Philoking.com

You have read all of the articles by bloggers who claim to be making tons of money. You have read all about the tips and tricks that will grow your blog from nothing to rock star in months. You have probably even seen a hundred companies online that promise to get you a massive readership and kick ass Google page rank. This blog post is a reality check for those of you with stars in your eyes thinking that you can make your way through this economic madness as a professional blogger.

Let’s start with a few things we can take as fact:

1. No matter how unique you think your subject is, there are at least a dozen blogs that already cover it.
2. Even before the economy started pulling back advertising dollars, online advertising was predicted to be only 1/10th of advertising revenue by 2011.

So what does that tell us? That you are going to be jumping in a big pool of already established bloggers that are all fighting for that same tiny slice of the pie.

There are also a few things that you should know about what is really required to run a successful blog:

1. Blogging is incredibly time consuming. Blogs that are successful have a steady stream of high quality content, build and communicate with a community of readers and are very active in the community with other sites that share their interests.
2. You need to be a good writer. If you don’t intelligently share your message, your readers won’t come back. If you can’t write with a compelling style while also using good form and grammar, you should probably reconsider.
3. Maintaining a blog requires a deep knowledge of web development. Sure you can pay someone to do the dirty work, but considering your blog is likely to make a quarter to a buck a day for quite some time, you are probably going to be your own developer.

The point here is it’s a lot of hard work and requires that you have personality, style, skill and knowledge. You can forget WordPress.com, Blogger, Live Spaces, etc. Running a successful professional blog means learning about hosting, blog engines, feeds, subscriptions, search engine optimization, online advertising strategies, writing, proof reading, editing, image manipulation, promoting and selling your blog. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme no matter what you might have read.

Let that sink in for a minute. Why would I be telling you not to start a blog? I am not saying it because I don’t want the competition. I make a buck or two on a good day, maybe $10 on a stellar day. I don’t do this for a living and the Google checks are infrequent enough where I usually don’t even notice when I get them.

I am setting some realistic expectations for all of my friends that have looked at the possibility of job loss and said, “maybe I should start blogging, then I could work from home.”

I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that less than 1% of blogs, not counting the personal blogs on the many services, but 1% of blogs intended to make money, make more than a fry cook at McDonalds.

Now let me add a disclaimer. If you have an awesome idea, great writing talent and the time and patience to get it started and grow it, blogging is a lot of fun and can really be rewarding even if it’s not financially successful. I have made friends all over the world blogging. I enjoy communicating with my readers and enjoy writing.

The important thing is to go into it with realistic expectations and not start blogging as a way to replace a career. Blogging is something you do parallel to another career and do professionally when you realize that your blog is successful enough to support you and your family.

One of the problems with using a news style theme is that you constantly have to upload files for lead stories, etc. If you aren’t always on a machine with a full fledged blog client or possibly suffer from firewall restrictions like I do, you need to be able to upload your images through the web.

After a failed attempt at writing a quick and dirty script to accomplish this task, I decided to browse the WordPress Plug-in library and I came across WP Easy Uploader. It installed in seconds and worked flawlessly on the first try.

It’s a simple tool. Once installed, on your dashboard go to Tools > Upload Files.

From here you can upload files from either a web reference or directly from your file system. You can upload to the default WordPress upload folder, directly to your plug-in folder or into a theme folder. These two also benefit from automatic extraction of zip files. You can also use a manual path, which is what I used to solve my problem. Remember to point your slashes / or you will get some weird folders in your WP root with \\ and \\\ between the elements. Other than that you can have it automatically overwrite files, rename if it already exists, remove the archive after an extraction or force files not in a folder to be extracted into a folder.

Pretty complete feature set and a plug-in that I would say is a must have for any WordPress site operator. You can find the plug-in in the auto install tool or visit the author’s site.

Enjoy!

I decided to take the plunge and give the beta a try on my main blog so here you have it. Philoking.com is running the WordPress 2.7 beta1 in production. From the viewer perspective it should be transparent. For, it’s already a dream. The back end UI has had a total facelift and some of my favorite plugins are now built right in. Less plugins is always better if you ask me.

I am also writing this post in the browser instead of using Windows Live Writer. Mostly because I am on my Macbook Pro, but also because it’s a quite improved experience, especially when you add Google Gears to the mix to speed up the UI.

So far the UI doesn’t seem that much faster with Google Gears installed, but I think I can possibly tell some difference. The next thing I am going to attempt is bulk edit to clean up some of my categories, things have gotten a little out of control at Philoking.com when it comes to categories and tags.

The new UI is gorgeous. There are too many new features to list so I will mention a few that I find really interesting. The ability to insert, upload and well format images is very welcome. One of the reasons I avoided posting through the back end UI was that it just wasn’t a good experience. It’s very much improved.

Bulk edit to posts is extremely welcome, when you get where I am with thousands of posts, making changes is a huge problem. Instant install for plugins is also very nice, but that was in 2.6 also. The last feature I want to call out is the ability to reply to comments being built into the comment moderation. I have used a plugin for this for a long time. It’s a very welcome addition.

I am not sure if I would suggest running it on a production site, even though I have not seen any errors so far, but if you have a local test setup or want to check it out, it’s well worth your time, the new admin alone is fantastic.

Do you believe it? Posting to my blog from my iPod Touch! If you speak iblogging, hit the app store now.