Problogging Q & A from Manuel

In connection with my problogging interview series, Manuel shot me with the following questions in the SEO Philippines mailing list:

1. How does Yugatech go about choosing blog topics? (pixel/overture, wordtracker, database of keyword lists, ebay directories, adsense accelerator, whatever topic you’re truly and deeply interested in)

Frankly, I don’t even use any of those “tools” for my blog topics. I blog to generate conversations as it’s apparent from my post-to-comment ratio of 10.16 (which is pretty high IMHO). The topics that I often blog about are personal tech experiences, commentaries, tech news/tips, guides/tutorials, and some personal favorite topics which includes photography and gadgets (that I bought and toy with or wanted to buy). These will be the same topics I would talk about whenever I’m with friends, chatting over a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer.

2. How do you generate the content for those topics? (outsource, private label articles, automated article rewriters, CJ.com links, self-written)

For the most part, I write them myself (evident from the grammar and spelling mistakes I often make). There’s the occasional comment-quote-comment posting style, but that’s inherent with most bloggers these days.

I really have to thank all of my regular visitors and commenters. They practically doubled, maybe tripled my content. Sometimes, it’s not really just the posts but the comments that adds value to the blog.

3. How do you get your blog posts to rank highly in SEs? (heavy SEO, WordPress default settings, network with other bloggers, simply write for your target audience)

I really don’t know. I practically have the default WP settings. I have several hints though. My blog is relatively well linked to in the blogosphere (Technorati Rank: 4,546 – 659 links from 280 sites) with a nice PR5. If we follow Marc’s “The Google SERP Party” explanation, I have a good mix of links from trusted sites as well (.EDU, Press, etc).

The only SEO practice I actively do with my blog is to track old posts and rewrite them when I have time. That’s why I really like MeasureMap because it can easily show me which posts in my archives get the most hits for a certain day (and from what keywords) along with the number of comments. I then go back and edit those old posts to add related keywords or a permutation thereof, or even rewrite the title.

The “Related Entries” plugin is a good way to pass traffic (and PR) from popular pages to less popular ones within my blog or across blogs I own or write for.

I am no expert on SEO so I can’t say how much of what I practice is really good (or not) for my blog. In the last 5 years that I have been blogging out of passion, it’s only in the last 12 months that I seriously tried to monetize my blog and have been relatively successful at it.

Just over a year ago, when Connie’s cooking blog was raking in hundreds of dollars from Adsense, I remember telling myself that problogging is not for me. Still, that did not deter me to strive and persevere. Had I accepted the glaring truth that like millions of other regular bloggers, I have no future in problogging, I would not have been able to blog fulltime today.

Thanks to Robert Kiyosaki and a xerox copy his book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad“. But that story is for another time. :p