Sunday, March 15, 2015

Pro Blogging

I have been hearing a lot about making money online by blogging? Is it for real or just a scam? As I investigated more, it looks as if there is some substance and people are really making money blogging in a professional manner.

Making money blogging is possible, but..

Making money by blogging is possible, but it involves much more than simply writing the blog. It takes lot of hard and regular work to build up a following and then make a email list and get your followers whom you can sell your products or your affiliate products.
Blogging was much easier years ago, but the situation has changed a lot over the years. Few years ago there was dearth of contents on the Internet and our blogs can easily find its way to the top search results and one could easily copy and paste contents from other places and get it published.
All that has changed as more and more of such contents flooded the internet and the quality of contents deteriorated over the years. For an user looking for information, the obvious information is readily available; but as he or she tries to dig a bit deeper, all those spinning contents show up making it a poor user experience.

Content quality

Google implemented a couple of major updates to its search algorithms to take care of the content quality and provide better user experience. While the algorithm updates provided better user experience, it made life miserable for those who were thriving with inferior quality contents in their websites.
Google is no longer encouraging thin contents and in fact majority of those blog posts that reach to the first page of Google search results these days are long content posts having typically more than 2000 words.
So the present day blogs need quality contents that are detailed and original. Plagiarism is penalized. Producing top quality contents regularly is not as easy as it used to be earlier when copy paste and thin contents were norms of the day.

Blogging for fun and then profit

I have started blogging in a lighter mood and as a fun pursuit. I want to get a feel of it for a while and eventually enter the professional blogging.
As it is observed, professional blogging requires devoting more time and energy. Again I was thinking, maybe, it is only an one time affair and once I make ample amount of contents, I can sit back and keep writing posts at a more relaxed pace.
That too seems impossible, since unless I keep posting regularly my audience look elsewhere for information and they cease to come back to my site. I cannot afford to lose my audience and I must quench the thirst of my audience by providing regular blog posts and responding promptly to their queries.
All these involve a lot of work, and I cannot imagine myself taking all those pains alone and writing a number of blog posts on a regular basis.

The pro blogger

But I wonder how the pro-bloggers are doing all this and even take care of their multiple blogs. There must be some secret that I must find out.
As I imagine things are tough only for a single individual blogger taking all the pain alone, but the situation is entirely different when there are people to share the burden. Maybe the current blogging scenario is more suited to a group individuals working together than a lone blogger. I do not know...

Long content blog posts

I can write about 500 words at a time for my blog posts and that probably is the best I can do effortlessly. Now if I am to write a 2000 worded post, I will surely need to find some technique.
To me a 750-worded blog post looks good enough. So let me explore how I can create a long post. There is no point in repeating the words in order to fluff up the blog post.
The best technique as I can see is to make research topic on hand and collect a few key points before sitting for creating the post. Then I can systematically develop those points into a fairly long blog post. This has worked in my earlier attempts, but this time I want the posts to be fairly long.
The website 750words.com provides platform for practice. This website encourage people to write at least 750-worded articles on a regular basis. They keep stats of your performance and you can also compare your performance with that of your fellow writers.
They also provide a one month contest which you can participate and compete to enhance your writing competence. Unless I emerge winner in such attempts, there is no point in jumping into professional blogging.

Conclusion:

I have decided on the strategy to write long posts for my blog and I need to keep working on it regularly to see if this is really workable. If it prove successful I am in for professional blogging; otherwise I would just continue to blog for fun at my comfortable pace for the time being.

Friday, March 6, 2015

Attukal pongala

Attukal Pongala
Today is the concluding day of the famous Attukal Pongala festival of this year (2015) in Kerala (India). I have been witnessing the festival ever since my childhood days.
Attukal is name of the place where the famous temple is located and Pongala is the annual festival lasting 10 days. Millions of women participate from all over the state of Kerala in the concluding event of Pongala on the tenth day. This event has he reputation of  being the biggest single gathering of women to offer prayers that has entered the Guinness Book of Records.

Pongala

Though the festival lasts for 10 days, the final (tenth) day Pongala is the main event. Women from all over Kerala gather for the event with make shift arrangements for cooking the Pongala offering made of rice, jaggary and coconut.
The rituals of Pongala start at about 10AM when the temple priests announce it and ends in the afternoon when the priests spay the holy water over the pongala offerings to the deity.

The finale








Monday, February 23, 2015

Blogging for fun

So I have setup my Blogger and this is my first post. I never thought it could be so easy to open a blog. I need some topic to blog about. What do I choose... have no idea...
First I want to see the look and feel of my blog and see how it looks on the web.

Anyway let me put some content. I had uploaded a fun video of my pet puppy playing which I am embedding below.