Ah well, not been on holiday or anything, but have been away from the blog for a while.  The first couple of days weren’t intentional, as all of my sites went down because of a server error on the 8^th – I make sure I’m aware of any outages of the sites in my portfolio by using Internet Seer.  Not entertaining at all and the host I am with (not for long mind) didn’t actually know that my sites had all disappeared from the web – just a bunch of muppets, I felt as if I was to blame and should be sorting out the problem.  Time after time of phone calls and emails, I had to sort the problems out myself – with files not re-appearing after the server was back up and I was congratulating myself on backing up all of my files on an external hard drive.  Needless to say the call centre and email tech people were not based in the UK and had very poor English – I wouldn’t really have bothered but I am paying quite a high amount for what I thought was a quality hosting service. 

I thought all the excitement was over with technological ‘mishaps’, after I had trouble with my laptop in the previous week, but good old life had to kick me a little bit more in the crotch! 

Taking a side-road not too far

After having the above issues with my host, and after re-loading and sorting out all of the issues of my sites and blogs I began to draw away from Road2blogging.com and decided to concentrate more on some niche blogs that I had set up in October.  I did some more keyword research on them, more content and produced more articles to submit to article directories and post on Squidoo etc.

It isn’t going too bad either, I have 12 niche blogs that are pulling in around $8 a day (on average) through adsense revenue, but I’ve received nothing so far from any affiliate ads on the blogs – a really annoying fact.  I’ve also implemented the information I discussed in a post last month where I wrote about the portfolio I want to have built by the end of 2009 – how to diversity your portfolio.  Yet, I’ve been neglecting this blog to concentrate on the niche blogs, last week I thought this was sort of ironic, that I’m banishing this Flagship Blog, for other niche blogs that (in the long run) won’t be as enjoyable and making as much money as this one.  So, I’m on catch-up and have shifted most of my time to road2blogging and will apply a little less time to building other parts of my portfolio. 

Getting back on track

Posting daily has been quite challenging for me, and I’m going to tone the posts down a little on the blog.  I’m still going to be posting up the newbie blog steps at weekends and the Tuesday link posts as I feel that these are of real value to the readers of the blog, but I don’t think posting daily is going to be possible and isn’t needed, not yet anyway.  I do have loads of information to share with everyone and lots of posts saved as drafts, but I think it’s time to be realistic – my mind is working so much quicker than my two digits can type, and until I get from 21 words per minute (what I’m currently at) to my goal of 100 words per minute on the touch typing course I’m doing I won’t be writing up posts on a daily basis – I just simply don’t have the time.  It’s not because I write a few hundred words either, but because I really do like to fully explain what I mean and provide the sources where I’ve learnt and read the things I’m writing about, just now I’ve written over 600 words and it doesn’t feel that I’ve actually written that much more this post – strange isn’t it?

Whilst I had a little time off from blogging I realised that my tone has changed in recent weeks.  I’m not trying to be professional in my writing, by writing as if I was writing a blog post to a close friend or colleague and not aiming what I am writing to a speech in front of a thousand students in a lecture theatre.  Even in the 2 months that this blog has been going I have learned so much about how to write to a blog, document the information and how best to approach and engage readers.  It’s not just about promoting certain products or affiliate links (as that can be left for other keyword niche blogs), but to tell my journey to problogger, my way.

Well, there you go, hopefully we haven’t had too many casualties along the way and RSS readers have in total gone down by 1, so thanks guys for being patient.  Here’s to more niche blogs and more comments on posts.

Everything on the Blog should be back to normal soon

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