What is the name of your Blog?
Is Your Pet Food Safe? The Holistic Pet Food Blog
What is your name?
Teresa
Where are you from? (include country, state and/or city)
Denver, Colorado
What is your current age or age range?
52
Please describe your blog
The Holistic Pet Food Blog a place for the average person to get pet food advice from someone "in the know". You might find articles about ingredients, such as, do you believe the hype about beet pulp or roadkill in your pet food? Or research you'll never see anywhere else on pet food recalls. And there are articles on how nutrition might just improve your pet's particular health problem.
Describe the main purpose of your blogging, what are you trying to accomplish?
It's all about getting humans to see the importance of not feeding our pets "crap".
What blogging platform do you do and why?
I use the free Wordpress.com mainly because they do a terrific job of promoting your blogs. You can very quickly see a few hundred hits a day without having done any blog blasting. And it's great for the beginner because so much of the work is done for you.
What do you blog the most about?
I mostly blog about pets because I do animal rescue that they are my passion, but I have several other blogs. For example, I am a marathon runner with Team in Training, which raises funds to fight leukemia. Last year, I blogged about going from a couch potato to an "elite athlete" and this year, I'm blogging about helping other people to learn how to run marathons.
What kind of blogs make you angry?
I really hate blogs where people post bad news without having done any homework. Like, this recent Optima pet food recall. It *only* affects mainland China but people blogged without doing homework and that just scares pet owners everywhere and maybe makes them turn away from a good food. It's just wrong to post damaging news without checking the facts.
Give five of your best blogging tips.
1. Do your homework. 2. Keep it simple. 3. Write with passion. 4. Write to a specific audience. 5. Monetize if you can. Use Google AdSense. In this economy, your blog might just save the day!
What are some things you would NEVER blog about?
Woo, is anything really off limits? I don't blog about things I know about my friends and family. You never know who's looking at your blog and I don't know them to be hurt or offended by my telling a confidence online.
Did you start blogging for the purpose of making money and if so, are you making enough money?
My first blogs were just daily "journals". I had no intent to make money. But the pet food blog changed all of that, by accident, and now, yes, I do make money. Google AdSense is an amazing, amazing tool. "Set it and forget it". You can't use it on the Wordpress.com blogs but Blogger and freeblogit love it. I did eventually learn how to discreetly make money on the Wordpress blogs. I'm thinking about writing a few blog articles on how to use blogging to make money in your various businesses, affiliate links, adsense, and all that.
How long have you been blogging?
About three or four years.
About how many hours per day do you spend blogging?
One hour or less on most weekdays. At least four hours per day on the weekends. That's when I "schedule" my articles for publication throughout the coming week.
Do you track RSS feeds and if so, how many do you usually track daily?
Yes, I track about six daily and I have a collection of Blogger blogs that I "follow" about once a week.
Do you use Digg, and why or why not?
Not so much. I haven't been able to see how it drives traffic to me so I don't spend so much time on it, any more.
Do you use Stumbleupon, and why or why not?
Never tried it.
What promotional techniques work best for you and why?
Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, and other Q&A boards, believe it or not. You write a short, great answer to someone's pet question -- sort of using a "trusted authority" technique of magnetic attraction --- and you refer to an article you saw on the The Holistic Pet Food Blog. Your answers actually pop up in the Top Ten in Yahoo and Google searches and you get a ton of free traffic!
If you could post a blog on any blog in the world, which one would it be and why?
Itchmo. Some guy in Seattle named that blog up after his itchy dog! During the pet food recalls of 2007, he jumped from a few hits a day to over a million a day. He discontinued the blog last year, I'm not sure why. But it was the best pet blog ever.
What mistakes have you made that you could warn others about?
1. Don't use WordPress if you do any monetizing! 2. If you have a "risky" blog, set it up under it's own account! 3. Don't get greedy!
I had an original "safe pet food" blog that was hugely successful. With 1300 visitors a day, I got greedy and started posting affiliate links with click trackers. THAT is a HUGE No No on Wordpress.com. They shut down my whole account, along with another half dozen very successful blogs. That was not a good day, when that happened!
What are your top five blogging site picks and why?
I'm not sure I have an answer for that one. "How to blog" sites? I just learned on my own.
Have you met anyone offline as a result of your blog?
Hmmm... not in person. But I've developed quite a few very good friends.
Do you think blogging for money will increase as a result of this recession?
Absolutely. Think about it. When you can set up a blog for free on Blogger and you can get an AdSense account for free, and you can earn anywhere from $50 to $500 just based on how well you write and what kind of an audience you pull in, why NOT blog? It's zero risk and all profit. So I think savvy people will stumble across articles on monetizing and they'll monetize their blogs, and they'll tell their friends, and blogging for profit will grow exponentially.
What is the url of your blog?
Is Your Pet Food Safe? The Holistic Pet Food Blog
