2 months to go in 2009!  Are you on target to meet your goals?

One of my goals in 2009 was to increase my blog traffic.  In January, I reviewed my blog and what I had read about good blogging and bad.

As ever when we have a big push, we often achieve what we want, and learn that quite different rules apply than ones we had previously thought. This is my story of how my blogging goals shifted as I coped with the ebb and flow of 2009.

The received wisdom in blogging amount to

• Stay at the top of people’s feed readers
  • Have an RSS feed so people can subscribe
  • Post often
• Be found in search
  • Choose keywords for which you want to be known
  • Include them in the title and in the body of the post
• Great content
  • Write scanable short posts
  • Show the benefits of post to the audience
• Comment on other people’s blogs
  • Your interest in their work is your best advert
  • Your comment provides a permanent link back to your blog which humans follow and which Google counts for page rank

These are the blogging rules I would add

• Comments
  • Cut out the elaborate logins with Disqus etc.  People will leave comments if you let them do it quickly
  • Have an RSS for comments as well the post and have it next to the submit button
• Take search seriously
  • Alexa rankings will tell you what percentage of your traffic is from search
  • Mine is low – less than 10%.  Obviously I could improve that.
• Great content
  • Write for yourself.  The pros do write great magazine pieces.  Write normally and develop your own style.
  • Alexa rankings also tell you the bounce rates, the number of pages each visitor reads and the time spent on site.  I have a very low bounce rate (below 25%), high number of pages (above 5) and high time on site (more than 5 minutes).
  • Google Analytics also gives these numbers.  I use WordPress.com which doesn’t allow a link to Google Analytics
• Get recommendations
  • Your real goal on the internet is to get people to recommend you.
  • Visiting your site is a recommendation.
  • Commenting on your site is a recommendation.
  • Commenting on other people’s sites is a recommendation (even though it is made by you!)
  • Also Stumble your post and use tags from their basic list of categories.  You will get 50-100 hits from your own recommendation.  Among those visitors some will give a thumbs up.  Your traffic and your chances of another thumbs up goes up exponentially with each thumbs up.

My Results for 2009

I started well in 2009 driving up my traffic upwards each month to 5 000 hits a month which was my modest goal.  Then I got busy on other things and my blog suffered.  In September, I got back to blogging and began to blog more than once a day to catch up.  I also started to use Stumbleupon better.

I probably won’t make 60 000 for the year, but better still, I’ve discovered the art of getting 10K a month.  Such is the result of making a big effort. We learn.

And our goals change accordingly.  Ultimately we set goals to give ourselves control.

In what areas of your life are you in more control than you were last year?

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