Blogging “Experts” always preach that you must be consistent with your blog, and you should post frequently. A minimum number of 1 post a day has become sort a rule among many bloggers. Majority of the bloggers write content daily for the sole reason of producing content. They find a need to produce content daily otherwise they believe they will lose subscribers.

A popular saying is “Don’t Talk Unless You Can Improve the Silence”.

I believe bloggers should take this approach rather than adapting to the rule which was made by Self Proclaimed Experts. In this post I will be explaining my point about how consistency and frequency are the ultimate downfall of blogging.

Compromising the Quality

Blogging should never be a chore. When it becomes a chore then the quality of the content seems to suffer. I am a firm believer of the idea that the best content is written when one has passion to write on the subject. Without passion, your post does not have a voice. Blogging is like an art that is fueled by passion. Without it, it looks dull.

In the quest of producing content for one blog, I am seeing often bloggers are relying on duplicating content from other websites in their niche. While I understand that it is a quick way to produce content, but this act compromises the quality of the content on the web. And at the end of the day you will not gain followers but lose followers.

Consider me as a new webmaster looking to get some information on make money online industry. I head over to a popular blog in the industry, see an article about site flipping. I read it, and then move along. Then I came to your blog, which is less popular. I see a mock up of the same article that was published on another blog 2 days ago, is now on your blog with a little paraphrasing. Now the first thing I will do is quit your site. And the second thing I will do is remember never to come back to you again.

It Gets Annoying

Speaking from a subscribers point of view, who is subscribed to your blog via email, does not want to recieve an email that is pointless and useless. When I subscribe to blogs, the main reason is to recieve useful content. If I recieve an email in my inbox from your site with a new post which is not up to the par, then forget it. I will most likely unsubscribe. Because it gets annoying. I would rather recieve one email per week if thats what it takes you to produce quality content.

Remember it is Quality that subscribers prefer, not quantity.

Being Consistent is Tough and Most Fail

Top blogs like SmashingMagazine, Psdtuts, and others always come up with great articles every day. You must understand that these sites have multiple authors. These authors are either getting paid well, or they are getting insane amount of exposure from that post which motivates them to write well. I can say from experience that some of those articles takes days of work to prepare. If you have a one man blog, then that is something you probably won’t be able to accomplish unless blogging is all what you do (Full Time Job)

On his survey at problogger Darren asked how long on average do you take to write blog posts?

Majority of the bloggers say 1 hour. Some had even less time. If your blog is about your life or some other rambling, you might be able to do it in 15 minutes, but if you are writing for audience like webmasters or other serious industry then you will have to put more effort than that.

That is how your daily blog traffic looks. No seriously, that is how it looks for the most part for most blogs. If you are not serious about your site then this is what will happen. Some bloggers write great content one day because they put alot of effort into their post for that day. Then for the rest of the week, they add more content to their blog, but none matches upto the standards.

Pissed Off Reader

Now I will give you an option of either write great content all the time. Or never write good content. Because if you don’t write great content all the time, you will have a pissed off reader. Lets say you write an extremely good blog post which caused you to get thousands of visitors. Out of those thousands, atleast a hundred subscribed because they thought you always produce good content. Now for the next week, all they recieve were new updates in their mail for your site, but none of the articles were up to the standards. Sadly, you got yourself a pissed off reader who will not subscribe to your site again!

Neil Patel is a Great Example

I hope you have heard of this guy. He is everywhere. Famous for his aggressive marketing strategies. You will see his blog, Quick Sprout listed on popular blogs like techcrunch, smashingmagazine, Fail Blog, CrunchGear and other places. If you head over to his blog, you will see that he does not upgrade as frequently. But the articles that he does write are quality. He still have thousands of subscribers and active readers which you can see by the comments on each of his posts.

Good Tip to Avoid the Downfall

Simple, only post when it is necessary. Don’t be under the mindset that since John Chow is successful. He posts 3.8 posts a day, so if you do it you will achieve the same thing. Now if you read John Chow’s blog, its mostly about his life, less about tips. Its more reviews, more ads, and more of stuff that will make him money rather than teach you anything. Best way to read his site is backwards when he had lots of tips. Now most of his tips and resource articles are guest posts from other bloggers. Once again not a one man site!

Don’t give into the made up rule of blogging atleast once a day. There is no such rule. In order for the quality to prevail, the quantity must be taken out of picture. If you have to cut down your frequency of posts to produce better content, feel free to do so because it is the quality what users want.

To Determine whether your post is worth being posted, it is better to ask other’s opinion. Or simply make yourself a checklist type survey. I wrote a post about 7 Questions to Ask Before Publishing a Blog Post. You can follow that, or make your own.

Note: During a period of time: I did that on Balkhis as well when quality of my posts were suffering due to lack of time. I switched from daily posts to every other day posting frequency. And I still have all my readers and increasing.

I realize that I wrote a very controversial post here which will definitely make you want to put out your opinion. I am eagerly waiting to hear them, so put them down in the comment box.

As I get more active in Social Media Sites such as Twitter, I see new blogs and blogposts published daily. Honestly, out of hundreds of posts I believe only 5% of those blog posts should have been published. The other 95% of posts should not have been published because they don’t answer one or more of these questions below:

1. Have I Written Something Useful?

The term “Useful content” is very subjective. Something that I find useful, you might think is useless or vise versa. The best way to know the answer to this question is by knowing your audience. If your audience is mostly designers, then I suggest you stick with designers post rather than talking about politics. There are many types of useful posts here are few:

• Entertainment – A new trend which is being seen in blogs is that they are posting articles for people to laugh, and gossip.
• Educational – Educational article has almost always worked and majority of the readers prefer it on Balkhis.
• News – Informational articles such as reviews of products and new information is preferred by users as well.

Obviously this is a small list, you can definitely add on to it. The bottom line is whatever you write make sure that it is useful to your audience.

2. Have I used a Title that draws people’s attention?

Most people don’t even read your great post if you don’t have a good title. So make sure that you write good titles. That is what users will see on social media sites, they won’t see your flashing post. So make your titles flashy. Brian Clark have a great guide of writing magnetic headlines.

3. Have I used Images to Highlight Important Points?

If you haven’t started using images on your blog, then you are missing out. Adding images in your blog posts add life to the post. It also makes it more pleasing on the users eye because if all you have is text, then most readers quit because it seems dreading.

4. Have I left room for my readers to have discussion?

If you want to have a good blog, you need to have community interaction on it. So make sure you are inviting your users to comment. Always ask for their opinion. Leave room for discussion.

5. What is the main point of my post?

You would be surprised how bloggers get distracted when writing a post. I know I get this as well. You need to make sure that you stay to the point. Put out your main idea, and get it over with. Don’t ramble along because sometimes it gets really annoying.

6. Did I Remember to Spellcheck?

Grammer is ok if it is messed up in my opinion because fragments are necessary sometimes. But bad spelling is something you should not have. I have users emailing me when I misspell. I really appreciate it. But remember to do all you can to prevent these minor errors.

7. Can I interlink my previous posts?

Interlinking is essential. This will not only increase your pageviews but provide great content for your new readers if they have not seen one of your older posts. I always try to interlink between my posts, so I can maximize the benefit. (How to Increase Pageviews)

I think once you have answered these questions, you are good to publish your post. Because It really will improve your posts. I try to do this question sheet before I do any of my posts. Can you find any error in this post??

I have mentioned in my previous post about distractions for bloggers that stats can be very distracting, and they can reduce your work efficiency if you obsess with them. If you use the stats wisely, they can be your most versatile weapon when planning a strategy for your business. Often times when webmasters want to grow their site, they evaluate their competitors against their own website to see what they can do to get an upper edge.

Well I have come up with a list of 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Website’s Popularity and your competitor’s website popularity. This way you can come up with a better game plan and get the leverage over others.

1. Yahoo Site Explorer

I know that all of us are interested in checking where are we getting our backlinks from. Well Yahoo Site Explorer is one of the tools that does the backlink analysis and it shows you which sites are linking to your site, or your competitor’s site if you type their url. This way you can see how you can increase your backlinks.

2. Feed Compare

Feed Compare lets you compare the rss subscriber counts using the data from feedburner. If the site doesnot use feedburner, or has this data hidden, you will not be able to use it. But if they do then you can see the trend of their subscribers growth or decline.

3. Compete

Compete lets you analyze the traffic of the site of your choosing. It shows you the unique visitors, pageviews, keywords and alot more information if you are PRO member. They also assign a compete rank to a website based on the stats.

4. Quantcast

Quantcast is another popular site traffic measuring tool. It allows publishers to “Quantify” their website by placing a script in their web pages so that quantcast can measure their traffic statistics directly. If someone does not put the script on their website, then the data may not be accurate.

5. Tweet Volume

Tweet Volume measures how many times a certain keyword has been mentioned on twitter by the users. You can search author name, websites, urls and so on.

Above are the tools that are actually useful in what you are doing. Below are some of the fun tools that you can try and have fun with but they might not be the most accurate ones.

Most of the tools below takes in account of various stats and they give your site an estimated value, and so on. But such measurements are very subjective therefore I would not use them as my main source of tracking.

DnScoop

Website Outlook

Cube Stats

Statbrain

Popuri.us

If you have any more tools you want me to add surely suggest it to me either in this post, or via twitter.

Remember these tools are free, and they are just to get an estimate figure. They are obviously not the most accurate analytics tool, but they do the job. I would not make any serious decisions using these tool. Meaning don’t go out and buy a site for 50,000 because one of these tools said so. Enjoy

Comment Moderation is an important part in blogger’s life. If you are a blogger like me, you get tons of comments on your blog, and you get to pick which one goes up and which ones does not. Well I have developed a policy for my comments, and I am going to share some of the possible policies which bloggers can use. I will let you decide which comment policy is smart.

Why Develop a Comment Policy?

Since blog comments is something that you judge often, Making a policy or a criteria is the best way to treat each comment equally and fairly. Aside from that reason, having a policy or a criteria speeds up your process of going through the comments.

1. Spam is not the Way

Believe me when I say this, I have taken enough measures to make sure that all spam gets caught. I will delete spam and I will not tolerate it. I will ban your IP if need be. I have written an article about 9 Tips and Tools to Fight Spam in Wordpress. Sometimes you might get lucky and your spam comment might slip away, but believe me that I will get it. I have some nice users that report me if something is fishy out there.

2. Irrelevant linkings is NOT Allowed

I have no problem with you linking in the comments as long as it is a useful link. If you think you can write a comment and leave a link to Credit Card Debt Free, then you are wrong. Your comment will go straight to spam and will not show on the web.

3. Self Promotion

If your comment is solely for self promotion then your comment will not be allowed. I have had comments on my postts where people want me to add their link in my post, and they add the comment. When I check their link, it is not worth it for my audience to see it.

4. Too Personal

If your comment is something that is specifically directed to me, and not related to the post. Meaning that you should have sent me an email instead of commenting. It will not appear. If I find time, I do reply to these people using the email they put in the comment box, but I still would not let these comment appear for public to see.

5. I encourage Links

I encourage good comments. If it is necessary for you to add a link which might be useful to my post, then surely do so. I will also add it in the post text if I really like your link. So the point is don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like irrelevant links.

6. I do not allow Signature Links

I do not allow Signature Links. I know there is an option in the comment form that says Website. If you want someone to see your website then use that url. I don’t think you should add a signature in the comment. I will edit the comment and remove the signature, and if you don’t stop, then your comment will not show period.

7. Bad Name Choice

If your name is like Buy Viagra or something else really spammy, no matter how useful your comment is, it will go into spam. Don’t use these spammy names. Instead just use your real name if you want to add something useful.

Although some comments requires special attention, this is the general moderation policy that I follow. Did I miss anything? If I did let me know by adding it in the comments.

Spam Comments are becoming a major issue now a days because more and more people are leaning towards spamming to get backlinks. Heck people are even paying spammers to spam with their url. Well are you tired of these spammers? I know I am. Over the past year, I dealt with tons of spam troubles because it seemed that a few spam comments would bypass the security anyways. So I thought I should compile a list of wordpress plugins, and tricks that I have learnt over the past to fight against spam comments in wordpress.

Wordpress Tools to Fight Spam

1. Akismet

This is the dual sword that everyone should have in their possession. Each wordpress copy comes with this plugin by default. All what you have to do is get an API key from wordpress.com. Once you get the API, you are equipped with this weapon. Akismet really gets the job done. It catches over 350+ Spam / day on average for Balkhis. Without it, I don’t think I would be able to monitor the comments.

2. Defensio

Defensio is like an automated bow and arrow that is bound to hit the bull’s eye everytime in your fight against spam. Defensio have your comment traffic route through it’s system where it analyzes each comment for the level of spam, and assigns a grade. If the grade is of an adequate value then the comment is published, if the comment seems suspicious it will be held for your review. Defensio provides you with good stats and gives you RSS Feed for both good and spam comments.

3. Simple Captcha

Simple captcha does exactly what it sounds like. It adds a random image in your comment box which every user is required to enter. It fools the spammers. This is one of the most efficient ways to prevent spam, but this makes all of your users enter the captcha as well which might reduce your total comments on the site as well because most users get annoyed with the captcha system.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Simple Trackback Validation filters through your trackbacks and only show you the ones that are not spam. Not a long while ago, this technique started to get alot of buzz and it is now being used by alot of spammers. They make you think like they are linking to your post, but mostly either they are copying your entire post, or have a short link to your post in a porn page or something spammy like that.

5. Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior analyzes the HTTP headers, IP address, and other metadata regarding the request to determine if the comments are spammy or not. This is also very effective if you have Akismet installed. This is probably one of the better combos. Not to mention, this works on almost all php-based sites like drupal, and anything else.

6. Spam Karma

Spam Karma assigns a score to each comment using a specific rating system which includes the age of the post, email, their link and more. The developer has stopped developing this plugin and will not provide future support, so don’t expect any updates. Although I was told that this plugin works well.

7. WP Spam Hitman

This plugin lets you set a list of words that are in spam comments. But you must remember that these words are often used by your normal visitors also, so you can’t just blacklist these words. WP Hitman takes these words and analyze how many times they have been used, and if they have been used alot then it triggers it as spam. This might put your users comment in danger also, but sometimes to avoid spam, you have to this method for a shortwhile.

Wordpress Tips to Fight Spam

Ok I have tried just about all of the below tricks that I am about to tell you, so you can use it. I will tell you the pros and cons of each, so you can make the judgement by yourself.

8. Comment Moderation and Blacklist

Moderating comments is a default function with wordpress. You can find it if you go in your admin panel if you click Settings tab and then discussion. I suggest you leave the url level to default. Use this feature only, if you find a certain person suspicious, you can put their IP in this list otherwise don’t add anything because you will be increasing the work load on yourself.

Blacklist option is right below the moderation area in Settings ~ Discussion. In this if you put down any email, IPs, or domains it would be blacklisted. You can blacklist a certain email, IP Address, or domain. The sad part is that they always find a way around. By adding more and more into this list you will hurt your loyal readers because their comment will go in Spam as well. I had this happen with me. So I try to avoid making the list bigger. Use with caution.

9. Nofollow Comments

Spammers target blogs that are dofollow. It was a big thing a while back. People would comment on every do follow blog, so bloggers would make their blog do follow in the hope of increasing the comments. Well, you will increase the amount of comments. But half of them would be spam. So the choice is yours. Most popular sites use nofollow. The reason for that is because it really doesn’t matter. Your comments get indexed anyways in the search engine and it counts as a backlink. You just don’t get the PR Juice (or some says).

Well here is how you can add a no follow to your comments.

Open this file: /wp-includes/comment-template.php

Look for the word External, and just add a no follow tag after it.

Some people might say that you are not being fair to your loyal users because you are no following their comments. That is why there is a top commentators widget which you can use to reward your top commentators by giving them a follow link from your site

I am sure most of you guys are already familiar with these tactics hopefully I added some more news. This is for starters or those who are still looking for more options. Believe me guys you get Akismet and add any one of these extra layers. You should be set.