Fortunately, with a little thoughtful lovin’ you can get that old horse to suck in its ribs and take a saddle again.

1. Bring the content back into focus. While having a cool theme and lots of widgets in the sidebar might have seemed like a good idea once upon a time a leaner sleeker look that makes your content the star of the show can help you infuse passion back into your chosen topic.
2. Clear out widgets and old plugins that are no longer being used.
3. Clear out nonperforming ads. I know there are thousands of websites dedicated to making thousands of dollars from Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates and Text-Link-Ads but if they aren’t paying out for you it’s time to say goodbye and kick those loafers off of your valuable real estate.
4. Go through your old articles for inspiration. You know, the ones you wrote when you really had a passion for your topic. Now you are older and presumably wiser; try writing a new article on an old topic and tell your readers what you’ve learned.
5. Write a confession. We’ve all made mistakes; some funny, some sad, and some just crazy frustrating– tattling on yourself feels good, and will help you reconnect to your readers.
6. Clean up the link rot. Dead/inactive/outdated links frustrate readers. Go back through old posts and check the links in your sidebar from time to time and replace or remove rotten links.
7. Rewrite old posts and edit them into new pages– this is especially good if you wrote a great tutorial or how to article. Why let your great writing languish in the archives when it can come to life as a stand alone article?
8. Write for people. Readers are smart, smart enough to know when someone is trying to cater to them and when they are trying to cater to search engines. Honestly, it’s better to have happy readers.
9. Alt tag your images and links. This will make the search engines happy, and will help direct traffic to your site.
10. Find your passion again. Not just for writing, or your chosen topic, or your blog– but for really enjoying all three smashed together. Start exploring topics within your niche not just because other bloggers are doing it, but because it truly interests you. Have fun.

It’s probably better to save a penny than spend it and earn it back later because the earned penny will be taxed a second time. I’m not talking about being miserly or cheap, but wisely frugal.

When you are working online it’s important to reexamine your expenses periodically.

It’s easy to hemorrhage money on hosting. Most of my clients grossly overestimate the amount of space and bandwidth that their sites will require, and then they pay for their optimism month after month.

Server space can actually be quite cheap. Use Google, it’s our friend. For hosting multiple sites use search terms like “discount reseller hosting”, you’ll find hundreds of nice hosts that will offer WHM with cPanel– this is what most of us need. Make sure to check the reputation of the host and double check to make sure that what they offer is what you need. If you aren’t sure, check the documentation provided by your current host and the support forums for any platforms and plugins you want to use.

I highly recommend the host that I use, Atomic Webhosting. The support is personable, responses are quick and the hosting is extremely reliable all at an extremely good price. I think I’m in love.

Then there’s the matter of domain names. I know GoDaddy is annoying with all the offers upon checkout– but they are cheap, take customer service seriously and have a kickin’ domain name control panel.

Some registrars (Yahoo) will offer a cheap initial year, and then kick up the price the next year. And other registrars (Yahoo) will also require that you email your requests for a DNS change and make you wait for weeks before actually getting around to reflecting the change. Some registrars (Yahoo) really tick me off when all I want to do is a bit of quick redirection so that I can work on a site without really mucking things up.

One last point: Use free services, Google Apps Standard Edition offers free custom gmail (you@yoursite.com) , Google sites, Google docs and Google Calendar. All free, all easy to use, but that’s just one example– keep looking and you’ll keep finding free (or ridiculously inexpensive) alternatives to the paid services you need.

Image Space Media is the advertising network that uses javascript to overlay ads onto images.

It seems like a really good idea and I could see it being more effective once the network is larger and has a broader range of advertisers but the ads were absolutely not relevant to the images  that my pages were displaying and although other ads on the same pages were getting a bit of love from site visitors– not a single click on the ISM overlays.

No clicks no love.

For what it’s worth there are some promising features. For instance the ability to make the ads as unobtrusive as possible and to turn the ads off and on image by image or en masse.

Unfortunately the javascript couldn’t tell the difference between my existing advertisers images in the column and images within the post, which meant manually turning off the ads every single time I had advertiser turn over. Not a huge deal but it was irritating.

I don’t think I would recommend it as yet, but I’m not going to delete my account (although I have removed the javascript from my templates) and I may try again in the future.

Here’s why:

• Payout is low (ten dollars)
• If you don’t meet payout you can easily set up your own ads on  other peoples sites without a separate advertiser account
• You can set minimum bids for your ad boxes
• You can set your boxes  to reject NSFW ads
• Project Wonderful only takes a 25% commission on ad sales and charges a $1 fee when you choose to accept a payout
• You can have as much or as little control over the content of the ads displayed through your boxes as you like
• If you choose to advertise as well as publish you can control exactly how much you spend on advertising campaigns

All kidding aside, with as many blogs and sites as I have (and those that I maintain for others) I can’t take too much time to obsess over traffic stats, reader behavior, or unique visitors.

Mainly because I have this silly idea that I should do other things instead– like see my children through the day and brush my teeth after meals.

This isn’t to say that checking stats is a total waste of time, just that obsessing over things like pagerank and backlinks and daily traffic doesn’t do a whole lot if you find yourself checking your stats more than actually working on refining your site and writing content.

WordPress has oodles and gobbles of nice plugins for statistics, I like StatPress and StatPress Reloaded– but I’m not sure which one I like better (I have versions of each on different sites, StatPress has nice pie charts but StatPress Reloaded has easily read info if you’re not so much into the pie charts.)

There’s also the Google: Analytics and Webmaster Tools (both are useful, Analytics for traffic behavior and Webmaster Tools to see all the linking and SEO stuff and to detect errors or malware on your site.)

As tempting as it may be to check everything daily, the prudent (time utilizing plan) is to check your stats weekly and if necessary, keep a notebook handy to jot down one or two tasks which will help improve your site’s traffic and search engine standings.

For example you may need to promote a few key posts, or want to update old posts with some fresh internal links and on the SEO side, install a plugin like XML Sitemaps Generator so that search engines can more easily index your site. This can be a day or two after checking your stats so that you have time to consider where you might make improvements and you’ll still have time through the week to do things that you can blog about or even have a little free time to enjoy life.

Or is it being able to go outside and witness the rain with your kids, taking photographs of moments that would might go unnoticed, developing otherwise impossible friendships with people states or even countries away, voicing your opinion honestly and having a real discussion, sharing your hobbies and interests, or showing off your work and experience?

Obviously this is not an either or question, but I see a lot of bloggers become absolutely obsessed with promoting their blogs and lose touch with what made them love blogging in the first place. We all lose our perspective from time to time, and not everyone recovers from it as gracefully as others. Some don’t recover at all.

I like to think since I have made a metric ass-ton of mistakes this gives me a unique vantage point. I also have a freaky talent for quadratic graphs and applying them to cost benefit analysis.

Time is a commodity, actually a metered commodity.

Everyone has 24 hours a day. Some of those reasonably should be spent sleeping, eating, taking care of personal hygiene and eliminating bodily wastes, we can call those the physical necessity hours. The rest of your hours could be spent a variety of other ways; earning an income, socializing, rearing a family, bonding with your children, sex, pursuing an interest, self improvement, and so on– but no matter what you choose to do with your time during the day, you neither gain nor lose time, it simply continues.

Which means that if you’re business minded then you’ll have to triage your greatest resource, which is time. To do that successfully, you’ll need to be able to discern the difference between time well invested and time poorly spent.

This doesn’t mean shunning all things not work related, or being sleep deprived, or eating fast food to grab a few extra minutes. But do you really need to spend three hours a day checking forums and clicking links, or filling out surveys only to earn a few pennies here or there? Would you be better off hiring a web designer to create a new theme for your site or struggling 10-20 hours (or more) trying to do the work yourself?

Are you spending more in time than you are earning in other ways?

I honestly love a particular home school blog, but I’m constantly irritated by not being able to find what I need (which in a reasonable universe would actually be on the site and probably is) because the list of tags under a short post is 50% longer than the actual post.

It’s like the author picked every conceivable phrase that could possibly relate to home schooling and home education and made a list and then the author copy and pasted the whole list into the post tags box. Actually, I think that’s what might be going on.

Evil.

Cold relentless slimy evil.

You know why it’s evil? Because it tells me that the site is written to grab the attention of search engines but doesn’t really give a darn if actual people are able to use it. This makes me especially sad because I like the print magazine that this site is meant to pimp.

Tags help organize the site in a way that strict categories might not, so first and foremost tags should be for the actual humans to use.

Step #10, gloating engaged

You might also want to make sure that you have more than enough bandwidth available to your site to accommodate crazy amounts of traffic. You might consider backing up your site on a completely different server/host so that if you do exceed your bandwidth limits you can quickly redirect all that traffic to the backup.

Here’s the basic gist of what’s going on:

I use one advertising network to bring visitors, I am a publisher with the same network (meaning  that their ads are displayed  on a few of my sites) which allows me to finance my advertising campaigns. Since people get burned out seeing the same ads all the time I arrange my campaigns sporadically– usually through the summer months when hits slump off significantly. And Thanksgiving day– like people have anything better to do on that day than keep up with my blog, pshaw.

I put affiliate links in when and where they are natural, and only when there’s a good deal going on. The commission rate is only 6%, so I don’t really expect a great return for the effort still I think linking to relevant offers ads value. Coupons and offers tend to expire after a set amount of time, so I crack open MS office and schedule a reminder for the day before expiration so I can either remove or update the link.

Then I move my contextual ads around. Adsense isn’t the best earner, but in the right setting it does perform well enough to (barely) justify it’s existence.

I never ever use pop-ups or pop-unders, or those stupid things that cover the page until an ad is done playing or page redirects. I hate them. I also hate videos that launch on their own and ads that make noises.

I’m also not in love with advertising schemes where crud pops up when you scroll over a linked word within an article.

Frankly, I’m a little worried that the new ads appearing on the images on this site might be a bit too obtrusive. I think I’m going to leave them for a few weeks and see how it goes, if they get in the way I’ll remove the script.

It might not make much sense to move around the ad schemes as much as I do, but I’m trying to create the best of both worlds which I think is worth the small amount of extra effort. The right ads do contribute value to my readers (and enable me to keep producing what I hope is interesting and helpful content), but the wrong ad scheme could make my sites impossible (or incredibly annoying) to navigate and drive readers away.

I’m definitely not advising anyone to follow my lead, but since I get asked I thought I’d share.

And an hour later you’ve realized that being stuck on that first sentence would be a luxury compared to the living terror which is that cold and relentless  blank page before you. Staring back at you. Mocking you.

I have a solution. Go do something.

Grab your camera, and go somewhere else (even if it’s still inside your own home) and do something, take pictures, make notes. Then come back and write about it. Put together a tutorial on how to do a certain thing, or write a personal essay, or just comment on your afternoon– it doesn’t matter.

Here are some of my favorite things to do:

1. Cook. I make some darned pretty goodies. (And after I’m done, our family gets to eat the evidence.)
   

   My example of some fine lookin' cookies

2. Take a walking tour of my neighborhood. There’s always something interesting going on, or something new to see.
3. Go to my local historical society, and take the tour. Most little museums allow cameras, and a few sell postcards. I love comparing how it was to how it is.
4. Organize my stuff. One of my most popular blog pages is a page with pictures and descriptions of my sewing machine feet.
5. Do something I’ve never done before. This is a double edged sword really, catastrophic crafting failures make the best writing fodder, but then I usually have a brilliant mess to clean up (and evidence to hide.)
6. Watch my dogs play. I’m convinced there’s a whole ‘nuther world going on in our house.
7. Repair something that’s been broken. Or, in my case, try to repair something and then describe how things managed to go horribly horribly wrong.