Working at Home on the Internet

Change is Not Easy

If anyone asks you how many posts it takes to run out of things to write about… It’s 300…

I’m just kidding. This just happens to be my 300th post on the Working at Home on the Internet Blog. It started life with at different name, “Self Improvement by Working at Home”.

I never really liked that name, but I tried various titles for the blog even before that. Work at Home in any form was taken and I was trying to find a way to fit into the niche. I thought that Working at Home was an improvement over working for someone else in an office, so I grabbed the first name available.

I had registered the Blog with every service that I could under that name, from FeedBurner to Technorati. The problem was, I still didn’t like the name. I found that changing the name on Blogger was quite easy, so I made the transition to Working at Home on the Internet.

That’s when I found out the hard way that change is not easy. I had a small following… of loyal readers, some of whom I haven’t seen since the change. I attribute this to the way I just changed and didn’t really promote it correctly.

I made all the changes on every feed and subscriber service I belonged to, but I neglected to do a pre-change promotion. Even thought I didn’t change the URL, people had subscribed to various services by the name of the Blog. This lead to a loss of readership for which I was not prepared.

I have more that recovered from that original loss and have actually built a decent following since. The reason I bring all of this up is, I am considering another change. Actually, it is Two Major Changes.

SEO has stagnated. I think the major reason for this is my URL mcbsconsulting.blogspot.com has nothing to do with Working at Home as far as searches are concerned. I do get some results with the Blog name since the Title contains the right Keywords and I have so many posts floating around the internet.

I have found a few possibilities for a Domain Name, workingathomeinternet(dot)com/net/biz that I feel could help in the area of SEO. It doesn’t cost too much to buy the domain(s) but it is a Major Change.

The other consideration is that Blogger (Blogspot) has been having major problems with their server, uploading, saving drafts and publishing. This is not a small thing when you try to pre-write posts and publish at least once a day. That leads to another possible problem, will a new hosting service be any more reliable than Blogger?

These have to be addressed, sooner rather than later. I do worry that, since these are such major changes, I would have to start over from scratch. I have invested a lot of time trying to get established. I don’t want it all to be for naught.

I also can’t see waiting too much longer and just hoping for the best. That will just augment the problems and be worse in the long run.

A Blogger friend of mine, Chris Cree over at CREEations has just made the move from a Blogger Blog to his own domain. I hope he doesn’t mind me watching how things go with his move before I make my decision.

Stay tuned for further developments.

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June 13th, 2006 at 12:12pm | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Basics, Blogging, Organization | 13 reader remarks | Print This Post