Photo from the Brigade N-Counter weekend April 2011
Last week I got really gung ho about blogging. Here are some of the strategies I’ve implemented this past week, and my thoughts on them…
Have you started blogging yet? 3 reasons you should start blogging
Frequencey – Last week I posted 5 blogs in 5 days.
History and Data:
In 2011 I only posted 2 blogs the whole year.
I had a 1200 pageviews in 2011.
In 2010 I posted 77 times
I had 13,585 pageviews in 2010.
In 2009, I posted 52 times in 3 months
I had 7,568 pageviews in that 3 months of 2009.
I think there is a definite correlation between the amount you blog and the amount of page views you get, but finding that sweet spot is pretty important. I felt productive and enjoyed blogging every day last week, but I’m not sure its sustainable. I’m also afraid that 5 posts a week will overwhelm and fatigue my “audience.”
This week I will trying posting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Using this service allows me to see, how many people are clicking on each link. If I just used a normal link I wouldn’t be able to see that information. Using bit.ly links inside the post also allows me to see if people are interacting with the page and clicking on links that I’ve placed throughout the post.
Data:
33 people clicked on my link to Monday’s post.
387 people clicked on the link to Tuesday’s post.
43 people clicked on my link to Wednesday’s post.
113 people clicked on my link to Thursday’s post.
16 people clicked on my link to Friday’s post.
Push Marketing – Using the word marketing sound so crass.
I have been sending links to my blog posts twice a day on twitter, which then pushes to my facebook. I have been using hoot suite to schedule these tweets.
We also send out monthly e-mail updates. Usually I send these out as a pdf, this time I simply wrote our update and put it on our blog. I then sent our update e-mail with a link to the blog.
E-mails were sent to people for Tuesday and Thursday’s posts and had a much higher view count. The links to Monday, Wednesday and Fridays posts were only posted to twitter and facebook. They had a much lower view count.
E-mails were sent to people for Tuesday and Thursday’s posts and had a much higher view count. The links to Monday, Wednesday and Fridays posts were only posted to twitter and facebook. They had a much lower view count.
Jump – A lot of successful blogs use a jump.
A jump only shows the top of your blog post on the index page and to read the whole thing you have to click to continue reading it all. For thursday and fridays post I posted with a jump and plan to continue to do this from now on.
Using a jump cleans up your index page.
It also REALLY makes me focus on my lead paragraph, making sure that I’m writing something that is hopefully enticing enough to get someone to keep reading.
Writing and formatting – What you write and how its presented
I am trying to make sure:
– The title says what the post is about in an enticing way
– The title is SEO friendly
– The opening paragraph is strong
– The conclusion gives a strong call to action
– The conclusion gets people thinking and hopefully interacting
– There is no real unnecessary information in the post
– That the post is formatted so its easily scannable
Engage: What strategies have you seen blogs use that keep you coming back and interacting? Tell us in the comments.
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by Jim Baker
Good encouragement! I tend to get pretty behind with posting about my trip so it’s helpful – Thanks!
great! glad it helped, keep blogging!
hmm. I haven’t tried a jump before. That might be nice to tidy up my home page, since some of my posts are pretty lengthy. Thanks for the tip!!
Try the jump let me know what you think!