by Sapphire (April 28, 2008)
A few months ago, I announced I was rebranding this site as Blue Mushrooms, and moving away from journaling and more toward actually providing good information to people who want to market online.
Since then my traffic has dropped a little. I thought long and hard this weekend and realized the following.
So I’m back to journaling. I’m importing all posts and comments from the Sapphire blog I started and killing that blog. I’ll continue to share good info, but mostly this site will be about me taking those “387,923 Difficult Painful Steps” that it takes to get to a full-time living online.
There’s another reason for this decision, though. Another thing I realized this weekend is that if I ever do figure out how to make tons of money online… I can’t exactly just blog it on here, can I? Then everyone would do it, and it would stop working for all of us. When you finally get where you’re going, there are some things you have to keep for yourself, and some things you can only sell at a price.
What you can always share freely is moral support. A laugh at your own mistakes. Reality checks. Those things have a lot of value. I’ll still be sharing the latest WP plugins and all that jazz. But instead of limiting myself to such “just the facts, ma’am” stories, I’ll also be posting about my perspective on what I’m trying, succeeding and failing to do online.
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by Sapphire (April 24, 2008)
My recent attempt to write Wordpress plugins failed, but it gave me my first semi-clear view of Wordpress under the hood. I saw big chunks of coding to replace features that didn’t need replacing. The whole system struck me as bloated and patched together.
I will stick with it until the time comes to invest in a pricey blogging system. But now I wonder how someone like me, without PHP expertise or much knowledge of servers and hosting, can guess which system is best.
I started this site on Serendipity, which is mind-bogglingly awesome in terms of features but had a limited community of plugin developers. I also tried Drupal, which is overwhelming for novices who just want to set up a damn blog and start blogging. I never figured out theming on either, which was one of the reasons I switched to Wordpress. But are they lightweight? Are they secure? I had no idea.
I played with TextPattern and B2Evolution. Again, I couldn’t figure out theming or find plugins for everything. And I had no idea if they were worth learning because, once again, I had no idea if they were lightweight and secure.
Wordpress is not necessarily secure out of the box because some hosts don’t configure permissions the way Wordpress developers apparently assume everyone does. You may not be able to upload without changing folders to 777, and novice users don’t always realize that’s a problem (either ftp your uploads, or find a new host). And Wordpress sure isn’t lightweight when you get Dugg. Until then, it’s a fast-loading, impressive platform - assuming you haven’t innocently installed plugins which dump mountains of garbage into your database, or made any one of 100 newbie mistakes I’ve made that slow it down. But once the traffic comes, the php calls multiply insanely and your blog can’t load. There are workarounds - caching plugins will almost certainly take care of this. And you can recode some of your php calls to be html (like your categories).
Wordpress is extremely full-featured, in the sense that you can practically order a plugin in the forum and find one or get one made in less than a day. Awesome! But that plugin could cause security issues, could kill your server with php calls, etc. You still have to know what you’re doing, or Wordpress can kill you. Fortunately, the community’s so big you can always get help when things go wrong.
That said, what do you use and why? Can you tell us non-programmers something about how to find the right blogging platform for our sites?
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by Sapphire (April 23, 2008)
There are tons of articles talking about just how far Twitter, Facebook or your blog can or can’t take you. Is it worth your time to become a high profile Digg user? Delicious user? Etc.
I think it all depends on whether you know what to use social networking for. Namely, the online equivalent of word of mouth marketing, not your own small personal PR firm.
Word of mouth marketing is far more powerful than any other type of marketing. You can splatter your product on every billboard I see, and even if you catch my attention and intrigue me, I’m still going to ask people I know whether they’ve tried it or not before I do. I do sometimes buy something without anyone’s recommendation, but that almost always happens while I’m browsing for something particular, not while I’m being marketed at.
Some people seem to have the impression that with social marketing, you need to build up thousands of “friends” and then everything you proclaim to them will influence them to go forth and spend money that benefits you. If it were that easy, every TV commercial would guarantee success for its product.
The real potential of social networking is like this:
- You build a small circle of friends who trust you and really value your recommendations enough to go put something on their Amazon wishlist right now.
- Those people also have a small circle of friends and hopefully are “sneezers” who recommend it to everyone in their trusted circle.
- You also build a small circle of friends who trust you but only on interests they share with you, or only on certain topics. Those people are also valuable.
If you can influence three people to go out and buy something because you thought it was so awesome, and those three people are sneezers with separate circles from yours, the sky’s the limit. It’s not about how many friends you have, but how many of them (a) listen to you and (b) tell people you don’t know, who listen to them.
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by Sapphire (April 22, 2008)
I’ve chimed in before on some good reasons why internet earners might not want to blog under their real names. I just thought of another: because you don’t want your current or future “day job” employers to find out what your real passion is when they look you up online.
People have lost out on jobs because their Facebook profiles talked about recreational activities the companies found distasteful. Is this a case of the company nosing in on your private business? Actually, it’s usually a case of: if we can find it, so can our clients.
But the job market is getting more competitive now, and it’s only likely to get worse here in the US. If your employer finds out you have a sideline that’s more interesting to you than the day job, and they’re looking to lay off a few people, you may rise to the top of the list.
Now, blogging under your own name and conducting business under your own name are two separate things. Many of us who don’t blog with our real names - for whatever reason - do have PayPal and similar accounts in our legal names so that anyone who does business with us sees a real name.
I’m curious, though: how many of you would prefer me to start blogging under my real first name, or at least a name I tell you is real that sounds reasonable, rather than Sapphire? I mostly use Sapphire because I think it’s more memorable than my real name, which several other prominent bloggers share. Even my full legal name is shared by a whole lot of other women. Maybe I could try to make a variation on my real first name that isn’t so common. Thoughts?
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by Sapphire (April 18, 2008)
I’m discovering some plugins and patches that make Wordpress 2.5 a lot less annoying.
And I’m trying to write a plugin that will restore the old time and date on Manage Posts so you can easily see how far apart your future posts are spaced by hours. If you can help, take a look at this thread and see if you can tell me where I’ve gotten stuck.
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And my truly helpful posts, like fixing the Wordpress is_home error and dealing with horizontal scrolling issues in WP themes, are few and far between.
