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I got to this topic after I read the blog of a former office colleague which I never knew he had one. I gave him some tips but noted that I could actually give him more based on my personal experience of experimenting and maintaining my blogs through the years. On a number of occasions, there have been surprising results and obvious mistakes I learned from.

I’m not a blogger who struck it rich by selling advertising space or being a luminary in the speaking circuit. In fact, I’ve turned down every “advertising for peanuts” request in the past all the advertisers had nothing to do with my blog’s theme, the topics I wrote about or even my intended market (of readers.) Those boxes to the right are all my personal ads or messages which relate to my blog categories. Maybe when the right one comes along, I’ll succumb to it. For now, I keep it to myself.

So, in the spirit of the “Hacker Ethic!” (read the Steven Levy book, “Hackers,” and you’ll know why I say it so), here are my top 10 suggestions to maintaining a good blog.

1. Focus and Stay with One Theme or Topic.

Our mind is a chaotic mix of thoughts, ideas, experiences, wants and needs. If you were to outline everything down, you’d probably need weeks or months to do so. Categorizing it is another task. There are just too many topics you’d like to express. That was my dilemma. I just loved expressing many things, not just one. I wanted people to know who I was through my writing.

The solution was to look for a blog theme that allowed me to display, in standard menu web site formatting, the few topics of interest I wanted to express and share. At the same time, I also wanted the normal menu options of “About” and “Contact Us” that you see in most web sites. This is because I always believe that habit is such a hard thing to change in people. The general public has been used to the standard look and feel of web sites, with their menu items at the top and summaries down below. Our eyes continue to use habitual methods of reading – start from the top-left and work your way down with a left-to-right scheme. Anyway, it took me a few days until I chose this blog theme which is something you can use only if you have your own web hosting package; this is not available in the free versions of blogging.

But before the “look and feel” issue was resolved, I already had general idea of why I was creating my blog: I wanted my clients to get to know more about me through my writing. For example, my business network in LinkedIn was able to read a few of my blog posts which enticed them to make the first move to inquire about my products or services. So, my blog is my marketing tool; at the same time, it also allows new acquaintances to get to know me and old friends to learn more about me. This is my main intention and the path to which my blog will continue to exist.

Workshop: Spend some time addressing this question: what do I intend to achieve through my blog? Once you’ve got the answer, start listing all the topics you’d like to express in writing with the answer in mind. Then, categorize these topics or, better yet, choose about two or three categories only excluding the usual “About Us/Me” and “Contact Us/Me.” The “look and feel” you choose will also speak out how you express yourself – choose what you like, not what others do. The rest follow – choosing a blog name, buying a domain name, deciding on free or not-free hosting, learning how to use your blog administrative functions and features, learning some basic HTML codes like centering and hyperlink-referencing. Practice makes perfect.

2. Allow Comments to Create a Conversation

When I started experimenting on blogging, I allowed anyone to write a comment without approval – it just got posted right away. Then, when my blog probably became more visible in search engines or people saw precisely which country was reading my blog the most, I suddenly started seeing comments that had nothing to do with the topic; in fact, most were just message-advertising their product, service, web site or worse, porn sites.

I quickly enabled moderation of comments on my blog and subjectively decided which to allow or trash and delete. For a few where the comments were good but included HTML snippets like “<a href”, I simply erased the code, retained the phrase beside it, and approved the comment. Because of this, I had to reserve at least fifteen minutes a day to manage the pending comments.

In addition, I also realized that there were probably “bots” (web-oriented programs acting like robots inserting predefined comments into blog sites) that were maliciously and automatically pasting comments on my blog posts without human intervention. So, I decided to add a Captcha plug-in, an HTML snippet you can plug into your blog setting or profile to make sure all the comments are being written by human beings, not a bots.

On the brighter side of comments and in the spirit of the slogan to which I named my blog, “The Internet is all about Conversations,” I managed to make a few new friends by way of a string of responses originating from the reader’s first comment, sharing and expressing one’s thoughts, ideas and even principles in life regardless if it were conflicting with me, and allowing other people to learn from the comments and responses the get to read at the bottom of the blog post. So, always respond back to the person who wrote a comment, regardless if it is a praise, complaint or criticism. “After the storm comes the rainbow” speaks well of cordial and respectful responses to even irate or critical comments; you’ll be amazed your once critical reader will suddenly become one of your most loyal subscribers.

This is the major reason why blogs became popular. There were many diary-formatted types of web-based user applications in the past but Blogspot (and its predecessor) forced the issue about comments, and that paved the way to a lively, very real interaction between the reader and the writer. Without forcing bloggers to allow comments, blogging wouldn’t have been that popular.

3. A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Newspapers have been around since the early 17th century. In the 20th century, photographs have always played a key role in its popularity. After black and white editions came colored versions of the newspaper. In the advent of the Internet, web sites are often a replica of publications – words with pictures. Today, blogs also mimic the newspaper or magazines. Relevant ones, that is.

I also chose the blog theme to which I’ve been using since Day One because it forces me to place a photo or image at the start of my blog post, automatically resized if it doesn’t have the perfect dimensions. If I don’t have the right image, I usually edit one before I come up with the final version. In every photo or image I use, whether I need to or not, I always credit the owner by his, her or the entity’s name, and the reference web site address, i.e. Flickr.com, Facebook.com. Where do I get these photos and images, you ask?

• I source out publicly-available photographs in the internet that doesn’t need licensing;
• I use my personal photographs or images;
• I borrow someone else’s with their permission;
• I use the ones that come with programs and applications I buy and own, i.e. Microsoft Powerpoint comes loaded with photos and images;
• I buy one from the stock photo suppliers in the web if it’s affordable.

Pictures don’t just lure your blog visitor to read your posts; they are also important when you or your social media network share your blog post in social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and social news web sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, to name a few. When you or your readers share the link of your blog post, the photo or image inserted in your blog post forms part of the shared link. Hence, the same effect of “a picture paints a thousand words” lures the person to click on the link and read your blog post.

4. Tags are Important for Future References

Tags are index terms that search engines and social news web sites use to discover your blog. They index it (or tag it) so when that tag item is used for listing or searching the tag, your blog comes up in the list. The more hits your blog receives for particular search engines or social news web sites, besides tagging, the higher the ranking of your blog post in its list. So, tags are important. My rule of thumb for tags is that if the word of phrase doesn’t exist in my blog post, it doesn’t get tagged. This, however, is not a strict blogging rule.

Rather than explaining tags comprehensively, it’s best you read more about its intricacies. Try reading about tags in Wikipedia, especially section 4 entitled “Advantages and disadvantages.”

What tags have done for my blog is bring it up higher in the food chain of the search engines, so to speak. Today, my top three popular tags to this blog are “call center,” “Kunnect,” and “Pekson.” In my other blog, www.miniphilippines.com, 11 percent from the thousands of total hits this blog has encountered all originate from the search engine phrase “philippines typhoon.” This is because in 2009 I blogged so much about typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng that I ended up with thousands of hits per day during those separate yet unforgettable events. So today, every time someone searches that phrase, the blog post about either typhoons comes up on the list of top links. Not that it’s relevant today but it catches the attention of a first time visitor which may lead him or her to browse or surf my blog for any post of interest.

What you can do that I’ve never attempted (yet) is to approach companies or organizations and offer them line advertising, graphical box advertsing, or even a box advertorial inside your top blog posts. Again, it’s your call if you’d like to impede something outside the theme or topic of your blog posts.

5. Add a Social Media Plug-in

There’s a famous phrase about Facebook which I’ve used in my social media training poster. It reads, “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan.” I wrote that last year and I don’t know if it’s overtaken a few more countries in the list; I’m guessing it has.

Adding a social media plug-in like AddToAny.com allows your reader to share your blog post across the dozens, if not hundreds of social media and social news web sites. Doing so also increases the popularity of your blog post, not to mention the number hits.

6. Add a Visitor Counter

On top of what your blogging application provides you regarding statistics, I also find it good to know where my readers are coming from. I got stuck using FlagCounter.com because I didn’t have time to go looking for something better; FlagCounter suited my needs. The only thing I did was reduce the size of the FlagCounter HTML snippet to 18×18 pixels, small enough not to be noticed but big enough for me to click into it when I need statistics by country.

Today, this blog gets read by 34 percent coming from the USA, 30 percent from the Philippines, 4.9 percent from Canada, and from 66 other countries. Though I sometimes pinpoint the Philippines as the place of my professional or personal experience in many of my blog posts, it is also my writing intent to try to be geographically unbiased so that people from other countries can relate to my words. Hence, more people outside the Philippines are actually visiting and reading my blog posts. That’s good because that is my intent and it is not a surprise to me. The same holds true for www.miniphilippines.com which gets 50.2 percent from Philippine-based visitors and 49.8 percent from 152 other countries (25.6 percent are coming from the USA and 6.8 percent from Canada, as the top two countries below the Philippines.)

7. Advertise Your Own

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I’ve only placed personal ad lines and boxes in my blog because any of these always relates to the theme, categories and topics of my blog site. I have had little less than 10 percent of my visitors clicking on these ad boxes for which I have no idea why they do – I can only guess interest or appeal of graphics as two probabilities. Yet, ten percent of the thousands of hits reveal some hundreds of clicks – which is still a good thing!

So, if you do some type of business or work part-time or otherwise, you may want to advertise those on your blog. In the past, I’ve advertised my high school’s events, my friends’ blogs and events, even my ex-wife’s business, and maybe a funny quip or two to let my readers know, “Hey! I can also be funny!” Just make sure it relates to you as the owner of the blog, or the blog’s theme, category or topic. Anything out of context can confuse your reader or worse, alienate people not to go back to your blog anymore.

8. Create a Facebook Page or Group

What’s the difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? Read my previous post, “Facebook in the Middle.”

Whatever your decision is, the reality that more and more people are starting their day with Facebook is something to consider. This social media behemoth has now replaced many of the habitual news web sites we used to start our day with, like Yahoo.com or some specific news web site. The joke goes that, if before, when people wake up in the morning it’s the newspaper and a cup of coffee; nowadays, it’s Facebook and anything to drink. LOL!

Search popularity of being on the top list as a Facebook Page or Group still belongs to normal, everyday words used in the name or label of your Facebook Page or Group plus the number of fans or members. So, name it as how it relates to your blog. For example, one of my business web sites is www.kunnectph.com and this relates to a WordPress blog site. However, the battle-cry I’ve used for this freelance business has always been “Talk is Cheap!” So, I’ve aptly named or labeled the corresponding Facebook Page to “Talk is Cheap!” while retaining the Facebook Page’s username to simply “Kunnect”.

In the past, I thought of marketing myself by creating a Facebook Page which bears my name in both the label or title and the username. Guess what? I had about five fans over the course of a year. You think I’d be famous right away? The point is it was a wrong move. Last month, I deleted the Facebook Page that bore my name and created a new one using “The Internet is All About Conversations” as the label or title, and the username is shortened to “internetconversations.” Today, I have dozens of fans without any marketing; just the simple interest of people liking my Facebook Page. It’s a good start!

9. Create a Twitter Account

I have two Twitter accounts – one each for MiniPhilippines and Pekson.com. Anything that has to do with the Philippines or Filipinos anywhere in the world gets tweeted in the former. Anything else I would like to share to the world uses the latter account. Then, I add icons or buttons on my respective blogs to link either Twitter accounts – but not both! Again, don’t confuse your visitor or reader. If they land on your blog, show them the way to the right and appropriate social media site, like your Facebook Page or Group, or your Twitter account.

Why Twitter? Thousands, if not millions of people are actually using Twitter to search specific words in tweets (or those 140 character messages) and hashtags. If you happen to be one of them, there’s a good chance that a Twitter user will click on the shortened hyperlink found in your tweet and land on your blog. You can also install a plug-in (called a Widget) that lists the latest tweets you’ve sent on your blog page.

10. Adjust but Don’t Quit

Like any successful endeavor you or other people have done with their lives, both professionally and personally, intent, focus, desire and the will to succeed forces you to continue despite any setback. It’s same goes for blogging. Even if you shifted jobs and are now neck deep in work with your new employer, find the time to keep adjusting, enhancing and writing for your blog. The moment you stop, you will begin to lose your followers or readers.

I’ve had a few false starts with blogging. I think there were about two blogs I started with gusto but failed to motivate myself to continue and lost the interest. But here’s another surprising story – it is (again) about MiniPhilippines. There was a time not too long ago that precisely as I had described in the previous paragraph, I was neck deep with work that I didn’t post anything for three weeks. Yet, this blog site kept getting the number of hits I didn’t expect. Why? Because I’ve had the blog for a little less than two years and with so much content and tags filed and indexed in cyberspace, the number of daily hits didn’t drastically fall. It was still being visited especially by the new ones. After seeing this, I began cornering myself to start posting again.

In Summary

There are thousands of more tips and suggestions on the web on how best to maintain your blog and make it successful. Google it and you’ll be overwhelmed by it. My intent is to let you know it can be done even with as little as a few hours per week. Just don’t stop if it means well for you to start expressing yourself in writing; and blogging is the easiest way to publish yourself for free. What I wrote is based on my experience, not someone else’s. Others will have many more to add to my list.

In closing, my peers and I, young or old, would always tell each other in the past that once we retire, we will either teach or write a book or do both. Now that you have this online activity called blogging and the resources for blogging abound like fresh water in Canada, wouldn’t you think that everything you write today can actually be compiled to resemble a book in the future? All you need to do is to start writing it.

Ahh, blogging. There comes a time when “you can’t live without it.” So, have fun expressing yourself or your business!

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If you and your business or organization would like to learn how to engage using social media networking and marketing the right way, I conduct a four-hour crash course entitled (click) “Social Media for the Workplace.“

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The CEO and COO of KUNNECT recently visited the Philippines to launch its call center technology solutions to the Philippine BPO market. Fred Cote, co-founder and CEO, spoke at the October 12 meeting of the members of the Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) in Shangri-La Hotel Makati. Mr. Cote presented KUNNECT as a viable, inexpensive call center solution for immediate operations without the need for costly and time-consuming setup, calling it the “best in its class” of a full suite of call center features and functionality. Together with Mr. Cote were Chris Persaud, COO of KUNNECT, and Raffy Pekson II, the Country Representative of KUNNECT in the Philippines.

In Mr. Cote’s talk, he presented two new subscription plans, specially created for the Philippines, at half-the-price rates: Plan 100 for $100 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America at a 1-year commitment contract, and Plan 125 for $125 per month, per seat, unlimited calls and a 6-month commitment contract. KUNNECT has two regular monthly plans with no commitment contract (start and stop anytime): the Basic Plan of $50 per month, per seat, plus toll charges, and the Unlimited Plan of $199 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America. “Someone has yet to beat our $100 plan.  We are setting a new standard.” adds Mr. Cote of KUNNECT’S web-based SAAS call center offering.

During their two-week stay in the Philippines, Messieurs Cote and Persaud personally presented KUNNECT and met with the management teams of several call centers, and also non-call center companies that want to set up small, internally-controlled call centers for their sales, marketing, service and support business requirements. Mr. Pekson said that some prospective clients remarked that the main enticing feature of KUNNECT’S offer, besides the price, is one’s ability to start immediately without the high setup and maintenance costs.

KUNNECT is a global Tier-2 class telecommunications carrier with offices in the U.S., Canada, France and Germany, and does about 6 billion calls a year through its network, according to Mr. Cote.  “The amazing thing about the Philippine’s business and commercial broadband internet service is that all the telecommunications companies in the country first land their internet pop in One Wilshire, Los Angeles, which is where KUNNECT is co-located.   This helps eliminate any downtime due to latency problems, as well as ensure the shortest possible route to a business.” (Latency is defined as the round-trip time it takes to access an IP address or a website, measured in milliseconds).

Aside from its popular hosted call center solution, KUNNECT also sells a premise-based, enterprise version for call centers that want to host their own solution. For details about KUNNECT’S solutions, get in touch with Raffy Pekson, KUNNECT’S Country Representative in Manila, at 501-3025 and 0927-726-9949, or e-mail him at raffy@kunnect.com. You can also visit their website at www.kunnect.ph for more information.

It’s been weeks since I attended Randell Tiongson’s “No Nonsense Seminar on Financial Planning,” more often referred to as a personal finance seminar. I met Randell after having e-mailed him a few times and asked if we could meet – I had a web project then that needed writers of his stature for enticing the North American market to come to the Philippines besides vacationing. This involved not only retiring in the country but more towards investing and hiring (or outsourcing), to name a few. The only thing we had in common was our high school alma mater.

Several months later, I attended his first free seminar and wrote about it. I probably jotted down more things about the event than the content of his free seminar. My inkling was to mark some role in the growing blogging community as “one of the guys,” so to speak. Still, months later, Randell came out with his first “not free” seminar but I wasn’t able to attend because of some pressing commitment I had to do. When he announced that he was going for a repeat, I made sure I’d attend.

Using Randell’s term for the one-afternoon session filled with alien jargon on finance, it was a “nosebleed!” However, it wasn’t much about the swirls of financial terminologies that silently drove me nuts – it was the realization that I should have done what Randell was telling me (and the others who attended) to do early on in my life, not in my mid-forties. During the session, my mind floated out to people I know who are still climbing into the prime of their lives and would love to convince them to attend Randell’s eye-opener seminar as young professionals, and not in their maturing years where the time to make mistakes isn’t anymore a luxury.

Here’s my “blinding glimpse of the obvious,” as a phrase I keep borrowing from the infamous book “Barbarian at the Gates”: all my life, someone took care of my personal finance. As a young professional, my parents were my personal finance advisers and accountants. Even if I would earn my keep at work, I would still end up losing my recent salary on useless spending sprees. Ever the generous parents of a middle-income household, they would oblige to continue giving me extra money, use their car, eat their food, live in their house, and have my clothes washed and cleaned – a practical dependent to parents who should have already started to think about their retirement. When I got married, my dear wife took care of our household expenses and, in that respect, my personal finance and accounting matters. When we hit some rough financial times, she managed our family expenses and balanced our personal financial needs until I came out swinging again – and she was good at it!

When I went back to the Philippines from Canada and ventured into entrepreneurship with friends, I relied on one of these people to take care of my personal finance. I had no personal accounting on revenue or expenses, even if I probably tried a hundred times. I could teach people how to create profit and loss presentations for businesses but I would fail doing one for myself.

My two-cents of practical advise to those in their mid-twenties to as late as the mid-thirties – start managing your personal finance today. The key word here is “personal.” It’s not about family finance, not company finance nor is it someone else’s personal finance. This is managing what you earn, what you spend and where to invest the extra money you save, the latter of which is something many Filipinos procrastinate about. It’s not being selfish – it’s being prudent. You can share information with your parents, spouse or life partner but you need to learn how to manage your money today. Randell’s seminar, though short as it was only an afternoon session, gave the attendees a glimpse at what one should start doing today. (The implicit pun is what you should have started doing a long time ago.) If you are already investing, is it a wise investment carefully planned, assessed and executed, or are you just like many of us being lured by the promise of extravagant rewards coming from friends and peers (worse, family members)? That’s the thing about personal finance – it’s a three-way street: income, expense and savings. A better word for the latter is “investments.”

Randell Tiongson and me

Randell  is a Registered Financial Planner (RFP) in the Philippines and does his seminars out of the goodness of his heart. He’s an active parishioner of the Victory Christian Fellowship (VCF), an ardent advocate of personal finance management, a loving husband (you should read his Facebook dedications to his wife) and a good father (his daughter kept shooting photos during the seminar). After getting to know and talk to Randell more, we started tallying-up common friends. Randell went to the City of Smiles (that’s Bacolod City) to run the same seminar. However, I do hope he could conduct a three-peat in Manila as I’d love to invite people whose faces crossed my mind when it wandered while listening to Randell will attend the third event.