Life as I find it

Ok, so much for me being aware of what is happening in the world. After almost an entire day of surfing John Chow’s site, I finally tried the front page…… and realized that he has a contest going about a bag of goodies that Market Leverage is sponsoring. The bag contains a Flip camera for sure - I really wanted one for adding some video content here…… Then, it contains a USB drive that doubles as a pen…. ipod (the husband won’t let me get close to it even if I win it…..) and a card for 200$ (notice how I am vague on the details?)

The contest post is not exactly invisible, and this is a prime example of how yours truly can lost all perspective when she starts reading

Actually, what’s so special about this is that the bag of goodies contains stuff I want….. like everybody else, and as John himself puts it, it has about the same chance as being struck by lightning…. which is a good chance for me, considering my name means lightning….. actually it is a better chance for the husband……

So now, I’m writing a post about it. Of course my intentions are entirely dishonorable. I probably wouldn’t have written about this at all, if writing about it hadn’t meant that I get entered for the draw that could win me the bag. The bag I want. So the post, I will…

This just goes to show you yet again how well the advice he gives us works. So, what remains is following it. I wonder how many suckers like me are linking to him out of sheer love - for that bag Yeah me too.

As I keep learning and growing from my blogging experiences, I find a certain clarity in me about which were the things I did hat helped me get better viewers. I say better viewership, rather than traffic or comments, because it is people reading your blog that counts, not the comments or traffic.

For the last year, my readership was rather low. My pagerank, Alexa, and whatnots are still low, but expect to see a shift next month, because from the last month onward, there has been a shift in my blogging behaviour. This shift has already started reflecting in my revenue from my blog, and the search traffic that I get. It is a simple matter for it to continue into recorded statistics, and I am not too bothered about that, because, after all, it is the working that matters more than the numbers.

Changes I have already seen. From the last month to this, my traffic has gone higher by 67%, page views by 89%, time spent on the site by 45%, number of pages per visit by 53%. My revenue from this site has doubled (its still pathetically low, but doubled). For one month (actually its mote like 15 days) is good enough

So what is the difference in my behaviour, and how can you get it to work for you?

1. Figuring out what needs to be done: This is important. Take a good, hard, honest look. What is unsatisfying about your blog? What makes YOU avoid it? Plan changes for making it to something you would celebrate. And don’t worry if the list is overwhelmingly long. A blog has no deadline - it should have a schedule, though.
2. Frequency of posting: If you look at my blog archives, you will notice months going by without a post, or a spurt of posts for a day or two followed by silence…… if you look at the postings this month, they are consistent. Strangely, the more I write, the more I want to write. After a gap, it became difficult for me to figure out subjects and write with any clarity.
3. Titles: If you look at earlier titles and the titles now, the titles now create interest, describe the post more accurately…. this helps readers click through to the post and read.
4. Categories: Actually, you can’t see this change to compare. Earlier, my categories were in a state of complete disorder. I had 1 post in “funnies”, “funny” and “humor”. It was the same post. My process was to make a post, asign categories, and create any more descriptive categories that came to mind on the spot. While this made me have a lot of categories, it didn’t help the visitors coming in to read to make a choice. I deleted the lot (almost) and created a comprehensive list. I am now in the process of going through the posts to make them fall into the categories I have. Thus the whole lot of uncategorized posts. It will take a while to get the whole of the thing sorted, but now that I have a direction, I find myself motivated toward the blog, rather than avoiding it.
5. Tags: The same with tags. I got rid of the haphazard tags I had, and am now in the process of planning them out to make more sense. What’s working for me for this is assigning all the tags that I can think of for a post, and then, once all the posts are done, going through the list, to ensure that newly added tags applicable to old posts get added. Then finally, I “weed out” the list of tags to remove the ones that have single or very few posts on them, and are not really descriptive. Thus, done (in progress).
6. Reading: I can’t stress this enough. Once I became aware that I needed to become a better blogger, it was apparent that I was clueless. I applied myself to reading different blogs by more experienced bloggers, blogs with useful tips…… Some of these are problogger.com copyblogger.com JohnChow.com …… no mentioning individual posts, this would become a spam post. Really, there is a wealth of writing out there. All it takes is the will to find out what can be done, and then DOING IT. There are really MANY sites out there and really insightful bloggers. All it takes is curiosity
7. Attention to titles: Luckily (or unluckily) my blog hardly had any deeplinks, so the permalinks changing hardly mattered. Where possible, I kept the permalink same, but edited the title of the post to become more interesting. I edited content I found myself yawning through, and replaced the yawning bits with things I would have prefered to see there. Again, this is work in progress…. will probably take me a long time to do.
8. Commitment: I found that there are some things I like to do, and others that I don’t. I compromise. I alternate between things I like to do, and things I don’t, and keep going. I have promised that I will devote at least a couple of hours everyday till my blog comes out of the ditch I drove it into, and then re-look at the time factor. The key thing is to keep being productive. Think of it like a part-time job.
9. Reading and commenting: Reading is not the only thing that helps. Commenting on the blogs you read helps develop an understanding of the subject matter, simply because you take a small moment to think of what you understood from the post. Not to mention the link to your own blog with the comment helps as well. Over time, I do hope to develop relationships with the writers I admire. That’s the fun of blogging - you can make friends with authors you enjoy, unlike a book……
10. Social bookmarking: Until my search hits happened, I decided to submit content that is good to social networking sites, and linked to it directly while commenting. I guess this can be done with forum signatures, newsletters, or whatever.
11. I’m planning to get a newsletter out with the announcement of the new and improved version of the site, with a promise to not neglect it again and ask for help from my readers in terms of promoting it and feedback. Not done it yet - getting my guts together, I guess.
12. Content: All the while, while this is happening, I have promised myself that I will make at least one post a day. Shouldn’t be too tough at the moment, with so much that I am doing to write about. I’m sitting right there, working on the site, and I love writing. So, it is actually a welcome break from re-organizing that I am enjoying now, while sharing my learnings for those who are interested.
13. Promoting the RSS feed.

Hmmm… so much for now. I love writing so much (or is it another avoidance of spring cleaning?). I’m hoping to make another post with a kind of credit roll for all the individual posts that helped me through this transition.

I found an “experiment” to increase Technorati authority. For bloggers, it is all important to have good authority on technorati for some reason. Whom am I fooling? That reason IS traffic.

However, something like this to increase that authority is a little too much. Who really is sitting idle there waiting to link random blogs together (AND update such random nonsense everyday!)? I guess plenty enough people. This is part of why most really good writers are less visible. They have no time to pander to bizarre measures nor the inclination.

What this “experiment” is, is no experiment, it is a link farm in a blog. There is a post with a list of links to other blogs, who have a similar list on theirs. As people join the project, they comment, and get added to the list, which is supposed to register as lots and lots of links with technorati, thus raising their authority. What in the world makes them think that their “gains” from technorati are not going to go reverse with search engines?

Uh…. that doesn’t mean I’m too good for such stuff. Actually, I AM good, but not because I don’t have the time, its simply because I don’t find it worthwhile to play these games. Not even for traffic (which is something most bloggers seem to sell their soul for). What experiment does it take to know that link lists are read by sites that count links? Worse, what does it take to know that this is basically worthless the minute some algorithm figures it out, and then its penalty bait.

How much traffic is enough traffic? And what is the point where we say… okay, I’m not going to post links that I have no respect for, because I have traffic, and now I would like some self-respect? Uh… never, I guess, unless we begin.

I feel a little disillusioned when I see such processes gain such popularity. Has anyone realized that Technorati getting hold of this link list is the one thing they don’t want, if they wish to retain their gains?

Sigh!

I don’t earn much from this blog, but hey, I’m having a blast writing, and I DO earn enough to not be spending for it. There is steady growth in traffic without spending a rupee for it. People come back, if you make an effort to write well.

I guess it would be too much to hope for that people use the daily devotion time to updating such lists to actually creating content that would gain them links that readers would enjoy, search engines would respect, and technorati would credit?

Thought I’d write something different this time. As more and more users access the net from their phones, it could be a good thing to design a version of the website that is suitable for mobile browsing.

Information abounds about how to adapt an existing site to mobiles like Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes. This information is easy to find, and is a good step I guess.

On my to-do list currently, is a way of identifying visitors using mobile phones and redirecting them to the mobile version. Failing that, I can always put up a link to the mobile version.

Another thing I would like to do is rewrite my content so that it is brief - in the sense that it mentions the salient points of the subject and the length of the pages is short, links are better manages, etc.

Some tips I have made out for myself to design the site:

• Planning a simple site with no columns, css, javascript, images and other stuff that could delay loading or clutter the tiny screens.
• Creating an edited version of the content to convey salient points - more information than entertainment.
• Changing the link structure to remove alt tags and using immediately relevant links with some logical deeper links, rather than the bulk of deep links available on the original site.
• I don’t use pop-ups at all, but going through the code in any case to look at links that open in new windows and stuff. I doubt if anyone is going to appreciate losing the page they were on.
• Figuring out links to switch between the mobile and normal version.