31 months later
Posted on July 1, 2007
14 Comments
Just over two and a half years ago I made my first enthusiastic “Hello World” blog post. I was naive and eager and ready to make my mark on the world. A lot of the posts from my first 9 months are long gone as I didn’t bother to save all of them when I migrated to WordPress in November of that year. In most cases, you didn’t miss much and that’s really a blessing.
I’ve learned a lot along the way. Being a “long tail” blogger is an interesting (and well populated) niche to play in and it seems to call for some expectation management.
I’ve learned to not pay as much attention to stats and to calm down about traffic. I’ve just recently learned to relax a bit on posting frequency. The rest of this article goes into more details.
Post Frequently or Consistently
Here’s a tip you’ll see frequently: Get a posting schedule going and commit to it. I’m going to say that we long tail folks can ignore that nugget of wisdom. It no doubt works for the “pro” bloggers or those backed by a corporation, but I don’t think it really matters for we common folk.
On any given day, approximately 80% of my traffic comes from search engines. These are folks who don’t give a rats butt about how often I post or what my most recent article is about. They’re here to read something I wrote in the past and continue on with whatever project had them visiting a search engine in the first place.
Now sure, a few of them may like what they read and come back or subscribe to the feed, but as near as I can tell, that’s a very small conversion rate. Perhaps the “What Would Seth Godin do” plugin would help with this, but I didn’t like seeing the “welcome message” it adds show up in my search results and ping/trackbacks.
I bet I could stop posting for the next month and my avg. daily page view numbers wouldn’t change one iota.
I’ve just recently stopped forcing myself to churn out a post every day. In looking back, that (self) expectation has led to some posts that were clearly just cranked out to specifically meet my goal. They tended to be on the weak side. Making the decision to ease up caused a load of unidentified stress to lift off my back.
Side Note: This will be post number 870. I suspect I’d be over 1000 if I hadn’t dumped so many old posts when I migrated to WordPress. Over 1800 comments have been left. Considering I started this as a lark, I’m kind of impressed. And hey, for you commenters? Thanks!
Get In on the Discussions, Get Some Traffic
It took me a long time to figure out I shouldn’t get caught up in the stats. I still enjoy checking my numbers, but I no longer check multiple times a day and obsess when a day seems under the curve. There’s a fine line between analysis and obsession.
Don’t even get me started on trying to track feed readers. Generally, Feedburner seems to do a great job. But with my relatively small reader count, I’m always surprised to see 10 - 20% fluctuations from day to day. Are there really that many people subscribing and unsubscribing daily, or is there still a bit of voodoo in counting these things?
Comment on other blogs
It is said that if you comment on other blogs in your niche, you’ll help drive traffic to your own blog. Pfft. What a load of hooey. The referral percentage, that I’ve seen at any rate, is less than 1%. Not that you shouldn’t comment on other blogs! Just don’t do it solely to drive traffic. Do it to keep the conversation going and give some feedback to the writers. Lord knows, bloggers like to hear some feedback from time to time! We might as well offer some to each other.
Carry on the Discussion on Your Own Blog, Use Track or Ping backs
This one I tend to agree with — depending on your target. Send the trackback to one of the self-proclaimed (or popularly acclaimed) A-Listers and expect it to be ignored. But every now and then a non A-Lister may pick up on it and toss a link back your way and get a nice back-and-forth series going.
Link Trains
Bah, don’t bother. The volume generated isn’t worth the embarrassment of seeing those posts 6 months later. Your readers will probably skip over it. The SEO folks will descend on you.
Create a Download
A common way to get some interest and volume is to create a WordPress theme or plugin. I’ll concede that this can indeed work quite well. Granted, you have to adjust to the fact that here’s another steady load of traffic that’s interested in your download, not any of your other articles. Converting them to regular readers seems difficult for me.
To be honest, generating traffic just for traffic’s sake is silly. Why bust your butt to get a post on Digg? And hey, if that was my goal, this would be a “top 10 things…” kind of post. Most of the folks ain’t ever going to be back (see the search comment above). Hoping for ad clicks or impressions? You think Digg readers click ads? That leads us to…
Monetization
I really have little to offer here. I’ve experimented with Google’s Adsense and Text Link Ads this year. I’m pleased to report that they generated almost exactly enough revenue to pay for next year’s hosting. And really, that’s all I want to expect.
I’ll be re-evaluating both at some point. Adsense seems steady enough, but I burn a fair amount of “above the fold” space for TLA that I can’t seem to fill at my traffic levels. I think I’m just too small.
I’ve recently added an Amazon affiliate thing to some sidebars just to see what happens. Below the fold though, so that’ll need to be looked at again in the near future.
Regardless of hopes and dreams I might’ve had 2 years ago, I don’t believe a full-time blogging career is in my future. Not with me writing at my current level. But that’s why I blog — to practice writing more better. 
If my thoughts on “pro” changes, I’ll re-evalute this topic then (of course!).
Focus
I tend to buy into the “keep your articles focused to a common topic” approach. If you get regular visitors stopping by for your cheeseburgers, don’t dump fried calamari on them next week. It just confuses people.
That being said, I don’t see any harm with “lifting the curtain” once in a while and showing that the author is a human too.
Where I initially messed up was that a lot of my original (mostly gone) posts would have a paragraph or two about family stuff, then a paragraph or two about work and then a paragraph about some interesting technology bright shiny object. I tried to please all the readers and likely chased off many — who wants to wade through that gunk?
Also on the topic of focus, I’ve learned to write shorter paragraphs. Shorter sentences. Adding section headings seems to generally be a good thing as well. Anything to help break up the “one big huge block of text” effect that (I know from experience myself) scares away readers.
Do Follow / No Nofollow
Back in February I joined the movement celebrating the removal of nofollow tags from my comments (more on that here and here). In my most recent post on the topic, I bemoaned the potential for a low-grade yet annoying type of abuse. 3 weeks later, it’s getting to the severely annoying point. I’m this -||- close to forgetting about the whole thing.
I love comments. I love sharing “real” links. It’s the right thing to do.
However, I’m damned tired of trying to decide when the links are real and when they’re bogus and just hoping for a real link back. And like most things in life, if it becomes a constant irritant, it must be time to do something about it. Soon. I can’t take much more of the SEO folks continually trying to wedge their domain into comments in various and “clever” ways. In fact, this has caused me to lose respect for a large portion of the SEO expert community. Not all of them, mind you — just most.
Conclusion
There you go, if you made it this far, pat yourself on the back — and then drop some comments with things you’ve learned as a casual, non “pro” blogger. Or let me know where you disagree, I’m all ears.
I might do a part two on this, there are certainly other things I’ve learned… but this is already too long as it is.
Tags: AdSense, amazon, blog, dofollow, feedburner, longtail, SEO, stats, text-link-ads, tip
Possibly Related Posts
Comments
14 Responses to “31 months later”
Leave a Reply
Allow me to beat you to the punch - this should’ve been 30 months later, not 31! Apologies for my silly math mistake.
This is really a refreshing post. As a new blogger myself all I am reading is articles about post quotas etc. It just doesn’t seem to fit. I hope to churn out useful information that can be referenced as needed. I do obsess over stats though. I look forward to growing out of that.
I echo Greg’s assessment- definitely a refreshing post and one that reflects my approach more closely that those I’m constantly reading that say you must post at least once a day or maybe twice. I suppose it all depends on what your goal is. I just want to be as relevant and helpful as I can and have fun doing it. If I don’t have anything helpful and interesting to offer then there’s no need to post.
If you’re really irritated by the comment thing, maybe you should install the plugin that allows you to set the number of comments a person has to leave before their links are followed? Seems that would address your problem. (can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head)
The great thing about WordPress theme creation is not necessarily the traffic, but rather it’s all the backlinks you get. (and it’s just nice to provide something free to people)
Wow, what a great post. This is exactly the kind of blogging that I want to do. I’ve been thinking about whether or not to continue blogging, especially since I lost my AdSense “rights”. Your post is helping me put things into perspective.
I haven’t posted in almost two weeks because I was on vacation and then really sick. In that time my subscriber count increased 5% lol.
Silence is golden I guess.
Your “Focus” paragraph is one I’ve been struggling with, my most recent post completely lacks any, but that was sort of the point of it so I’m OK with that. I commented on my post that there’s going to be more of ‘me’ in the posts because I feel like I’m pretending to be something I’m not when I leave the personal out. I’ll keep it to distinct posts so ppl can come to the blog for the posts that interest them and ignore the ones that don’t (I do that with some techy ones. If it’s got mac, linux or rails in the title I pretty much just mark it read and move on.)
All in all, one of your best posts in a while though. It wasn’t dry or personality free in an attempt to be professional. It’s good to hear your voice again.
I don’t get enough bad comments that make it to moderation that I have a big spam problem. My biggest problem is the number of ppl named mzxiuck that keep registering as users that I have to remove by hand. I wish there were a way to moderate user registration in wordpress.
@Greg - thanks for dropping by. Best of luck in not obsessing about stats in the future.
@Randa - As always, you bring up good points! I know the plugin of which you speak and it just may be the ticket. At least it would stop the drive-by SEO types that are just grabbing the link because I showed up in a “do follow” list.
Good point on the backlinks too. I’ve only done plugins, not much change for such stuff there. Maybe I should release a theme soon.
@GTD W - I’ve found many of your posts helpful in the past, so glad I could return the favor.
@Rich - thanks for the kind words.
I had a great post planned for tonight, but I just finished driving in to the office to recover from a power failure (doing this while waiting for servers to come back up). Ah well. With my memory, the idea for the post will be long gone by tomorrow
All your talk of GTD, even mentioning you’ve found GTD-W’s posts helpful in the past and you didn’t have a capture device to jot down ideas while you wait for the servers to come back online?
Oh wait… you did… you wrote that comment.
Wow, this has to be one of the most honest blog post, i’ve read all these times. I’ve been blogging from last couple of years (almost same time) and believe me, I’ve learned same things which you’ve learned!
I hardly care about stats any more, I do care about traffic but the one which can build community around my blog…not the one which gives the boost.
Link Train : I got away with them too…but now I think they are waste of time!
Great post! Stumbled (and not digged :D)
Great post.
@ReviewSaurus - So glad you liked it. I need to puzzle out the community aspects some day. That’s where the real fun of it all is.
@”Pregnant” - thank you!
I can agree to lots of this, I’m a long time blogger and I also found out for myself much of what you found out. There is only one thing that I found a bit curious, how can you make so little money on text link ads? I make enough money on text link ads in a month to cover a year of hosting.