If your blog generates traffic but isn’t profitable and looks unprofessional, your choice is pretty clear.  Either continue with this losing proposition that is also a waste of your valuable time or scrap it and start over.  Starting over doesn’t have to be as scary a thought as it may seem though.  If your blog is bring traffic, making that traffic work for you with a new and more professional blog just makes sense.  People are already visiting your blog, that traffic is an asset you have but because of the condition of this blog and what you didn’t know when you started it, you are not properly capitalizing on that traffic.

Many people dislike the idea of scrapping a blog and starting over because they have an emotional attachment to that first blog.  Sometimes people like to keep their first blog as an illustration of how far their skills have come.  While this is understandable in some cases, it doesn’t make sense when you can improve your income by scrapping that blog and starting over.  Often you don’t have to scrap the entire blog, you can preserve the content and the posts, only scrapping the design elements and overall setup of the blog.

While experienced bloggers are often very successful in their online money making ventures, odds are that they didn’t start out that way.  Every blogger has a first blog and there is no way that it exhibits the same sort of professionalism and polish that there current blog or blogs do.  That original blog may not be currently in the shape that they can be proud of, but it does most likely still retain some value in terms of traffic or content.  To not redo that original blog to some extent just doesn’t make financial success at all.

So yes, while it is true that you should be passionate about your subject matter, you must also know what you’re talking about or you will not be giving your readers any reason to come back.

What other options are there though when it comes to varying the permalink structure of a blog?

The default setting will make the URLs of your post look like this: yourdomainname.com/?p=123

Through the admin panel, the following optional configurations are available:

Day and name, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/2008/07/11/post-name/
Month and name, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/2008/07/post-name/
Numeric, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/archives/123

But, Wordpress also allows you to insert a custom structure. Using the custom feature, you can assign a different set up to the URL’s of your blog posts. The set up that we use here at ItsABlogThing.com is: yourdomainname.com/category-name/post-name

In doing this, the URL for the individual post will end up having the domain name, the category that describes what the post is about, and the post name in it. This is but one way to go about having custom URLs through Wordpress, many also prefer to have the URL be just the domain name followed by the post name which is also a good way to go. The best permalink structures to use allow the URL to describe exactly what the page or post is about. The only way to do this is to alter the permalink structure that comes as the default setting with Wordpress.