great post, as usual. my blog started a few weeks ago, but i had another blog before tht that was about 6 months old. I think that a blog is still considered “young” until it’s one years old, so im def in that Young catergory!

all the best,
renee

I’m still having fun with my blog and trying not to let it stress me out.

As always, another fantastic post by Darren! Good job!!!

That said, there’s a lot of great partnerships to be made out there, without letting people latch onto all your ideas.

one “feature” of google’s algo (that is often exploited by spammers) is that it treats every sub domain as a new domain, so the efficiency of this tactic is a bit questionable. Also, the aging delay is actually measuring the age of incoming links to the blog, not the domain itself, so again, simply using a wordpress.com or blogspot address doesn’t solve the “sandbox” problem.

Keep in mind, however, that the Sandbox is only in place on some selected keywords and phrases, but not all. As a result, your blog can still rank highly, and perhaps for the phrases that are the most important for your blog’s niche readership. Keep building content and natural links and the Sandbox time will pass leaving your regularly posted blog in a very strong position.

Don’t worry too much about that little green line on the Google toolbar. It’s hopelessly out of date, and the amount of Google PageRank displayed is not the same level as Google uses in its search engine ranking algorithm. The reason that the publicly displayed green line is about two to three months (or more) out of date is to prevent link sales based on PageRank.

Don’t obsess too much about PageRank either as it’s no longer a major component of the Google search algorithm calculations. While it measures the relative importance of a page on the internet, based on the number and importance of the inbound links, it’s only one factor of well over one hundred. More important is maintaining theme relevance and providing good content that attracts natural links.

The fresh content provided by your blog will serve you very well on the search engines.

So that and the setting priorites are our toughest issues. Luckily with a news blog the rest pretty much falls into place :)

Before I started, I jotted down about 30 post ideas to see if there was any hope of still wanting to write a month from now. I had no trouble doing that. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m trying to brace myself for when the traffic falls off tomorrow and I’m realize that it’s really just a brand new blog with no traffic that happened to get a bunch of people to magically appear over a couple days. That way I can get back to trying to build for the long term instead of trying to recreate that kind of one-off traffic surge.

I also think that it’s one you will find difficult to carry on over a long period of time but you might be able to feed of the comments your readers leave.

I liked the way you didn’t try and claim ‘expert’ status – you’re just a dad working at the coal face and that should appeal to a lot of ordinary dads :)

But it does get frustrating to start a niche and then nothing happens, and I am always amazed when you start a blog and out of nowhere you have thousands of hits.

But my best advise is to read other blogs every day to keep you motivate.

I have been blogging for nearly 3 years now and I know how extremely frustrating it gets at times.

There have been other times I have started blogs and just let them die out or have deleted them just because though the concept seems good at the start, it just isn’t worth the effort.

have decided to cocentrate all my energy into a single blog. Hopefully it works out :)