What is the name of your Blog?ForeclosureFish Blog
What is your name?
Nick Adama
Where are you from? (include country, state and/or city)
Chicago, IL
What is your current age or age range?
25-30
Please describe your blog
Our blog provides readers with information that is designed to educate them on how they may be able to stop foreclosure on their own, or at least understand the process a whole lot better. There are many options homeowners may have available to save a home, but they too often end up trusting in someone who sells them on one solution or another, never realizing that they may have more options.
The blog is unique in that it also provides some of the basics of the foreclosure legal process, what banks must prove in court, and how homeowners can use that in their defense. Since so many of them are unable to hire a lawyer for thousands of dollars, they just avoid going to the foreclosure hearings at all, which makes it very easy on the bank to take the house. Understanding even a little bit of how courts work and what options they may have in the court system working with a judge will help these homeowners show the banks that they won't just allow themselves to be pushed around.
Describe the main purpose of your blogging, what are you trying to accomplish?
I'd like to create more of an awareness that homeowners in financial trouble need to educate themselves about the dangers of missing a mortgage payment, as well as what they can do once they are facing foreclosure. Rather than avoiding the lender's collection calls and hiding under a rock until they have recovered and it is too late, property owners should start evaluating their options as soon as they get into trouble.
Too often, homeowners either wait until the last minute and there is a sheriff sale coming up very soon, or they send away thousands of dollars to a company who was supposed to work for them but did nothing. This is a sign of not knowing what options are available at any given time, and the blog is designed to help overcome this obstacle and educate readers about the various options and when they may be appropriate.
What kind of blogs make you angry?
I'm not sure if they make me angry, but blogs that only offer short, spammy posts seem to annoy me when I click on them from a search engine. A short message every day of "we're here to help, click on us" without providing any relevant content or even any content at all is just a waste of my time as a reader, and I can't imagine that such messages would convince any intelligent reader that the blog offers realistic help.
If I'm going to spend the time to read or write a blog, I would like it to have information that has something unique to it. That might be new information that I've never been exposed to, or old information presented in a new way. Short spam posts just to trick search engines and searchers irritate me and provide no useful content to anyone.
Give five of your best blogging tips.
1. Read other people's blogs. 2. Read articles in the mainstream media and on article sites. 3. Watch documentaries or TV specials on related topics, if available. 4. Get away from the computer when facing writer's block and go for a walk/run/drive. 5. Participate in Answers/forum websites, and then expand a short answer into a longer, more detailed blog post on the same topic.
Tip #5 is probably the one I use most frequently, especially in my area of expertise. Answering questions on forums is a great way to participate in the broader community and contribute relevant content to others' sites, as well as a great representation what people are actually wondering about in real life. A four-sentence answer can be expanded to a seven-paragraph blog post exploring many more details. Plus, it offers an actual answer to questions people may be asking.
Did you start blogging for the purpose of making money and if so, are you making enough money?
Not directly, exactly. The main website itself was designed to bring in money more than the blog. But the blog was always to be meant as a main driver of traffic to the site, and it has performed extremely well in that regard. With nearly 400 posts over the past year, it brings in more total traffic than any other part of the site.
So the blog itself does not make any money directly, but it is a good reason to continue providing content that users find relevant, which drives traffic to other pages beyond the blog itself.
Do you use Digg, and why or why not?
I do use Digg, I search for and submit stories. I actually just added it to my blog, and have gotten a fairly decent response so far, and have been working every day on adding new contacts and Digging interesting stories.
I mainly use it because it is quite easy to submit stories, and it helps me later on if I go back through some of the random articles I have Dugg. Sometimes when blogging, I think back to an article I read a few days/weeks ago. I can either spend 15 minutes searching Google for the story or something similar, or I can search through my recently Dugg articles, which is much faster.
So I use Digg quite a lot as a reference material and a way to gradually build more traffic.
What mistakes have you made that you could warn others about?
Having no control over spam when I started blogging. Of course, when no one was reading the blog and search engines didn't know much about it, and there was hardly any content, this was not a problem.
But one day after a few months of blogging and dropping like a stone on search engines, I realized that I had been attacked days ago by hundreds of spambots. Comments, trackbacks, everything was covered in waves of male-supplement and cell phone ringtone offers. That taught me fairly quickly to be a lot more aware of the status of the blog, and I keep trying to make small improvements to keep out the spam.
Having to delete hundreds of comments all at once, though, that had built up after days of ignorance was a large-enough project that it taught me a few lessons.
What is the url of your blog?
ForeclosureFish Blog
