Blogging success: “What lessons have you learned”
I got an email from a loyal reader this week end asking me point blank what I had learned from my blogging experiments [Described in the “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11].
I’m a little embarassed to say that I don’t have a nicely packaged to-do list for you. For one, I haven’t achieved success and I am still doings TONS of experiments as some of you may have noticed (site layout, polls, etc).
But I did keep track of my ideas in a Notepad file (Ideas - not solutions). And since I don’t want to spend 29H13MINS writing this post (see #14) - here are the quick notes:
1 - Blog for a purpose (sell a product? ego? make money? something else) and stick to it
2 � Why should visitors read your blog (succint mission statement)
3 - Learn to recognize and ignore junk traffic (spent too much time slicing and dicing “junk” = people who landed here for Costa Rica Coffee, etc)
4 - Treasure your most valuable visitors (like Eric Butler@Webtrends, because they provide valuable feedback publicly or privately)
5 - Get people to return (because that’s your “base” = returning users)
6 - Get people to subscribe (because they return)
7 - Engage your audience through comments (because they return too)
8 - Have a �blogosphere presence� (commenting on other relevant blogs drives potential loyal subscribers)
9 - Leave quality posts on top of your blog (for increasing chances of getting people to return)
10 - Forget Adsense (waste of real estate, not worth the $15/mo)
11 - Don�t over-analyze (spent too many hours looking at Fireclick)
12 - RSS Readership is the only metric relevant to bloggers (because that’s your audience)
13 - Use Feedburner (they ROCK)
14 - Watch your time investment (writing stuff, making mods, looking at reports, etc)
15 - And� don�t be shy! (I’m free to blog, free to be right, free to be wrong)
Satisfied? Can we go home now? Not quite. I’m still trying to get my arms around other more general “blogging success” issues. Will post more soon. Tahhh.