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Starting a Blog: Step [X] – Optimization for Speed

July 3, 2016 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

A little while back I started a series titled “Starting a Blog.” I need to pull together a few pieces, but you can get started with the important Step 1. I’ve written a couple more steps, but today I wanted to cover something that can be done almost any time. (That’s why I went with Step [X] in the title.)

Generally, successful blogs focus on writing great content and networking with other bloggers to get it viewed.

However one of the most overlooked areas is making your blog fast. This is important because people will leave if the blog takes too long to load. Google also favors websites that load quickly… and Google can be one of the best gateway to getting more readers.

1&1 Hosting has a great guide to making your WordPress blog fast.

I like to say, “You have to know where you before you can get to where you are going.” The 1&1 guide writes about a few tools to measure the performance of your website. I actually prefer one tool they didn’t mention… Pingdom’s Website Speed Test. They cover one tool that I haven’t looked at, P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler).

So once you know how fast or how slow your blog is, the guide covers the basics giving tools for each step. Specifically:

  • Shrink Image Size – They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, it can take a lot longer to download an image than to display a thousand words. There are ways to make images look the same on a website at a fraction of the size. This might be the best thing you can do to speed up your blog
  • Shrink CSS and Javascript – This is similar to using a “.zip” file converter and can reduce time drastically. However, the best thing is to eliminate any javascript that you don’t need.
  • Caching – WordPress builds a page from a lot of different places. This assembly takes some time which adds up if you have a lot of visitors. You can “cache” pages which simply amounts to saving the assembled page for the next user. It’s the difference between spending two hours building Ikea furniture and having someone deliver you an already assembled piece.
  • Clean the Database – Over time WordPress databases get “junked up” with data. The guide gives some good tools for cleaning things up.
  • Eliminate Plugins – The more plugins your WordPress site has, the longer it typically takes to build pages. To use my Ikea analogy above, it is like building a piece of furniture with 72 pieces vs. building one with 20 pieces. All things being equal, the 20 piece model is going to be faster to build.

What’s not covered in the 1&1 guide? They don’t mention using a Content Distribution Network (CDN) or using CSS Sprites (which is fairly complicated). Also, sometimes just reviewing your basic design can help you eliminate elements that slow things down.

Are you a blogger with a website? How do you optimize it for speed? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: speed, Wordpress

Starting a Blog: Step 1

March 30, 2016 by Lazy Man 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I started a new blog. I’m not quite ready to tell you about the blog I started. It needs a lot more work to be “ready.” You only get one chance to make a great first impression, right?

While I was going through the process, I thought to myself, maybe people would be interested in this? Maybe readers would like to read why some starts a blog. (Hint: If it’s just money you are probably not going to be successful.) Maybe readers would like to read how to start a blog. In any case, I’m sure there are people out there who find this stuff interesting.

Why Start a Blog?

The answer to this is most easily found in my Ten Reasons Why You Should be a Personal Finance Blogger. I learned a lot about the subject (personal finance), the technology, web design, the business of running a blog (including negotiating advertising), and how the Internet works. You can substitute a topic of your own interest and you’ll likely learn more than you ever imagined possible. It can even get to be a bit like Brewster’s Millions where you get too much of good thing.

How to Start a Blog

Keep in mind that this is step 1 of starting a blog. Starting a blog isn’t exactly rocket science, but it isn’t something that comes naturally either. There are a lot of little steps. Don’t worry, most of them are very easy. I’m going to start at a high level. We can drill into the details later.

Choose a Topic

If you are thinking of starting of a blog, you probably already know the topic you want to write about. That’s a great first step. However, depending on your goals, it’s not enough to be successful. Before I start a blog, I ask myself two basic questions:

1. Am I Passionate About my Topic?

There’s a lot of nonsense on the internet about “following your passion.” It sounds great, but as I turn 40, I realize that you need more than passion. For example, being quarterback of the New England Patriots is not in the cards for me. I would say that “passion” is just one ingredient in the “Success Cake.” It isn’t the “Success Cake” itself.

2. What Are My Reasons for Starting this Blog?

When I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 it was about learning how to manage money, compound interest, and reaching financial freedom. I also wanted to connect with other people looking to make the most of their investing dollar. I was seriously considering a Condohotel at the time and it was obviously a very bad idea. To understand how bad an idea it was, this is the W Las Vegas that I was looking into.

(It’s worth taking a moment to laugh at how bad my first Condotel article was. It may only be surpassed by my second article on Condohotels.)

We all make mistakes, right?

I created Lazy Man and Money in hopes that I could find a community of people who could help expand my ideas of expressing a goal of achieving financial freedom.

I never expected to make money. In fact, after 6 months of writing, another personal finance writer wrote in a forum that you can make a $100 a month blogging. I was amazed. Who doesn’t want an extra $100 a month? That’s a utility bill for what I was doing anyway. So instead of watching reruns of Seinfeld, I put some time into learning how to add advertising and get to $100 a month. As it was 2006, blogging was very different… which means that making money with a blog was very different.

You should start a blog to learn more about the topic or connect with people of similar interests. If someone wants to throw money at you (like they did to me) to add advertisements, that’s awesome!

How Do I Get Started?

Once you have a topic, there are three basic steps:

  • Pick a Domain Name – In hindsight, LazyManAndMoney.com was probably not the best choice, but it worked. I usually go to InstantDomainSearch.com to see if what I want is available.
  • Find a Hosting Service – I recommend Bluehost and used them for my new blog
  • Install WordPress – WordPress probably powers 99% of all blogs and 25% of all websites. Bluehost makes it really easy

I should probably be more verbose in explaining these steps. If you agree, tell me in the comments, and I’ll work on another post fleshing these details out.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: business, how to blog, Wordpress

Start Your WordPress Blog Today

April 3, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Back in 2006, I thought I’d start a blog, because I wanted to learn about why people blog. I also wanted to learn the technical aspects of running your own site. Facebook was still for colleges (for the most part) back then and YouTube had barely been dreamed up.

Somewhere along the way, I learned the value of creating a journal for yourself. I learned to connect and share ideas with like-minded people who I wouldn’t have run into otherwise.

Blogging for money?

I often get asked about making money from a blog. My response is pretty much the same, “Don’t waste your time.” It is very competitive (there’s very little barrier to entry as we’ll find out today) and to create a blog in the top billionth of a percent that makes money (I may be exaggerating) you have to have a lot of knowledge. You can read about blogging all day, but a lot of that knowledge comes from the experience of running a blog.

Many people I’ve run into say that you can’t just be a blogger any more. You have to be YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. You have to create podcasts. You have to write eBooks and give them away to build your mailing list. That’s just creating content and doing a little networking. I don’t want to get into the advertising side of things. I’ll just state that I have a dozen form letters for different advertisers approaching me about how their great program is going to make us both rich.

One of the things you learn by experience, is that advertisers need publishers, so they offer the world. After you join, you get days when you earn 12 cents.

Blog for the love of the game!

When I started blogging, I didn’t know that people could make money. I thought online advertising was only for ESPNs or the CNETs of the world. It isn’t like Reebok is going to call me up and try to negotiate a deal with me.

That’s the way, I think everyone should look at blogging. Just start something of an online journal. Create information that you think would be beneficial for others, but include some personal stories as well.

If you aren’t a writer, you are going to suck. I sucked too. Everyone has sucked at writing at some point. I was always a math and computer science in high school. I still think I suck, but some people have said I’m good. As always, you the reader, is the ultimate judge.

I do know that I can write this article as a constant stream of thought and intertwine useful information with my personal experience. I certainly couldn’t write anything like this back in 2006. Probably the closest I came was much, much worse and took 3 times as long.

Let’s get started

I’m hoping that by this point, you see some value to creating your blog. I understand that it isn’t for everyone, but if you were on the fence, hopefully I’ve convinced you of the benefits.

Prior to this year, I hadn’t started a blog from scratch in a long, long time. However, with the incoming new year, I launched Be Better Now. The website is a lot like Lazy Man and Money, but focused more on personal development than just money. It is more visually appealing because I include pictures with my articles. It also had no advertising (and probably won’t for at least the first year). I invented some awesome organizational tricks to give you just the information you are looking for. For example, save-money.BeBetterNow.org will give you just tips on saving money. You never have to read articles about health or even investing if that’s not your thing.

In creating Be Better Now, I had to learn things about blogging that I hadn’t come across in a long time. There’s buying a domain name, finding hosting, connecting it all up. Then there’s getting email set-up, creating a blog design, getting all those social media accounts.

It’s a lot. I’m not going to cover it all today, but I’d like to focus on two aspects to get started quickly:

1. Get a host with an easy to install WordPress blog such as 1&1. Maybe it’s because I’m a weird tech nerd, but I find signing up and getting a blog running easier than using Facebook.

2. The next hurdle is picking a theme for your WordPress blog. I would love to give some intelligent advice in this area, but I don’t feel it would be genuine. There are probably hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. It’s too much choice and it is hard to find the perfect theme, though you feel it must be out there. I can only suggest that you go with what’s “good enough” and not waste your time looking for that perfect theme. At the end of the day, it is going to be your writing that matters.

You can have the blog up in minutes and logo design done shortly thereafter. That’s really there is to getting started.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, hosting, logo, make money, Wordpress

Mohu Leaf Winner Announced, More WordPress Cloud, and Links

March 21, 2011 by Lazy Man 8 Comments

It’s time to announce the winner of the Mohu Leaf that I reviewed last week. I was pleasantly surprised by not just the number, but the quality of the comments. Many giveaways lead to quick comments, that are almost borderline spam. However, nearly everyone wrote about their situation or their set-up. They offered some great suggestions too.

Let’s get all the drama out the way. There can only be one winner. The virtual ping pong balls ended on Mike with the comment of

“I’ve gone with OTA for almost 10 months. Initially it was tough to cut back to only the local channels, but not having to pay that $75 a month is worth it. I’m using an antenna that came with the house, but it is not getting all the channels so I’d like to try a new antenna. Also, I’m using a Hauppauge 2250 TV tuner card in an PC as my DVR. No cable bill, no DVR fee, and I can still watch one show and record another.”

I’m thinking of looking into that Hauppauge tuner card myself as it is one of the few that has two tuners. As Mike points out that is necessary to watch one show and record another. Going to a single tuner solution would be a downgrade that wouldn’t sit well with my wife.

Congrats, Mike. You have an email in your in-box. If you get me back your name and address, I’ll be putting one of these in the mail for you.

More WordPress Cloud

My experiment with hosting this site on Amazon Web Services EC2 continues. I have been extremely happy with the performance for the price about 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time, I’m wishing I had access to a Linux server guru who could do a little audit and tell me what I can do to prevent segmentation faults and the like. I may go searching for some such person.

The other thing that I’ve come to realize is that there are a ton of things out there to improve the performance of a WordPress blog. Sure there are the standard tips, and most everyone knows them. However, there were a lot of small things like not loading Jquery javascript library by default that I could cut out. I was able to cut the load time of some of my pages from 14 seconds to 4 seconds. My hope is that gives some of you the incentive to click around the site a little more.

One of the more difficult things to solve was email since many spammers have tainted the Amazon cloud (like all cloud services). I’ve got a patch in place that seems to be working well with Gmail’s SMTP server, but I may need to upgrade to something a little more robust, the cost of which should be minimal.

And if you didn’t understand that last paragraph, because you are not a webmaster, don’t feel bad. I’ve got links, lots of links:

Money Writers:

  • Brip Blap presents 10 tips to avoid money worries.
  • Digerati Life on how to protect your information with these types of paper shredders.
  • Frugal Dad offers ideas to trim (or slash) vacation costs.
  • Generation X Finances posts signs you may be a victim of tax-related fraud.
  • Million Dollar Journey goes over buying foreclosures in Canada – the process.
  • Money Smart Life on wanting what you’ve got.
  • My Dollar Plan wonders what are your options when you owe the IRS money?
  • The Sun’s Financial Diary asks leaving your job? Take your retirement plan with you!

Top PF Posts:

  • The Smarter Wallet says to double check your credit card statements!
  • My Journey to Millions asks can small businesses teach blue chip corporations something about paying profits?
  • Enough Wealth wonders is $7 million enough wealth?
  • DINKS Finance blogs the 6 most ridiculous lawsuits I’ve ever seen.
  • One Money Design talk about how to split rent with roommates.
  • Accumulating Money shares 15 things people forget to budget for.
  • Pop Economics on why we’re going to stop caring about the unemployed.
  • Savvy Saving Bytes presents the 20 most profitable small businesses in USA.
  • The Economic Collapse offers up 14 reasons why the economic collapse of Japan has begun.
  • Mighty Bargain Hunter says your home mortgage debt is not an asset.
  • Hope to Prosper says freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: Cloud, Mohu Leaf Antenna, Wordpress

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