What I've learned in my first year of blogging

Subject: What I've learned in my first year of blogging Fri Apr 08, 2011 5:28 pm

What I've learned in my first year of blogging

What I've learned in my first year of blogging

For the last few days I’ve been trying to figure out how to best write this post. This is what I’ve come up with, I hope it’s helpful (cause it sure is long, winded).

What I’ve done

What I think I’ve done right

Research

What I think I’ve done wrong

Misc. Mistakes

What I was surprised by

Top content

What I still don’t understand

What I’m going to do next

Summary of my tips/suggestions

What I’ve done

One year ago I started this site. The first month (Aug, 2006) I had 1400 visitors. The last month (July, 2007) I had just over 200,000 (full stats here). I’m in the Technorati “Top 5K”, and have been featured on a bunch of high profile sites – including Lifehacker, digg,del.icio.us/popular, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, 43 Folders and Download Squad. Simplehelp actually led to a contract with Download Squad, but that didn’t last very long (no comment).

I don’t know if that qualifies me as a successful blogger, therefore take everything I say (in terms of the suggestions I offer) with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.
What I think I’ve done right

asks

have

Research

I’ve learned a lot by reading other peoples blogs, and actually doing what they suggest. Pro Blogger I couldn’t recommend enough. Even the guest writers on his site offer great insight. I read How not to be a successful blogger (and the fantastic quote by Kathy Sierra at the end of the post) at least once a month. Though I don’t always agree with some of the ‘marketing’ tactics he suggests, Dosh Dosh is also a wealth of knowledge.

Using Google Analytics. I can’t stress enough how helpful it is to know things like how people got to your site, what they searched for to get there, which posts are most viewed, which source of traffic it was that drove a post up etc. That’s all pure gold. Once I realized that people were searching for info on flac files, I went nuts with the lossless audio posts. Though none of the subsequent posts have been as successful as the original, combined they have generated pretty significant traffic.

Knowing which questions to answer. In my case, that’s literal – Simplehelp is a Question and Answer site. But it applies equally to any blog that tries to answer any kind of question. Know the right ones to answer. For example – I sign up for message boards of the bands that I like. It’s a great way to find out pre-sale info for concerts, trade (legal) live music etc. But I also see the same questions asked over and over again. One of them was “how do I convert this .flac to .mp3?”. So Iwrote out the answer, and now it’s the most frequently viewed page on my site. Go to forums, join mailing lists, newsgroups, yahoo groups, whatever – but find out what people are asking for or find interesting, and then give it to them.

What I think I’ve done wrong

Community participation

Took a break

What I think I’ve done wrong

What I've learned in my first year of blogging Visitorsa

tough

Keep at it

Low Page View per Visit ratio

this

Related Posts

think

Misc. Mistakes

I should have registered a .com domain.
I haven’t done enough to promote RSS. Take a look at the How-To Geek. He started his site in October of 2006 (I started mine in Aug of 2006) and he has 14,557 RSS subscribers (as of Aug 08 2007). I have 1100, on a good day. In fact, get him to write a ‘how to be a successful blogger’ post, cause he’s done a better job of creating a ‘how-to’ site than I have.

What I was surprised by

Traffic sources

Browser type

Top content

The #1 most viewed article, as I’ve already discussed, is the how to convert flac to mp3 tutorial. The #2 most viewed article is How to use your PC and webcam as a motion detecting and recording security camera. In hindsight, it kind of makes sense that this was popular. It’s a neat concept, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different reasons someone might want to use their webcam as a security camera, and everyone has a webcam lying around unused. But at the time I wrote it, I did so in part because it was something that I personally needed to do (someone broke into my apartment, and judging by the neighborhood it probably would have happened again). So I figured out how to do it, and decided I might as well document it as well. It was a front page digg, linked to from Lifehacker, was popular on Reddit and then eventually Stumbleupon.

What I still don’t understand

Why on earth does Google send so much traffic my way, and Yahoo so little? Seriously, do you know? Search Yahoo for Windows Explorer. The 20th result is “10 Windows Explorer alternatives” – on Lifehacker.com. The Lifehacker result is a link to a post on my site. The post itself doesn’t show up until #30 in the same search for “Windows Explorer”. Now search Google for Windows Explorer – my post shows up as #4. Is Yahoo “punishing” Simplehelp because it uses WordPress (which means it must be a blog?) and ranks blogs lower? As I mentioned in the traffic sources section above, Google accounted for 93.41% of my search traffic – Yahoo accounted for 2.88%. That’s a huge difference, and it’s one that still has me puzzled.

What I've learned in my first year of blogging Search_referralsa

What I've learned in my first year of blogging Search_referralsa

click to enlarge
What I’m going to do next

I’m going to try some new stuff this year. My first project has already started – I’m trying out different ad vendors and actually spending money to promote my site. And then reporting back on how it went. This is all part of a larger ‘new project’, which is to writetutorials about blogging. I’d (like everyone else) like to reach a wider audience, and what better an audience than bloggers, right? Now, don’t expect Pro Blogger stuff out of me. I’ll leave that to the experts where it belongs. What you can expect: reviews of paid services (and the free ones too), tutorials on how to use them, and my personal findings/results. I’ve started out by writing How to “Pubvertise” your Live Feedburner RSS Content to a Wider Audience. And I created an actual ad campaign through FeedBurner, which I’ll write about as soon as the results come in.

Next. I absolutely never, ever said that I was particularly good at graphics. Because that would be a lie. Adding to that, I’m an even worse designer. This all results in the site you’re currently looking at. Now – I intentionally went with a specific type of WordPress Theme – minimal. Which I think this current one accomplishes. But lets face it, it could still be very functional, and look a lot nicer. So in the next month or two, I’ll have a completely new look. This is entirely because of the time, effort and incredible ability of Jamie Carter – someone who I will be singing praises of in more detail soon.

I will continue to write the same type of content that I always have. Trying to increase the audience is one thing, avoiding doing the thing that brought you ’success’ in the first place strikes me as not a good idea.

I think it makes sense to try and correct a few of those things in the What I think I’ve done wrong section. For starters, I’m going to be a bit more social. Speaking of which, check out the Simplehelp Facebook group (ok that wasn’t entirely subtle, but you get the point).
Summary of my tips/suggestions

If you didn’t read the “take what I say with a grain of salt” disclaimer at the top of this page, I’ll reiterate it here. I’ve had a semi-successful first year. That doesn’t make me a pro blogger. I’m sure there are much better lists of “how to be a successful blogger” in existence. This is a series of things that I’ve personally observed.

not

true

do it

that

don’t be an ass just to incite feedback

You’re starting to see growth and you’re very pleased with yourself. People mention to you that your site is down all the time, or really slow. If you’re certain that it’s not a problem with the code on your blog, switch hosting providers. Thelast thing you want to do is attract readers, and then give them an easily avoidable negative experience (slowness or frequent downtime). When you get to 4-5k visitors per day, start to consider a dedicated hosting solution*. Shared hosting services like Dreamhost are fantastic to start on. They typically offer very inexpensive packages that include plenty of storage space, and most come with “one click install” packages so you can get your blog up and running quickly. But you’ll get frustrated when someone else on your shared server causes your site to go down (or, when your site causes others to go down). If your site frequently makes it to the front page of Digg, Reddit or Slashdot (any site that drives huge volumes of traffic in a short period of time), a shared hosting provider can becomefrustrated with you. This is a lesson I learned the hard way.

*=The 4-5k number is by no means a ’set in stone’ rule, but it was at about that point when I should have moved (I did shortly after, but it caused me a lot of headaches to be forced to move quickly). If I had been able to plan out and time a move from one hosting provider (shared) to another (dedicated) the transition would have been much better. It’s also worth mentioning – most of the stuff on Simplehelp includes a fair number of screenshots. The more your visitors browser has to load, the higher the stress you’ll put on your web server. If you have a blog that’s almost text-only (which can include CSS etc), you’ll be able to survive on a shared host quite well. The more widgets, images and plugins you have, the more your web server has to work (less with external widgets, but some regardless). If the topic of your blog isn’t one that’s popular with the digg/slashdot/reddit crowd, chances are you won’t have to worry too much about sudden massive traffic spikes. Which is another reason you can go well above 4-5k per day and still be ok with a shared provider.

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