succeed, and he will get alot of popularity. Same concept will work in blog commenting as well.

Therefore, you will see wherever I comment, I include Syed Balkhi rather than Balkhis, or Uzzz Productions because I want to be known with my name. People should recognize, so when I launch a new project, they are like OH, this is launched by Syed Balkhi. I know this guy we have seen him commenting at xxx blog. This way you already have tons of loyal users already built…

What about forum names? what should you do? Pick one screen name and have it at all the forums you are registered at. I am mostly known by “smub”, my initials, on most forums. The reason why people have to do such things is because the world is so big that same name exists, and I dont want a number in front of my name therefore people go along with having nicknames, but don’t get a brand name there as well. Say I registered as Uzzz Productions, and than I want to sell the company. I sold the company, but people will still be contacting me about the company. Also, the new owner might not like it as well.

These are my thoughts on what name should you use when commenting on blogs. What do you guys think? Also if anyone have any more questions they want to be answered here feel free to use the contact form.

Negative Press is when your site or business gets mention but not for the great job you did, but this type of press basically identifies the mistakes in your business model, or problems with your website. Alot of people take it as insult when they get negative press. They often get angry at the person who writes bad about their website, but I think differently, and I would like to share why I think that Negative Press is sometimes good.

I was inspired to write this article because I have seen alot of changes in my business model as I grew and got more experienced. I remember when I first started, I could not stand any negative press. How dare you say something about my website which I put so much work in? But you have to learn how to take criticism. Only because it is going to make your site the best. Half the times, people who were jealous of me will point out mistakes on my website, but everytime I will fix it, and get a more stronger grip on my audience whereas no one was pointing out their mistake. Did you ever hear people say that sometimes when you look at your work for too long, you can’t find your errors, so it is better to have someone else proof read it. This is exactly what it is. Your users, competitors, and other people will find errors on your site especially the ones you will miss. So it is a good thing when someone report an error.

I got pointed by Bloggingtips about having a bad 404 page. Well, I got an honest opinion and I am glad that I did because I went right away and fixed it. At the end of the day, my blog was better than it was yesterday. Isn’t thats the ultimate goal. Vision for success, Keep improving every day. It was after all negative press that made me realize that.

Negative Press increases traffic. These tricks are often used as link-bait when people talk about you and give you negative press, and you become a big icon in the industry. Joel Comm did when he screwed up with his e-book, but do you understand how many people who didn’t know about his book actually went and saw it. In the end, I really think did he really purposely did it to get some negative press? Who knows, but you best believe that such things will increase your traffic.

But now you are wondering, these people who are coming to your site thinking it is a bad site will not come again. Wait a minute, they will definately come back again especially if you change/fix your mistakes because that will give the users an impression that you really care about your website, and how active this site is. I mean now I am still getting hits from that post about bad 404 pages, and most people can see the 404 page is good and now Balkhis traffic/subscribers has increased now I don’t know whether this was natural or due to that, but this is just a theory. But you have to take yourself in account what will you do if you see that somesite is a bad example, and you go visit that site and see that they have fixed the issue. I know I would stay at the site and check some more stuff out to see if I am interested or not.

Well now that you see why I think the other way about negative press, I think you guys should learn how to respond to it as well. Many webmasters tend to go negatively and start attacking the other person, but that only makes you look like a stuck up peice of sh*t who thinks his product is great. And you are not open to public’s constructive criticism. Instead what you should do is thank the company who reviewed your site and pointed out the errors, and state that you will work on fixing it. Also apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused any of the valuable users. I hope you are one of those who will follow through and actually fix the issue as soon as possible.

Reminds of a great quote: Do the right thing, Do it right, and Do it Right now.

I would like to think what others think on this issue about Negative Press….

Well how often is it that when you visit a website through Google, or some other external source, and the link is not found, but you really wanted to see that page, or that article. I know it happens often, and most of the time webmasters tend to switch their permalink structure, or some thing of that sort which causes this, but due to an unoptimized 404 page the visitor end up leaving the site, but now you can keep your visitor by following the certain tricks I describe below.

Well to tell you the truth, this post was not initially my idea. This was started by David Shaw at Blogging Tips in which he used two good examples of the site that does it and two bad examples of sites that have very unoptimized 404 pages. Guess where Balkhis was? Yup it was in the bad one……Good thing that I found out the same day this was posted, and worked on the fixes immidiately, so not many people got to see my unoptimized 404 pages, but It made me realize something… Eventhough I got negative publicity, It was still publicity, and I actually want to Thank David Shaw before I go onto writing this post for pointing out problems in Balkhis because due to his feedback, I no longer have an unoptimized 404 page, and I am sure when he found Balkhis, he must’ve heard about it some where which makes me feel good that this small blog is now becoming known in the blogosphere.

Let me tell you Why David Shaw thought my website was a bad example.

This page does not offer anything to keep the visitor on the site in any way, just a short message to acknowledge that the page does not exist then some ads to send the user to another site.

Well I worked on to Improve my 404 pages and you can see it right here. Preview my optimized 404 Page

Ok While David gave some good examples the site’s pages contain exactly what I have on Balkhis but a little less… I found that he really didn’t go into showing every single thing except for just pointing the users to a Plugin of Alex King that will let you track the amount of times a user hit 404 on your website.

Well since he only mentioned go check your template for a 404 page, or some other template, I will share what I have done.

I opened up my index.php file

I found these tags <?php endwhile; else: ?> <?php endif; ?>

In between these tags, I added all the things that I wanted to add, and as you can see I have Archives pages on my 404 page which are by the way no-index so no duplicate content.

But I have alot more than just that. Features I have on my 404 page (For now because I will update this)

Pages
Archives
Categories
Important Keywords (aka Tags)

How did I get them there?

For Pages, I put this code: <?php wp_list_pages(’title_li=<h2>By Pages</h2>’); ?>

For Archives, I put this code: <?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>

For Categories, I put this code: <?php wp_list_cats(); ?>

For Tags sorted by list: <?php wp_tag_cloud(’smallest=8&largest=12&unit=pt&
number=30&format=list&order=RAND’); ?>

I have not installed Alex’s plugin on the site to test it, but I don’t think this will hurt the site in anyways, but It will surely help it. I hope I was clear enough in the above post, so if you have any questions feel free to comment.