A not-so-final farewell...

Well, the time has come for me to say goodbye to this blog and my good old Blogger account. Don't worry it's going nowhere, but from now on, I will only be posting at www.blogtrepreneur.com, the rebirth of Blogtrepreneur.

It's been a fantastic 4 months, and has seen my entrepreneurial spirit reach all new highs! What's left now is to thanks all those who have linked to me, and who have taken the time to comment on this blog, and help it reach unprecedented success.

So thankyou, but remember, Blogtrepreneur lives on through my new blog at www.blogtrepreneur.com so head on there straight away, where I'm sure you'll continue to enjoy me, Adnan, posting as the Blogtrepreneur!

My not-so-difficult quest for a webhost

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So today was the day that I was scheduled to buy my hosting for blogtrepreneur.com. I imagine that many people just search around for the cheapest and most well known webhost, but I wanted to share with you the reasons why I didn't need to go running around.

For a long time now, I have been using www.frozenwebhost.com for all my hosting needs. Every entrepreneur will eventually need a website, and it is only natural that they want to find the cheapest so as to save money and increase profit. It's a known fact.
However, for me, customer service is the main thing. As a techie dumbass (!), I need all the support I can get. Some hosting companies offer 24/7 email support, but often this can get laggy and very delayed.

With Frozen Webhost however, the owner Steve prides himself on being on MSN for a great deal of the day. He is very polite (again this is very important for building a relationship with the customer - a very good tactic for business) and he always has an answer for everything.
And even I do look at the price tag...with Steve, this tag is very very reasonable at only $5/month. What else does a budding entrepreneur need?
So a quick update, Matt should be starting on transferring the Wordpress files to my host, and it looks good for a very nearby release of Blogtrepreneur! Watch out, here I come!

Going off on a Tangent like a True Entrepreneur!

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Lately, you may have seen that I have been starting to talk more about blogging itself, and focusing on How To Make Money from blogging. It has taken a few kind words from the Director of MindPetals Entrepreneur Network (www.mindpetals.com), to put me back on track.

For those of you who are relatively new to Blogtrepreneur, the reason why I chose such a creative name, was to reflect my love for entrepreneurship, and also to show the format that I would be presenting my experiences in...a blog. Now, I have covered a wide array of topics in this blog (for example How To Start Your Own E-Business), and I feel that I have strayed off the topic a bit lately.

Therefore, I would like to return to my roots, and continue to write about how you too can build your entrepreneurial talent. Every entrepreneur is bound to go off on a tangent whilst writing...it's only natural! I was not surprised to know, reading a few of my favourite forums, that other entrepreneurs also shared the same habit of losing track of their path when they have been struck with a good idea. To me, entrepreneurship is about creation of novel ideas, and about how you can put these ideas into practice.

What I have learnt from this diversion is to stay focused on your goal, which in my case, are to provide the right content for my readers and to network with them and continue to share information round. I have also realised the need for a notebook or pad of paper wherever I am. I always seem to have brainwaves in the most impractical of situations (dropping off to sleep, eating my dinner), and I let these pass without jotting them down. This is a serious mistake for all those who want to capitalize on any ideas, so I will practice using a jotter to help me organize my thoughts.

Who knows, I have discovered a new and uncovered passion for blogging, and so you may see a How To Start Blogging Site popup somewhere...but I will keep you informed! If you ever feel that there is a subject that needs to be discussed, please let me know, but be certain that there will be a whole new level of entrepreneurship in my next blog at www.blogtrepreneur.com. Just to update you on this, I have nearly finished making the design with Matt from www.mandladventures.com, and hopefully the site will be up very very shortly, so stay tuned!

How to boost traffic to your blog: Commenting

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To continue with my mini-series on how to boost traffic to your blog, in the build up to the launch of Blogtrepreneur.com, I will talk about how commenting is really important to create a sense of personality to your blog.

I often get people commenting on a good article, or on a point that I have made, and I endeavour to respond to these comments. By simply thanking the reader for reading your blog, and by trying to make a conversation within one of your posts, you will be bound to receive retuning visitors and more interest in your discussions.

I also wanted to make certain that by having comments enabled on your blog, does not mean that you will gain a higher search engine rank. Many comment features on platforms such as Blogger make sure that comments do not contribute to a site or commenter's SEO...so don't Comment Spam, it doesn't help!
What does help is if you write constructive comments to a person's article. This is to say that if you enjoyed reading the post, make sure you thank the writer and urge him to continue to write great posts.
Do not put a link to your site in the body of the comments section, unless you have written a similar article on your site, that will help other readers browsing through the comments section.

By commenting, your readers know that you are involved in your blog's welfare, and that you are taking an active stance in trying to increase the traffic. Blogger's who disable comments on their blog, also disable their ability to connect with other writers who share similar interests.

How to boost traffic to your blog: Backlinks

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Over the past few weeks, Blogtrepreneur has experienced a steep rise in the number of hits, and I owe this down to a few particular factors which I will share with you over the coming days in the build-up to Blogtrepreneur.com.
Everyone knows that by constant posting, you are likely to target a bigger audience and have more keywords in your site which will be searchable by all the top search engines. But there are other methods that can help to increase your site ranking and traffic.

From Day 1, I have exchanged links with any others who have liked my content or who were blogging on a similar topic. I happened to come across Nathan Waters' Entrepreneurship site first on my visit to the blogging world. I emailed him in a plite email, and he responded by linking back to my site, which I reciprocated.

Now in order to gain the most successful backlink offers you must follow a strict ruling of behaviour or eticate:

1. Say who you are...there is nothing worse than an anonymous blogger. First name terms will do, but don't name yourself by the name of your site.
2. Introduce yourself and what you do...provide information on how you started blogging, what successes that you have with your blog and any other relevant pieces of information that will help your receiver know a bit more about you.
3. Explain how swapping links will help you both...Advise your receiver that by swapping links, your websites will gain a higher search engine ranking and will thus increase traffic to both your site. This is in fact true! Google in particular values the amount of inbound links you have pointing at your site. What's more, Google also values the inbound link more from a site with higher credibility. So if you get a linkback from Google themselves, who have a pagerank of 10, you're sorted!
4. Don't forget to include your site URL and Name...I've had some bloggers contact me about swapping links and then forgetting to put their URL or name of their site in the email. How is someone supposed to link to your site then!
5. Be friendly and not pushy...everybody hates a pushy salesman and so if you try and force someone into swapping links, chances are they're not going to. So keep your email short, full of sweet and kind words and informative.

For me, backlinks have definitely helped the SEO (search engine optimization of my site). It's a roll-on effect, someone links to you, you get a higher ranking, you get more traffic as a result of this ranking, Google places you even higher due to your credibility and status. All there is to it is a friendly email outlining your aims and blogging URL.

Blogtrepreneur.com themes and colour?

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Well, at the moment, Matt and I are discussing the colour schemes for Blogtrepreneur.com.
As you will be the readers of the blog, I wanted your opinions on what you think the best colour schemes will be for the page. I said that I want a warm colour to attract readers, on other pages that has seemed to work....any ideas?
Also, please tell me what you would like to see on the new blog. We are both open to new ideas, and really want to optimize the blog for your experience. If you look on Matt's archive page (http://www.mandladventures.com/archives/), I really like the way he has categorized his posts and the fun user interface. Also the tag cloud must be proving to be effective in terms of bringing targeted traffic to his blog.

Go on...Share a bit of link love!

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Recently, I've been the victim of a bit of link-loving. Well actually, victim is completely the wrong word, because the benefits of being linked too are far from horrible.
At the beginning of this week, my aim was to write a quality post for Darren Rowse as part of his Blogging Group Writing Project. I wrote a post which you've probably seen on my homepage, and then submitted it to Darren through his contact page.
Well two days ago, I looked at my stats on statcounter (still havn't received an invitation for Google Analytics yet!), to see that my traffic had rocketed to 70 odd uniques, another record for me!

Then, by checking on my Technorati account, I saw that another person called Matt from www.mandladventures.com had written a little post about me and what we've been talking about recently. I'll just say a bit about Matt. He has been commenting a lot on my blog, with every comment full of valuable pieces of information (look out for him, his ID is Mithrill). I contacted him to thank him for his support, and found out that he was a great blog designer and as he puts it a "techie". So I asked him if he could help me with the design of Blogtrepreneur.com to which he kindly agreed. Therefore, on the new blog, you'll be seeing and hearing a lot more from Matt. And also, if you need any advice particularly with Wordpress, just give him shout through his contact page.

So, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent, but the main point of this post was to tell you how hard writing work can pay off, and once again, the blogging community can prove to be a great help if you start to get to know a bit more about the people that are close to your blog. Darren has also taught me to share more link love, so I will try and be analysing the blogosphere and finding posts that will help you on your blogging quest.

Why you can't have a Blog without a Blogtrepreneur!

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Okay, weird headline right! But all will be explained later in this post which I have submitted as part of Problogger’s Blogging Goals Group Writing Project.

My initial motives for starting a blog were very, if not, too simple. I saw bloggers such as Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse, and thought, why can't I make money from Blogging too. And that was it, for a few months while I started my blog, and loaded it up with fresh and inspiring content, I thought only about money and how much I was making every day. Whenever I would come back from school I would check my Adsense....$0...$0.15...$0, I was going nowhere.

I tried to link swap in order to boost my traffic and search engine rankings (which is a must anyway for all blogs who want to be pushed up in search engine results), and submitted some articles to Ezine.com and various Blogging Carnivals. Although my traffic did increase and my Adsense did follow, I was still feeling annoyed that my blog had taken off so slowly.

Then, a few days ago, things suddenly went pear-shaped, I lost my will to write content. If I was making no money I thought, then why bother continuing to write for a petty audience who didn't even care about me or know who I was. This was a huge mistake. As I posted in various forums asking what I should do, I noticed that there were quite a few people, who were actually following my blog. They told me to avoid the blogging burnout by writing less and by caring less about how my blog runs. The biggest tip they gave me, was to enjoy the networking and the social factor that I was getting out of Blogtrepreneur.

This is where my post title comes in. The reason why I created the word Blogtrepreneur, was to serve as a constant reminder to me that I was trying to create money out of my blogging experience. However, more recently, I hav come to translate Blogtrepreneur as something different. By being a blogtrepreneur, you must care for your community, you must respond to comments on your blogging posts, you should do your best to read other blogs and support them through backlinks and linking, and you should broaden your view to the whole of the blogosphere, and not just your goal to make money.

So, what are my blogging goals for the future? To enjoy working with the people who I share the most things in common with, you fellow Blogtrepreneurs. I will strive to always give something back to the community through my posts, which I hope will help you on your blogging journey. And above all, my goal is to stop basing my entrepreurialism around money, even though in the long run, this will lead to my success. Networking is the key, and one which you must grasp by the handles if you want to succeedwith your goal to be an entrepreneur.

Blogger experiences yet more downtime…

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Lately, Blogger has become more and more unreliable. Today when I tried to write a new article and when I tried to publish my edited template, the upload kept stalling and the percent of upload complete kept reading 0%. Maybe this is to do with their growing number of server problems, which for Google, may be a worrying sign. However, Im sure that they’ll fix it soon.

This incident though, has made me want to move from Blogger so much more. I have discovered how vulnerable my blog is, and the power that Blogger has over my blog is unbelievable. If they wanted, they could shut down my blog without me even trying to contest it, such is their power.
As of now I hadn’t realised how important this was, however, more recently, I have realised that having the maximum amount of control over your blog is very important, in terms of security and readership. Your readers don’t want to see NavBars that you don’t even want to be there. It just clogs up your page and demoralises your visitors.

My advice, go hosted like Im about to do, and stick with the clean lines of Wordpress. If the best of the best are using it, then it must be good mustn’t it!

The stresses of maintaining a blog

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Recently, I have noticed how much pressure I have put on myself to write consistently (summarised by my last post). This increased stress has led me to doubt my blogging abilities and whether I should really continue with blogging.

I asked a few people about this, including some people on www.youngentrepreneur.com/forum, who asked me the reason why I started blogging in the first place. This got me thinking, however in all truth, I responded that I really wanted to make money, like all the other Problogger's out there. This would prove to be my first weakness.

However the most helpful answer came from Matt who runs a blog at www.mandladventures.com. He gave me some very important advice, which I previously did not consider. He told me not to worry over trying to frequently write articles to impress my readers. "Going with the flow" would be a good way to describe it, but also that I should not feel that I have to keep up to date with the site everyday. Thinking about this now, Yaro Starak at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com only posts every couple of days and yet he still has a readership of 1300!

However, when I read Matt's email, his enthusiasm for the internet really struck me, and some more ideas popped into my head about possible future ventures. I won't go there now anyway.

To summarise from this rollercoaster of emotions and feelings today, I would say to all you bloggers out there not to feel intimidated into writing to maintain a readership. If you continue to post quality content whenever a great idea comes to mind, then you will never hit a "dry patch" and run out of things to say, like I have started to encounter now.

So the future of Blogtrepreneur? Well as promised I will be continuing with my www.blogtrepreneur.com startup in a few weeks time, but I won't feel so obliged to post every day. But when I do post, you can be sure that it will be only the best content that I will provide my readers with. Thanks again to Matt and everyone at Young Entrepreneur Forums and elsewhere for your inspiration and advice.
Blogtrepreneur strives on!