Phew, for the past 4 days, I have taken a break (from this blog), and took a trip out of the country! It was a wonderful weekend getaway, out of the busy city and hectic schedule, into a beach resort with nice blue seas with no cargo ships to be seen in the horizon.

It was also a great time to reflect and take a step back on what am doing, look at longer term plans, and really be with the people we work hard for everyday, and live our lives for. 🙂

Now I’m back again with more energy. Hurray! Back to blogging!

I realised that my Alexa ranking is slipping away – and now its back to 65,318. But interestingly, I am getting more visitors everyday this month and more sign ups for my Blog Marketing eCourse, so I guess it is still good.

It’ll be better if the rankings don’t slip, though

Anyway, I think every blogger deserves breaks. Maintaining a blog is fun and exhilarating, but there are times where you just don’t feel like writing anything. Times where you just prefer to take a book and read, rather than read feeds and articles off the web.

Is it time you take a break too?

Just today, I was checking out the links coming in to this blog (using the WordPress dashboard) and I realised that these two days marked a milestone achieved for this blog, well, at least, in terms of Technorati authority.

Technorati measures the rankings of a blog in terms of the number of incoming links from other blogs in the past 6 months. So today I found out that my number finally tipped across 100!

Yae!

In the state of the blogosphere report last October, Dave Sifry posted about 4 different authority groupings.

1. The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
2. The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
3. The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
4. The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)

So its up a notch for me today! 🙂

I remember I posted about this figure with my post about the report, and in early November I had like only 16 links. 102 links is not a lot compared to many in the blogosphere, especially those in my daily reads, but its at least an affirmation to me that I’m doing some things right. 🙂

To be frank, I haven’t been actively building links these couple of months. I have been busy reading books (all the “digital junk”) and preparing my course materials. Perhaps the only link building activity I have been doing was to go around contributing to others’ blogs and adding to their conversations.

That said, I think rankings are just rankings, inbound links are just inbound links, and traffic is just traffic! For the regular content publisher, traffic may be the bloodstream for their business, because some of them live by monetizing their traffic through advertisements. However, I guess what many bloggers aim for is to build credibility for themselves.

I was inspired by one of Lorelle’s recent comments:

I’m always stunned at the “fame” assigned to me and others like me. We just do our thing and do it to the best of our ability. I don’t go out chasing traffic or holding up signs that say “point to me”. We just do what we do and people point and say “famous”.

Famous is relative. It’s nice for people to think so, but there are a lot of people who would be envious of my traffic (if they get less than 50 visits a day) and others who think my traffic is child’s play.

Do what you do (and you love to do), and do it well – the links will come. If you are doing your stuff right, incoming links should not be the result of a link building campaign, but because people want to link to you.

Updates have been slow on this blog lately, and I really apologise for that. My computer is giving me really weird problems – and as I am typing this, the other partition in my hard disk where I store all my data, is lost again. Its happened the 5th time (or 6th?) since this week, its frustrating.

Does anyone have a remedy for this? If not, I guess I’ll have to go get a new hard disk tomorrow and do my final reformat.

So, the lunar new year holidays are over and its time to get back to work, hopefully after all the hard disk issues have been settled, I’ll get back to my regular posting schedule.

Over the holidays, I’ve also gave some thought to my blogging strategy – and I’ve come to realise that I need to focus on maybe up to three blogs, at a maximum. I’d rather build three good blogs than 20 blogs with no traffic or whatsoever.

Well, one could have 20 blogs, but in order to update each of them regularly would be terribly time consuming. Since I need to work on other projects like my training programs and the other stuff in the pipeline, I guess I’m better off focusing on three.

No worries – this one will stay, for sure.

Catch up again when I’ve got my new hard disk.

Happy Lunar New Year readers! Its the year of the pig!

Its time to take a rest from work today, go around visiting my relatives, get myself even fatter by eating all the goodies (especially barbecued pork! 😛 ) and collect my red packets (yeah, I’m still on the “collecting” side, I haven’t joined the “giving” gang yet)

恭喜发财！万事如意！

Wow! Time flies when we get busy, doesn’t it? Its been three days since my last update, and this time it not a blogger burnout, but just that I’m getting busy doing something else, hoping to bring the best value for my participants of the workshop.

So since my last post, things have happened, I’ve run my first one day workshop! 🙂 (and of course, I took a one day well-deserved break after that!)

Thank you Practical Blog Marketing 0207 participants!

I hope that short one day workshop on blog marketing has helped you understand the concept of blogs and how to market your blog better. I hope you had fun, and I really hope that I have helped you get started with a blog!

Yes, again, here are some photos to share:

We had fun, didn’t we?

And of course, not forgetting the people supporting me – this workshop wouldn’t be possible without all your support and backup and assistance. Thanks Shi for you advice on training, Jolly to help me market the course in short period of time, and Kiat Wee for your excellent copywriting. I really look forward to working with all of you again.

The next run of Practical Blog Marketing will probably be two full days! I’ve got so much more I want to share! Check out this space for the dates for the next run. 🙂