A month ago, I challenged myself to post one article per day for thirty days as a test.  I wanted to see if creating new content each day would generate traffic.  For this little experiment, I chose my blog, The Bullshit Stalker.  I figured it would be easy to find and write content on that topic and I was right.  I’ve completed my 30 days and here’s what I learned:

1. The more often you write, the more distributed your search traffic becomes.  Not many people are searching for “bullshit.”  But when you cover a story, a current event, or a certain topic, you’re likely to get a few hits on that from search engines.
2. The more often you write, the longer people stay on your site.  I have Entrecard on the site, so the drop rate is still very high.  But since I started this experiment, the time spent on is much improved.  Some of you guys actually do stop and read every now and then.
3. The more often you write, the more regulars you see in your comments.  I wouldn’t exactly call them an entourage, but there are some regular commenters on my blog now.
4. The more often you write, the more you touch on different nerves.  I found that certain topics elicited more response and higher readership than others.  So far, television, sex toys and bad parenting seem to be hot topics.  Go figure.
5. The more often you write, the harder it is to stay keyword dense.  That blog was a bit easier to stick with a keyword, as you can imagine.  But if you have a lot of varied content, it will break away some of the keyword density and, if SEO matters to you, you’ll want to focus on retaining that.
6. The more often you write, the more you’ll have opportunities to build backlinks.  I didn’t spend much time doing the whole routine of pinging, stumbling, digging, repeat.  If I had, I’m thinking I would have seen some cool referral bumps here and there.  More on this later.
7. The more often you write, the more likely you are to write shorter articles.  Time is a precious commodity.  I found that I had to really manage my time wisely to be able to keep up with my plan.
8. The more often you write, the more you appreciate Wordpress post scheduling.  There were times I would write several articles at once and then schedule them to hit over different days.  It also allowed me to post around the same time each day, which was a bonus.
9. The more often you write, the better you get at breaking things down into bite-sized pieces.  You’re still reading this article because you care about the content.  With the droppers, they are taking seconds to decide if they want to read your article.  A picture, the title, the first paragraph.  That is about all you have to snag them for a bit longer.  If the article is too long, they’ll bolt before the end.  A short article will get more full reads than a long one.
10. The more often you write, the more you appreciate writing.  I had a topic area that I could be passionate about on a daily basis.  Therefore I was thinking about things more and researching more.  I received daily feedback from the comments (even though I didn’t spend a lot of time responding to them).  It felt good to go through the moderation for first time commenters and see the comments from people who were becoming regulars.  It was a fun month!

I hope this post helps some of you decide how to approach your blogging.  A daily blog posting might seem too daunting to you.  I understand.  I felt that way when I first took this on myself.  My girlfriend isn’t all that happy with me right now.  So, I still have some time management issues to work through.

What’s next?  I think I’m going to keep that blog going on a daily post.  I’ll hit this one about every two weeks with lessons and commentary on blogging.  Since football season is coming up, I’ll be more active on Whodowethinkweare.net (along with continuing to build that blog network) and I need to get back on target with my weight loss journal at FatBastard.org.  And there is always Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge, where I’ve created yet another blog that I’m using his techniques on (still a WIP, but I’m learning quite a bit).

With my daily posts on The Bullshit Stalker, I’m going to do a bit more social network promotion.  As a result, I’ll likely drop off a bit on Entrecard dropping for that site.  I appreciate the traffic it provides, but I need to find a more time-effective route for traffic generation.  I’ll still drop for each of my blogs on the network, but I just can’t keep that volume up and do what I need to do to grow.  And that’s the name of the game, isn’t it?

Probably not the best of questions to ask a reader, huh? But it is one you should ask every day. Why are your readers coming to your site? What are they after? Are they getting it? Are they going to come back?

The way readers use blogs is so different from other websites. When a websurfer goes to Web MD, they will read an article that is years old. But on a blog, they are typically looking for fresh content. Will they drill down to other articles you’ve written. Sometimes, but more likely, they are only looking at the most recent post.

Are you creating regular, fresh content? If so, then you’ll likely see regular traffic. Are you making it easy for them to find related content on your site? If not, then you’re missing an opportunity to hold a reader. This can be addressed simply by linking to older stories. You can also look at the layout of your blog. Are your categories what they need to be?

Perhaps your site is more about the present and less of an information resource. Then you need to have a strategy to create a regular posting pattern. You’ll need to ensure your readers get their daily, twice weekly, weekly fix. That takes planning.  Fortunately, Wordpress allows you to schedule out posts.  That can be a life saver.

While I know this site should be a reference source, most of my current readers are looking for regular, fresh content.  I need to address that if I want to maximize my revenue from this site.  I tried a little experiment this past few weeks.  I made a generally good post about my first month blogging.  The number of hits and comments were very good for me.  I found that leaving the good content up longer drew in more readers.  Now I just have to find that sweet spot.

In any case, if you don’t know what your readers want, you might not be providing it.

Early on it is a good idea to look into the available Wordpress Plugins and evaluate their value to you. While I’ve never experienced any lag issues or conflicts between Wordpress Plugins, I also tend toward simplicity. I only load and keep the plugins that I need.

Below is a list of Wordpress Plugins that I would say are must haves:

Feedburner Feedsmith

Most serious blog readers are not visiting your blog every day to see if there is new content. Instead, they are seeing your posts through an RSS Reader. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. And it really is simple. Wordpress does this automatically but Feedburner (owned by Google) makes accessing feeds easier. Easier access means a larger audience. Set up a Feedburner acount and you’ll have access to a great deal of tools to advertise, optimize and monitize your RSS feeds.

WP Security Scan

You site is your business. Would you leave the door unlocked and unattended? Of course not! This Wordpress Plugin helps you evaluate your site and gives you details on any vulnerabilities.

All In One SEO

As one commenter noted on my Basic SEO - Titles post, All In One SEO takes care of the titles issue (provided you name your posts appropriately). I just installed this Wordpress Plugin and my titles and meta descriptions (more on these soon) are practically writing themselves. I have no doubt my sites will be moving up in the rankings as I continue to build content and my site ages.

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Adsense Manager

You are in this to make some money, right? If not, skip this Wordpress Plugin. What I like about this plugin is it’s ability to work with just about any ad network. It is also very flexible! It allows you to place ads where you want them in your posts. If you want to maximize your site’s revenue, check this one out.

Comment Luv

Did you know that most of your traffic may very well be other bloggers? You are reading your competition aren’t you? Well, comments and the interactivity they create is what leads to what marketers call “stickiness.” It helps you build a brand for your site. The Wordpress Plugin Comment Luv entices readers to post comments because they know a resulting link to their last post will be posted below their comment. Instant reciprocation!

Others

There are thousands of available Wordpress Plugins. I’m sure there are others that you would find useful. I encourage you to check them out and use them to enhance the value and convenience of your site.

I’ve seen it posted in various places that one of the keys to maintaining traffic to your site is to post daily. Seems like a good idea. But when you really start thinking about it. Daily is a lot of work. Daily would mean you don’t take a day off. Noone wants to work every day.

Then consider things like this critter:

One of his little friends decided to make a ruckus all night long the other night. I got no sleep and wasn’t in a very good mood yesterday. Last night was more peaceful (Although I haven’t seen that peacock lately so he might have met his demise. Heaven knows I thought of it a few times.).

Point is, a blog has a tone. Tone is just as important as frequency. I’d rather write a good blog post and post every few days than post poor ones in between.

Wordpress 2.5 does have a function that can help it look like you post every day. You can schedule posts to hit on certain days. As a result, you can go on vacation (as I am now) and have your blog continue to roll. You’ll still have to manage your comments, but that is far easier than posting good quality blog entries.

No peacocks were injured during the writing of this blog post.

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Anyone who wants to make money on the Internet will eventually be faced with tackling the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m just scratching the surface on my SEO education, but I figured I’d share what I’ve learned so far. This entry will focus on the website title.

The title of the webpage is your first opportunity to establish the value of the content. The bots that scan the Internet for searches will read the title to determine the relevant keywords to index the site. Also, users will decide whether to click on a search item based on the title and description (we’ll discuss the description in another post).

To set the title of a webpage, you use the title tag:

<title>baldeagle blogs</title>

Obviously, if you’re building the webpage yourself, you can modify the title tag to properly title your site. But understanding how Wordpress builds titles takes a bit of work.

To see the title tag, you can use your browser’s view source function.

For the blog in general, Wordpress builds the title tag with the title you set through the settings. Wordpress then appends the title of the post to the end of the blog title.

Now that you know how to affect the title of the blog and the blog posts, I’ll go over a few tips on how to optimize the title:

• Ensure your keyword is in the title
• Be specific when you title your posts
• Avoid confusing titles (i.e., funny or play on words)
• Experiment to see what works best for your site

I recently changed the title on this site, but as you can see, the presentation of the title isn’t so pretty. I’ll be doing some work on that through the theme, since the SEO is more important to me right now.

In the next Basic SEO post, I’ll cover the meta discription and how it affect SEO.

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On my continual search for good tools/tips, I found an old post by TallFreak.com for generating a flavicon file for your blog/site. The site htmlkit.com has a great tool that allows you to build a flavicon file from any picture. For those that don’t know what a flavicon is, it is that little graphic up in the url box of the browser and in the bookmarks/favorites drop down. It is one way to demonstrate a bit of polish on your site (read professionalism).

Htmlkit.com also gives you the HTML code you’ll need to add to your site to have the favicon work (note: for most Wordpress installations, the HEAD… /HEAD section is located in the header of the theme).

Let me know what you think of my new flavicon and the tool.

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Okay, I’ve started circulating and tying in my blogs to a few social sites I’m aware of. There are many, many more, but I figure I need to stay active on them if I hope to get any traffic from them. So far I’m working with Feedburner (recently acquired by Google), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo!) and Technorati. I may look into a few more social sites to see how they work, but at least now I’m beginning to get some visitors to the blogs.

I’m still working with the themes. I’m not sure I’ll ever be happy with any of them. I’ve made a couple of posts. Nothing special, but did want to begin building some content before I go nuts on the ads.

Probably the toughest chore of the evening was getting the older blogs upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. It completely crashed Who Do We Think We Are? and I still haven’t gotten a theme to load properly with Can-Am Fan. It shouldn’t have been so hard (at least that is what the instructions indicated), but it was. The Wordpress support forums had the answer to the crashed site (albeit buried on the third page). I’m less concerned about the theme issue at this point, so I’ll move on.

Enjoy!

Okay, so you’ve decided you want to start a blog for either fun or profit. My first thoughts when I started this little experiment was finding a way to do this as efficiently as possible. You can’t make a living on a blog if you’re having to live for the blog. Well, maybe you can, but it isn’t how I want to live.

I decided I would go with Wordpress, since I was familiar with the software (I’ve had a couple of small blogs in the past) and it seems to be the most common. Also, I decided I would run their software on hosted servers versus doing it on wordpress.com. I could never really understand why someone would want to put their content on someone else’s site (although I did get a hint on that today, more on that later).

The latest version of Wordpress is 2.5. It is fairly easy to install, but you do have to set up a MySQL database and be able to FTP the files to the host server. This can be rather complex depending on who you chose to host with.

Once you get the blog software installed, you should then pick a theme. There are thousands of them out there and most of them suck. I picked this very basic four column theme, but I’m likely to either modify it or find another one soon (I want to see how it looks after I’ve added some content and links/ads. Adding a theme is relatively easy, but again requires some knowledge of FTP. You can modify a theme if you have some basic knowledge of CSS, XHTML, and HTML. I’ll go into these in more detail later, but suffice to say, hosting the software yourself is going to give you more freedom, but at the cost of complexity.

Long story short, it has taken me a great deal of time just to get the blog installed and “based up.” I did post a short entry on my Southern Miss Fan Blog. I’m a long way from analyzing my Search Engine Optimization (SEO), building networks (MyBlogLog, Technorati, etc.), or placing decent ads. Tomorrow is another day.