What Do I Do When My Blog Flips Me the Bird?
Religiously every Saturday (unless I’m out of town or have a more pressing obligation), I record my blog stats – a combination of stats from SiteMeter, Technorati, Alexa, Google Analytics, Post Rank and Aweber. I probably don’t then analyze them like I could, but I find recording them in Excel and comparing them to previous week’s unexplainably comforting.
Imagine my surprise today when they flipped me the bird!
What? After all of the love, time and effort I give you, you have the audacity to flip me the bird? What gives? What are you actually telling me?
I did some digging because, as a curious blogger always on the look out for good post ideas, that’s what’s I do, constantly. I found:
- In February I published 11 posts
- March: 9 posts
- April: 8 posts
- May: 5 posts
- June: 5posts
- July: 6 posts
- August: 6 posts (so far)
Except for February and March, the time of the Olympics and the Paralympics when I allowed myself time to play and to blog about it, my monthly post numbers have been fairly consistent. Low, but consistent, hence I passed the first rule of blogging.
Looking deeper, the traffic spike in May was due to my post The iPad as an Affordable Communicator: Initial Review, which was written from the heart and was timely as May was when the iPad was released in other countries. To date, that post has resulted in 159 tweets, 11 trackbacks, and 32 comments – my most popular post ever! And, that bodes well for another project I have in the works.
However, unfortunately, that dramatic traffic spike did not have any long term benefits; at least, not yet. The number of email subscribers did not increase. The post didn’t even include an Amazon link for those moved to purchase an iPad in the moment – something for which I’ve kicked myself.
After May’s spike, the traffic dropped down to exactly it was pre-iPad post. Granted, some of that drop is likely due to readers out enjoying summer. Why read blogs when its gorgeous outside!
Digging even deeper, I revisited my goal to comment on 10 blogs per week and realized I failed terribly with 41 comments in that same 7-month period.
Yes, I have been crazily busy, I’ve been out of town twice, and other such reasons/excuses. But most every other blogger has a similar story. If I want more traffic, more comments, more of an engaged blog community, then I need to visit more blogs, contribute more comments and be more engaged in the blogosphere. That’s good blogging karma. Simply retweeting a link isn’t enough of a contribution, in my opinion.
(Why I would want more traffic, an engaged community is a good question and perhaps the topic of another post.)
Last night on Twitter, I discovered the free iPad app Flipboad – “a personalized, social magazineâ€. I’m curious to check out this, to see if it’ll be easier for getting all of the links and blogs, which I’d like to read, in one place. Then, commenting and contributing might become easier.
Hopefully, then, my blog will tell me, You rock!
What is your blog telling you?
If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a chai tea latte. Thanks kindly.
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