Life as I find it

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.

So, you want to earn more faster, get better clicks, etc. Join the club.

I’m just sharing a few of the things that seem to work for me and are relatively hassle free.

• Write, write, write. Not like this blog. Write regularly. This brings regular visitors to your blog and helps the search engines keep their attention on you.
• Don’t worry too much about super planned keywords and content. Of course, be relevant, but write naturally. Cramming keywords into an unintelligible mess is not going to make visitors want to visit.
• Its far easier to write three quick and easy posts than try and include all the keywords you want into the one post. Reads more natural, more posts for less time.
• Focus on more than the money. Like they say men can smell a needy woman from far and run away, so can a visitor. You don’t want to give, don’t be surprised if people don’t want to stay
• Enjoy your writing. Write with passion. If you’re passionate about subjects that attract better ads, great. If not, enjoy even then!
• Think of angles you can include in your posts that sell better.
• Read around to see what others are doing, incorporate when you can, but if you find yourself obsessed, think of the posts you could write in the same time you spend nit picking.
• SEO happens automatically if your writing is clear and concise. If you’re not good with writing, work on that. It will help you with readers, search engines and ads.

I’m learning elaborate ways of checking backlinks, figuring out keywords and figuring out new keywords to use on the site. It takes a lot of time to learn all these. Which actually begins with learning to use the tools, then you have a list, and then you go around customizing your site so that it works better like that.

Honestly, at the risk of being beaten to death by all the wise SEO gurus all over the web, I found nothing that saved me time and worked more efficiently than what I already do, and it is totally free too.

I login to my Google sitemaps account. That’s also the same place where I submit my sitemaps to google, BTW.

I go and check the links to my site. Great. Done. Then, I go and download the search keywords for the entire site and take a look at them. It takes some patience, but basically, I look for things I came in the search results for, but not clicked through, and then see which of them are things I would like to get clicked through for.

Then, I either adjust an existing page so the title sounds more inviting (yeah I got loads of bad titles from my days of ignorance) and take a look at it to see if I can write it better, or create a page about it, and put it somewhere appropriate in the site. Done.

Honestly, this learning curve for figuring out backlinks and keywords is worthless when compared with this. For me at least. Since I started learning, I’m only fiddling around reading lengthy reports and suggestions, and aiming to get every keyword under the sky on my site. The old system was better me thinks. Listing positives:

1. I spent more time working on my site than with software reading my site.
2. If google has some amount of back links, other engines have them too. Its not something I can insert my finger in and sit and it will become better. I submit, don’t I? Its time to trust them to do their jobs, and get back to mine.
3. I get loads of keyword ideas just looking at the search data. And honestly, as long as I’m writing about my subject, how wrong can I be in expressing the topic? I’m not exactly writing aimless shit that needs to be decorated with words to tell engines what it is. I’m writing what it is already.
4. While the keyword analysis will probably give me an edge, even being careful to use the important words relevant to what I’m writing will promote my subject. And, I will have the time from analysis to devote to content as well, like right now. I’m not trying to figure out what will sell “Nerd in Progress”. I’m simply being Nerd in Progress, which I think is a good idea, and letting the rest happen.
5. Back links are overrated anyway. I hardly have any backlinks and I still come first for many searches and first page for even more. The back links are slightly higher these days, but again, I haven’t really done anything about them as yet. Its a project for “one day”
6. Keywords are also overrated. If my site, which was pretty terribly written initially and got reworked over and over for the content to be good for the subject (let alone keywords and search engines) can come in the first page of results for several words related with it, why wouldn’t any decent writer who can be genuine about it do the same?
7. All these SEO terms are best for the guys writing about them, not your site. Their site is about this stuff, and believe me, a person who blogs daily in several places isn’t really spending a whole load of time figuring out words. They are telling you about the words and getting your traffic, while you spend an eternity running after words and ignoring your primary duty as a webmaster - developing your site in the direction it was intended, rather than keywords.

*I am not here at all. I’m hiding under the table. If there is a lynch mob waiting to hack me to pieces, my site probably got hacked and someone wrote this post to defame me. I’m a certified wimp.