CIAO9to5

Do blogs contain the community momentum to start a forum about their blog?  A lot of big blogs seem to have a pretty decent following that comment on their post.  Wouldn’t it be helpful to push this discussion to a forum or something?  It doesn’t even have to be a forum about your blog.  Maybe, just about a related topic.

I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.  Wondering if it would be benefitial and worth the trouble.  I mean, I know I don’t have enough people coming yet to start it.  But, people like John Chow haven’t even taken the opportunities given to them.  He has tens of thousands of people coming to his blog everyday.  It seems that a forum would create a sense of community that would be harder to break from.  Such as someone who has grown tired of his post but sticks around because of discussions proposed by others at a forum.

Just some food for thought.

The advertising experiment isn’t going quite how I planned.  For one, it took about 2 days to get approved by the ad networks.  I didn’t know that was required.  And two, Google Adwords are expensive, ineffective and unenjoyable.  I could be doing it wrong, though.  I hear JohnChow is a fan of Adwords and he must be doing something right.  I’m hoping that the money I spent on Adwords will be exhausted by tomorrow so that I can write something up on it.  I believe the next thing I will try is Stumble.  I haven’t decided yet.

A big emphasis on how well your blog is doing is by tracking your RSS subscription numbers. Are they high or are they low? Either way, you’ll never have too many. Increasing RSS subscribers is something every blogger is always trying to do and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

A big mistake that a lot of new bloggers make is not being upfront with their want of RSS subscribers. I see little RSS subscription buttons on blogs, way in some distant corner. Don’t be ashamed of your RSS button. It is your friend. Do something like me. I smacked a big ass banner on the top of every single post page and the main page. If that doesn’t get people’s attention, then I don’t know what will. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers to subscribe, either. I’m sure a lot of them come to your site daily anyways but have never gone through the trouble of subscribing.

As your RSS subscription rates increase, so will your traffic and revenue. That’s what we’re aiming for, right?

Some quick statistics about why I believe this will work(don’t take it personally guys, just needed examples ):

http://www.imbloggingthat.com/ has been around since the genesis of January 2006 and has 26 RSS subscribers. This is due to the fact that Katy has her subscription buttons on the bottom of her page. They’re hard for me to find and probably are hard to find for other readers.

http://theblogscape.com/ has been around since August 2007 and has 16(let me know if this is wrong Ben, I got it off your about page) RSS subscribers. I think that Ben could easily increase his numbers by putting his RSS link at the top of his post instead of at the bottom so that it is more noticeable.

Both of these are good blogs. They are both well written and informative. However, due to some bad placing, they’re not maximizing their amount of RSS subscriptions.

And now for my stats.

I’ve been open for a little over 5 days and already have 21 RSS subscribers and seem to climb everyday. At the moment, I should hit my 100 goal easily. Why? Big ass banner.

As your blog grows and you begin to cover more and more subjects about your niche, there comes a time when you need to update your old post.  I don’t mean to go back rewrite all of your old post.  I mean as you gather more articles about the subject you’re preaching about, go back and create trackback links in your old post to the new articles.

When you first started your blog, you probably had a lot of things that were the first things for you to post about(they had to be at some point).  Well, as you build on these concepts that you talked about in the past, you can go to your old post and link to the new ideas that you’ve formulated.  This helps keep the reader reading.  They’ll get a lot more information out of your post too.  This is a lot easier than your reader finding one thing to read on your blog then having to search for a new one to build off of what they learned.  Keep the reader hooked, keep them on your blog.  They shouldn’t need another blog for information, you should give them all the information they need.

Also, always make sure that the links are trackback links, not regular links.  The trackback links help the readers find your old post, also.  It is probably a good idea to mention that you have already written related topics about the subject and give links to the articles, too.

The main focus here is keeping the reader interested in your blog.  You want to strive to keep them coming back for more.

Starting tommorow I’m going to be running an advertising campaign experiment. I’m going to try various ways to promote my blog. During this time I will keep track of increases of everything: revenue, traffic, RSS subscriptions, incoming links to my blog, et cetera.

Each day after I finish one campaign, I will post the results. At the end of the experiment I will post a synopsis of the results and determine which is the best way to go about blog promotion. All details will be given.

Read about them here:

1. I’m going to fill this out as I go.

I hope this experiment helps with your promotion techniques!

I thought about making a list of goals for 2008 and try to complete them, but the more I thought about it, the more that sounded like a bad idea. You see, I have a problem of trying to finish everything I need to have done during the last minute. Well, I’ve decided how to fix this. I’ve decided I’m going to set goals for each month during 2008. This way, I have more last minute deadlines to meet, making me work more(It sounds good in theory). At the beginning of each month when I list my goals, I will also talk about my past month’s goals. Did I achieve them, why didn’t I achieve them, et cetera…

Well, here are the goals I have, for my blog, for January of 2008:

1. Have 100 RSS subscribers
2. Have 100 authority on Technorati
3. Make $100.00 - this will be hard considering many ad networks won’t accept a site so young.
4. Improve my post quality

I’m not sure if these goals are modest or not. I suppose as time goes on, I’ll get a more general idea of what my blog is capable of. But, I didn’t want to set myself up for failure.

Since it is the beginning of the year, I’m going to make a couple of new years resolutions as well:

1. Make all A’s at school
2. Improve my French and Italian
3. Become fluent in C++, PHP and either Python or Java
4. Start up another online business
5. Manage my time better
6. Become more self-disciplined
7. Make a habit of waking up at 6:00 everyday

Well, wish me luck for January and the new year!

So, how important is it to put a link to an RSS email subscription on your website? From the looks of my statistics, very important. That is, if you want to increase your RSS reader base. From the statistics on my Feedburner account, it shows that 33% of the people who are subscribed to my RSS, are subscribed from email. This is the largest percentage of any method of subscription, for my blog.

How do you get people to subscribe through email? Feedburner will give you the code to put a link on your website, like mine, that allows people to subscribe to your RSS through email. When you log into Feedburner and click your websites feed that is being burned, go to Publicize. On the side there is a link that says Email Subscription. When you click it, Feedburner will give you the code to put on your website.

Make sure to put it somewhere that people will see it. You might even want to try mentioning in a post that you’ve added this addition on to your site so that people will notice it. Who knows, your readers may have been waiting for this all along. Now that you’ve added it, you’ll receive a plethora of new readers.

The thing that drives me the most while making this blog is the fact that I’m extremely competitive. I think this is a big reason why my blog is starting become successful. Many people are now starting to tell me that they enjoy my blog and it is very helpful for them. Well, this would of never came about if I was not as competitive as I am.

Everyday when I get to a point where I feel like taking a 15 minute break or so from my blog, I look at other start-up blogs and see if I have surpassed them yet. I check when blogs have received their first comments and compare them to mine. I check their RSS in relation to the time they’ve been online and compare. I check how many post they make daily. There is basically nothing that I don’t check.

I’m not entirely sure you can train yourself to become competitive, since I was born this way. But, I am sure everybody has a little bit of a competitive spirit in them. You need to use this to drive your blog to the top. You need to use it to make your blog better than everybody else’s. The competitive spirit is a key factor behind the motivation to keep your business going(I assume money is the other).

So, next time you find a start-up blog: check all it’s stats and see how well it is doing in relation to your blog. If you’re doing better than it is, you’ll be surprised at how motivational it is.

That being said.. you can take competition too far. Don’t go start hacking blogs and redirecting them to yours. Also don’t start ripping content for your blog. Keep it civilized.

I found this really helpful tool that Wordpress has. I’m actually using it right now. It’s probably obvious to a lot of you that already do this. But, I didn’t even know about it and I’m sure a lot of others don’t either. So, what is this amazing tool that is already on your Wordpress? It is the ability to write something up and Wordpress automatically posts it sometime in the future, specified by you.

I used to keep my notepad open and write down all the ideas that would come to me, so that I could blog about them later. Now, I just write up the post I’m going to make at a later date and put some Timestamp in the future on it.

This is really helpful because if you’re having a really creative day and finding a lot of stuff to write about, you can get it over with. You can write about it all and possibly have some free days because of your Wordpress having so much content to post over the next few days.

To change the Timestamp: write your post like normal but look on the side bar for “Post Timestamp.” When you find it, change the time to when you want it to post. Hit publish and your article will be up at the time you told it to be.

A lot of times I see bloggers linking a post that they found interesting.  There is nothing wrong with this.  In fact, it’s probably good to give a link to it.  But, give a link to it after you write your own take on it.

Many times the post will be a sentence about what the blogger found and then the link.  This isn’t doing anything but driving people away from your blog.  If you’re not the one that can write up valuable information, nobody wants to stay there.  They’re going to go to the people who do write up valuable information.  The people that you link to.

When you find an article that you like, you should research it.  Read up on everything that was mentioned in the article and learn as much as you can about it.  After you’ve learned about it, write up your own take on it.  Formulate your own ideas and post them.  Put a trackback link somewhere in your post when it mentions something similar to what was said in the other blogger’s post.  This will let the reader see the article that gave you the idea and your article.  This lets your readers get more information out of the subject than if only one post, with one viewpoint, had been written on it.

Now, when I say viewpoint, I don’t mean that you have to have a conflicting viewpoint.  You can whole heartily agree with everything that was said.  But, still, you can make some points that weren’t made by the original poster.