It's no secret that good writers work the same way as everyone else: 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. They spend very little time thinking of what they're going to write about and yet spend a whole lot of time doing the actual writing. This is normal. What isn't normal is the reverse, spending too much time thinking about what to write and not actually writing.
From the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2010, I concentrated most of my writing efforts to change this site from a social-oriented site to a search-oriented site. The conversion actually started in 2008, but I didn't concentrate on it. You may wonder what effect it has had on what I write, how I write and how often I write. I'll try to explain as I go along, but only after I tell you what effect it has had on the site itself.
It seems like every where I go (as far as blogs are concerned), I seem to come across RSS feed subscriber numbers that look a little odd. They're odd because there aren't a whole lot of comments to coincide with the high subscriber count. That's almost impossible.
If you think what looks like an official FeedBurner chicklet showing the RSS feed subscriber count couldn't possibly be faked, guess again. How many of you check the source of the page? Where's that chicklet coming from? I can tell you with utmost certainty that I could make a chicklet like that and even make it look correct in the source of the page in under 2 hours, and that's with me being out of practice in coding. It would be even easier for me to fake a FeedBurner plain text feed count for all my feeds since I'd only have to edit the widget in the sidebar.
Yes, I truly believe that the road to success is paved with stones of failure. There are a very few people in this world who are successful in any endeavor on the first try. The remaining 99.9% of us have to keep trying and trying to reach that success.
A Bit of History
When I first started this blog, I started it as a mere journal. It wasn't until several months later that I realized what kind of potential a blogging platform had to offer. Still, I was naive.
About a year ago, I posted my first milestone. I thought 10,000 unique visitors in 7 months was a lot. I set a soft goal of 100,000 unique visitors by the one-year mark. I went way over that goal because of the things I started doing to attract visitors. In a sense, I would call that a success, albeit an easy goal to achieve. Since then, I've stopped paying attention to that figure. I now get well over 5,000 unique visitors per month and well over 10,000 page views per month.
A year ago, I was getting 20 to 40 unique visitors per day. That number, as of a few days ago, was 200 to 400. Using the techniques I recently learned from 3 prominent bloggers, I plan to increase that to a number of at least 2,000 to 4,000 (and hopefully more than that) by this time next year. Will I be successful? I don't know, but I do know that the road to success is paved with stones of failure.
Over the course of the last year, I published posts under my bragging rights category. I was showing how well I was doing with my Alexa and Technorati rankings. Those rankings started bothering me when they stagnated and then started getting worse. My unpublished goals were incredible failures. Of course, I later learned that neither ranking is important and are only indicators of failure or success. I stopped bragging.
My wife is almost a computer illiterate. She has learned during our physical separation how much money can be saved by using an instant messenger with voice. She has been gradually learning other facets of computer operation. I can no longer connect to the PC she's using with a VNC client and she can't figure out why (and neither can the owner). I don't have the patience to try and walk her through all the possible causes, especially since I can't see what she sees.
New Goals
I and my wife have had some recent, long discussions via instant messenger. Starting in April (a good guess), and armed with resources and knowledge obtained from "How to Make Money Online for Beginners", "Court's Internet Marketing School", and "Blogger Unleashed", we plan to launch a series of niche blogs for the sole purpose of making money from search engine visitors. We want to create new blogs at a rate of at least one per month, giving each ample time to grow and ourselves ample time to make adjustments.
Recent events and a financial hardship mitigated, possibly eliminated, by the overwhelming support of our fellow bloggers has made it our desire to be able to do the exact same thing for others that find themselves in tight predicaments. We want to be able to funnel online income to the people who need it more than we do. Will we be successful? Again, I don't know.
I will be teaching my wife everything I can possibly teach her about computers in general, blogging, advertising, and anything else she needs to know in order to assist me in doing what we plan to do. I realize that I may not have any hair left after we're done, but that's a risk I have to take.
An Unreachable Goal?
While this isn't a niche blog, I believe I have the motivation and the talent to put it up there in the same league as the ProBlogger, where a few short paragraphs can make a resounding impact on the lives of others. I realize it's going to take a lot of work, a lot of rewriting (for SEO and SERPS), and a lot of determination to make it happen. I also realize that there isn't a timetable that I can follow to get there.
This is a lofty goal, which means I'll be in it for the long haul. It could be another year or another 10 years, or even longer. I expect to fail many times before I reach the success that I'm trying to achieve. The road to success is paved with stones of failure and it's going to be an extremely bumpy ride.
How can I make such a bold statement? It's simple. It's the truth.
I don't pay attention to the Alexa rankings anymore, but I was curious and looked at the ranking for my other blog, which is less than a month old. What I discovered was shocking and amusing at the same time.
It seems that blog had a ranking of 64,602 yesterday. How could that be? It takes some time to get that kind of ranking on any blog, right? Well, I guess not, but I think I accidentally gamed Alexa yesterday and succeeded in getting that number without trying.
You see, I went through all 40+ posts on that blog yesterday to make sure all the videos were still active on YouTube. I found quite a few that weren't and replaced them. I intend to do that at least once per month, at the end of each month.
So… yesterday's statistics for the other blog shows a reach of 0.00045%, a rank of 64,602 and 64.7 unique page views. There's no way those stats are right. I only had 47 unique visitors and one of those was me!
I'm through with both the numbers game and adding the initial content to VideoTyme. How are these two related? Well, umm…
When I first started this blog, I didn't pay attention to numbers at all. I'm talking about the rankings on Technorati, Alexa and other places. I didn't write much and it didn't matter to me. Somewhere along the line, I started paying attention to the numbers. I started writing in such a way as to increase those numbers (or decrease them, depending on your perspective) and I started writing a lot more. As of now, right now, I'm not paying attention to them anymore. I'm going to continue writing what I like to write and to hell with the numbers. Sure, I'm going to try to stay focused on the primary topics of this blog, but I'm not going to limit myself.
VideoTyme is a niche blog. It's all about videos related to "Movies, TV, Models, Music and More". I just finished copying and redirecting the last blog entry about movies from this blog to that blog. I won't be putting any more here on this blog at all. Approximately 30 days from the first video entry on that blog, I'll be deleting the corresponding entry on this blog and continuing in that fashion until there's nothing left to delete. Comparatively, VideoTyme is doing much better than this blog considering the short amount of time (less than a month) it's been active. It's crazy.
I'm fed up with the numbers, the fluctuations, and everything in between. I'll continue to focus as much as possible on the primary topics, but I'm going to concentrate on nothing but the content from now on. If I write a lot, it'll be because I want to write a lot and for no other reason.
Numbers be damned.
Sometimes things happen when you least expect it. Yesterday was no exception.
It actually started back on March 20th when HMTKSteve of Ramblings from the Marginalized submitted my Downloading Pirated Anything Is NOT Illegal article to Digg. The traffic spike, which still shows on my Alexa stats, was unexpected. I didn't write the article for Digg or any other social site. It was more of a personal rant than anything else.
The continuation of massive traffic for that article started by accident. Jonathan of SmartWealthyRich stumbled an unrelated post the day before yesterday and sometime after midnight, a top stumbler spotted that article and stumbled it, setting off another StumbleUpon chain reaction. Again, it was unexpected, but at least my server didn't become inaccessible for hours (unlike the original traffic spike from Digg).
According to Clicky, I had 4,633 visitors with 9,294 page views. At the time of this writing, Google Analytics is not up-to-date yet, but still shows 4,575 visits (4,349 unique visitors) and 9,658 page views. The traffic from that stumble has slowed down, but is still going and has been going for more than 24 hours now.
I hope by sharing this with you, you can understand the consequences of writing controversial articles. Unlike some of my fellow blog authors, I'm perfectly content with watching my daily traffic slowly increase as time progresses. This kind of traffic madness makes it difficult to see what draws regular, daily readers. I'm not complaining, mind you, because the digg put UV on the blogosphere map and the recent stumble can only help to solidify its position.
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And now for some unrelated news. Alexa upgraded Sparky so that it works with the latest upgrade for Firefox (version 2.0.0.5). Thanks to Abhinav Sood for pointing it out. I must say that I didn't expect Alexa to act this quickly and it was an unexpected surprise.
Some of you newer bloggers writers and authors need to take a step back and examine your statistics from time to time. Even so, you have to realize that they're just numbers that fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes for no apparent reason that you can see.
If you're serious about increasing your readership, probably the worst thing you can do is to sit back and write haphazardly, seemingly without a care in the world. How are you going to know who your readers are, where they come from, and what they like if you don't use the tools available to you? You can be a rebel, if you like, but being a rebel (like me) can generate negative impressions that make it difficult to increase your readership.
I use the WP-PostViews plugin to count post views and generate my "Top 100 Posts" links. It allows me, at a glance, to see what's being read or looked at the most. It's kind of a double-edged sword in the respect that it not only shows how many views have taken place but it also encourages new readers to take a look, skewing the results. But why not? You want people to see your best work, don't you?
You may or may not have heard of the statistics generated by Alexa (Alexa either owns Amazon or Amazon owns Alexa, I never bothered to find out). While you can't get a traffic chart from Alexa until your ranking gets below (better) than 100,000, you can still see your one week and three month averages.
You can register at Technorati and see your authority, your ranking, and your blog reactions. The numbers are interesting to keep up with. You have to remember that incoming links are not counted after six months so that a sudden drop in any of the three doesn't give you cause for alarm.
You can use Google Analytics, Clicky or Site Meter (or any combination of the three) to see your daily statistics and more. There are even plugins that can help you see statistics (I don't use any or I'd give you a link or two).
A point that I want to get across is that your statistics, visitors, and popularity are going to fluctuate until you get a steady readership. I don't think it can be done in under a year (unless your readers follow you from another popular service, like a blogger I know about but won't mention). Here are my own charts from Alexa to prove it to you. Hey, what's that penis doing in the first one? Just kidding.
Seriously, though, that's my top post that got "dugg" and keeps on getting dugg, months later. Do you see the peaks (mountains) and valleys (canyons)? After a year, I'm still fighting my way to the top. I offer you these tips to prevent you from getting discouraged about your own blog performance. If you try, you can find stats for the so-called "A-List" bloggers and find out that they too have peaks and valleys.
It happened today. 10,000 unique visitors since May 27th, 2006. That number has a plus or minus margin of error of about 10 percent. I've been filtering search engine robots, spam robots and other robots pretty much since the start. Here's looking at getting to 100,000 before the 1-year mark.
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