A New Zennie62 Blog Under Construction

A new Zennie62 blog is under construction, and about 60 percent complete, but well enough along the way to show you and ask you to check it out.

It’s called Zennie62Blog.com and you can see it here: http://zennie62blog.com . It reflects a switch from Blogger to WordPress for this flagship blog of the 96 blogs in the network, and also a switch from “free” to a paid hosted server environment.

I had the idea for a while, but Executive Editor Nikky Raney, who prefers Blogger, was understandably resistant. But after Google focused more on “original content” as a factor in Google News submissions, and because we were producing original content, and Google wasn’t favoring Blogger blogs for Google News (even though Zennie62.com was on it) I started to think about a switch.

Also, I’d taken the Zennie62.com blog as far as it could go in template changes on the Blogger platform. The simple fact is Google has not installed a full permalink system on Blogger, so what we get are URLs that don’t have all of the words in a blog title, if the title is longer than four words. So you have to do a “workaround” just to deal with that problem.

It’s a huge problem because it means that one word which may cause you to get more traffic because it’s in your URL is left out of Blogger’s permalink design.

That can translate into thousands of dollars of lost potential ad revenue. Moreover, WordPress does not have that problem; I think its something Google does deliberately to counter the wave of massive impact millions of well-optimized Blogger blogs would have on the media climate today.

There’s a reason even Matt Cutts, Google’s Engineering “public face” switched from Blogger to WordPress a few years ago. I should have taken Matt’s cue and did it then, but I was stubbornly married to the idea that I could push my Blogger blogs to new levels of performance. I did that, but now and with what I’ve learned, I want to apply that to this new, even more powerful blog under development.

Making this switch is not easy, but it’s worth it. I feel like I’m building the new Enterprise.

It means learning a new programming language, PhP, “on the go.” It means locating a good hosting service, finding the appropriate design theme, then one-by-one, installing the files from that theme into the server. It means re-coding some files to meet certain needs, particularly in the area of Google AdSense ads. It means working on a strategy to transfer the remaining blogs posts, after already moving over 7,000 posts to the new blog.

And it means working on a system to transfer links and URLs to the new blog so that a search allows a reader to come to the new blog, rather than the old one.

The Zennie62 Blogger blog will be used as “Zennie2005.blogspot.com” and a place for YouTube video placement and for occasional blog posts pointing to activities at Zennie62Blog. Eventually, “Zennie62.com” will point at the new blog, and be the “go to URL” for it. But I prefer to keep “Zennie62Blog” for SEO purposes.

The process of making the new blog from scratch has been exciting; I love the challenge of building new platforms.

First, WordPress just may be the most powerful blog platform on the planet today (which is old news to some of you). Second, Google seems to have deliberately avoided making a Blogger that completes with WordPress in the area of SEO. Even before my focus on it, the Zennie62Blog.com platform started to be listed on Google and generate comments for existing blog posts! Third, the new Zennie62Blog.com is already Google News ready, as I have found plugins specifically for that purpose, and installed them.

Zennie62Blog.com will be positioned to compete with news blogs from PerezHilton.com to The Huffington Post and ProFootballTalk as well as Red State and the great liberal blogs at Banter Media. While that may seem like a tall order to some, let me inform you we have over 9,000 blog posts going back to 2005. We also have the 96 Blogger blogs to use to “point” at the new blog – those blogs will remain and with their own unique content.

We have the over 2,000 videos on what will be called the Zennie.tv video network. And we have our social media and broadcasting base, including what stands at almost 30,000 Twitter Followers, with an objective of 1 million. That’s the perfect foundation from which to build this new blog and explains why I assert we’re in a great place to catch those blogs.

Finally, as Old Media continues to prove it’s not capable of succeeding in the digital space, this is the best time to attack. To strike while the iron is hot. Blogs will rule media in the 21st Century, and with over 70,000 blogs made each day as of this writing, that forecast is becoming all the more true each day.

Stay tuned.