While many people were vacationing, relaxing, and whatnot during the three day weekend, I was taking the opportunity to do something that needed to be done for a long time. I moved my photography blog, my husband’s HDR photography blog, and several other WordPress sites that were on HostGator to GoDaddy. Yes, you read that right. And yes, I’m using an affiliate link as I use and support their services.

Why I Chose to Go All GoDaddy

I know that a lot of my readers have suggested HostGator over GoDaddy, and so I gave it a try for about six months. While I believe that a lot of people have had great experiences with HostGator and less than stellar ones with GoDaddy, my experience was much different so I thought I would give a little insight into why I made the switch.

Less Downtime with GoDaddy

This was the biggest motivator for moving my sites. Every site I had on my HostGator account would go down a minimum of what felt like once a week, and sometimes it would be in bursts once a day.

HostGator has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and they were pretty darn close to it according to my Pingdom reports. I started this service on one of my HostGator sites (Photo Ninjas) and Kikolani, and the following are summaries of my websites for the month of April.

While 40 outages and a downtime over 2 hours still does make for 99.71% uptime, it’s just not good enough. Especially when a lot of the outages happened during the day which meant our photo sites lost out on a lot of traffic and comments. For this site, it would mean a loss of mailing list subscribers and sales, ie. not acceptable!

I feel like I’ve been in a more opinionated mood recently, and I hope that is alright with you, my readers. I have a nice juicy “how to” post for next week though, so don’t fear!

Today I wanted to share with you, pun intended, why I share what I share through Twitter and my Fetching Friday posts.

Changing My Approach

In the last few weeks, I have been changing up my strategies quite a bit, from taking the time to comment on blogs to turning off my Twitterfeed and other social media automation services.

The reason why is because I have become somewhat obsessed with the quality of what I give to the audience I have built. I know that in the past, I have shared things simply because someone was my friend and they asked, because I felt the need to reciprocate something of theirs for all they have shared of mine, or because I maybe just wanted to get on someone’s radar (yes, guilty as charged).

Now, I am taking the time to only share things that I really feel are essentially awesome.

This is a guest post by Chris The Traffic Blogger.

“So did you read that awesome post I wrote yesterday on 101 ways to motivate bloggers to write better?” I asked into my Bluetooth during one of those random conversations on the road with my mother.

“No,” she replied, “why would I read your blog when I can just ask you questions that I have in person?”

Dumbfounded that my own mom didn’t read my blog, I began to realize that I was missing a very large piece of the blogging puzzle which helps grow and sustain a blog of any size: reader interaction and engagement.

In a single word, my blog was missing conversation. If all I had to offer was my opinion, then my blog was more like a column in a newspaper than a place for people to interact with myself and others in order to discuss the ideas I brought forth in my writing.

Photo Credit

Lead, Don’t Dominate Conversations

How can you build a community out of your blog where discussion is paramount? For starters, you need the right mindset. Instead of just writing for random strangers, you need to start writing to a specific group of people.

Disclaimer: Please note that the following post is purely my own opinions about the subject at hand, and I’m not trying to tell anyone how to run the show on their blog. I am simply offering another perspective and some things to consider before putting objectionable content on your blog.

There has been what seems to be a surge of bloggers who are getting into the “shock and awe” side of blogging by going against the grain with some relatively colorful language, explicit images, and controversial stirrups.

Photo Credit

The question isn’t whether these tactics work at drumming up comments, social shares, response posts, and recognition for the authors as the heroes of free speech because for the most part, they do. The real question is, after the feathers have been ruffled and settle back again, will it be worth it?

Questions to Ask Yourself

Everything you choose to do with your content really depends on your purpose for blogging – what you hope to obtain, not just from one post but as a whole from your blog. Here are some simple questions to determine if you are on a good path.

Who Is Your Intended Audience?

Let’s first think about your intended audience. Are they just regular people who enjoy a little bit of everything? Are they businesses who are looking for great advice to share with their employees or clients? Are they your clients or potential clients? Are they people who you influence that would want to emulate you?

What Are Your Blogging Goals?

Next, let’s think about your goals in blogging. Are you just trying to see how much traffic and comments you can drum up? Are you looking to make waves or change the way blogging is done? Or are you trying to drum up business for a company, whether it is your own or someone else’s?

Would You Want Your Post to be a First Impression

Think about the most potentially offensive, controversial, line-crossing post you have on your site.

Now think about that being the first post that someone will read visit on your blog, and essentially their first impression of you.

Going back to your answer about your target audience and your goals, would this be an acceptable first impression for that audience that would lead to the achievement of those goals?