I have a friend who has written a 1500 page novel, edited it countless times and is now trying to get it published. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with his dedication and patience to complete such an enormous task. As a blogger I am lucky to have enough patience and dedication to read all my emails without being sidetracked with something else. An analogy of blogging I often use is the primary school classroom. The authors and novelist are sitting on the bean bag in the corner quietly reading their books and us bloggers are running around the room, screaming, hitting other kids, throwing toys, opening drawers, and frustrating the hell out of the teacher. So how does a blogger overcome this inherent ADD issue. The answer is setting short term goals.

1. You get hundreds of emails a day

As far as I can tell the successful echelon of bloggers all have this in common. Us mere mortals wanting and begging for their help, advice, traffic, business and wasting their time with our petty request. So if you are getting hundreds of emails (excluding spam) its a fair sign that you have made it.

As a blogger of any niche one of the most difficult tasks can often be trying to find ideas for new posts. It has been discussed many times in numerous blogs but its generally the same advice; write list, top tens, resources, interviews etc. However I thought I will throw my own 2 cents in with some more unique ideas that will will not only provide ideas, but great ones for your new post.

Whilst moderating these comments I have noticed trends with spammers trying to get their links published on my site. Some are plain stupid, some are completely irrelevant to the site and some are copied and pasted across many sites. I think the funniest part of the following list is all of these comments have been collected from my site within the last 14 days only. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences and I expect some more classic comments added in my own comment section below (don’t worry I will approve these ones).

I recently installed a new theme on another blog. As with most of my blogs I was using the manual excerpts so that my home page and my category pages show a summary of the article instead of the whole article. However the new theme was not equipped to show the manual excerpt and finding a solution was far more difficult than I would of imagined.

I have been working towards starting a list for this blog and developing some long term relationships with its readers via newsletters, and twitter. Because of time contraints I have yet to put this into fruition but am currently developing some excellent products to use as bait to get people to sign up. However today I found an excellent subscription bait which you can find at Habitation of Justice. I am not going to show you what they have done, you will have to visit the site to see but it is very funny and effective.

Now I should mention when I refer to “blog”, I am in fact referring to the wordpress blog software. It is an amazingly adaptable, easy-to-use and SEO friendly platform that I use for almost all my sites. And after using wordpress for so many sites there are 7 steps I take every time when setting up a new blog.