Change of direction
I normally update this website everyday, and occasionally on weekends. Demands of work and family life have increased however, and most likely I will be updating it every other day instead. This will also free me up to spend more time publicizing this blog, something I really need to work on (for a full and possibly boring explanation why, click to open the rest of the article below). I really wish I had a staff; I have to do it all: writer, editor, photographer, fact-checker, designer, html fixer, and publicist. And I do it all for free.
My biggest problem is not enough of the right people are finding this weblog. I need to aim for the target a bit better.
I'll explain. Over the past six months this blog has been up, my traffic from Google searches have greatly increased but direct visits and other referrals have flattened out in the last three months. Right now, about 35% of my traffic comes through Google alone (other search engines only provide about 2% of my traffic), with about 20% through direct hits and 40% referrals from dozens of other web sites combined. Google is by far my single biggest source of traffic and really does a lot of heavy lifting here. I'm very grateful for that, but that would work better if this were a commercial site and I were selling something. Web searchers tend to look at one page only and move on, rarely leaving a comment. I would prefer to have more interaction.
To help illustrate this, I posted an identical article on both my web site and Red State. 24 hours later, the article has 13 comments on Red State, and only one on my blog.
There are other directions I would like to go too: 73.65% of my traffic comes from the United States; that is a little puzzling since I have really gone out of my way to increase my hits from other countries, particularly the UK (which is about 4%). But I haven't quite broken through there yet. Any ideas from readers? I'm all ears. There's nothing at all wrong with American readers, but so many blogs focus on the United States that I would prefer to reach out to less saturated markets.
So for these reasons and others, I'm going to experiment with concentrating a little less on writing and a lot more on publicizing this blog on other forums and elsewhere (no, I'm not going to resort to spamming anyone). I'll let you know what happens.
And keep in mind: if you want me to add you to the web site list, a great way to do that is by adding me to yours! Also, feedback, either by comments or email, is always appreciated. Godspeed.
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3 comments:
I routinely read your blog via google reader without actually clicking through to visit the blog or comment.
Just thought you'd like the datapoint.
Good luck with your efforts.
I wish you luck. I may never agree with anything you say, but encourage you in your right to blog it.
Blog promotion sounds like whoring to me. I hate it. If people like it, they will read.
Well, there are a lot of ways to publicize your blog other than "whoring". Simply leaving comments on other web sites, like you and "iamnot" did here, is one way. If people want to know more about you, they will follow the link on your names.
And iamnot - thanks for the tip, I do check my newsreader stats through feedburner, but they only give a rough estimate of the number of subscribers. Unfortunately, unlike Google Analytics, it doesn't give me any detailed information about the people reading my site.
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