It is rightly said that a blog grows in levels. You climb a couple of steps and then comes a plateau. You stay there for a while, going to the next plateau is twice as difficult.
For a considerably long time, I was stuck at a plateau, in terms of RSS readers and traffic. Adsense is no longer a concern, if you might have noticed, Million Clues is now Adsense free. Going Adsense free is not going Ad free, I am experimenting with static ads and affiliates.
Planning is vital for any progress, here I expose my current strategy to take this blog to the next level. Your suggestions are most welcome.
A Post A Day
I have heard that blogging daily makes a lot of difference. Some Logic – People see you every day in their reader, reading your blog becomes a part of the daily activities. More posts = more pages, more keywords, more traffic?
I have been doing this for the past three weeks, and I hope to keep going. Having a time-table helps me prepare for the days post.
Right now, I am experimenting by posting them at different times of the day (thanks to the scheduler in WordPress) to see if that makes any difference.
Well, coming up with long and deeply researched articles is not practical (given that I had to spend my day in college), so the plan is to do longer posts on holidays and shorter ones on other days.
No, I wont be writing to for writing’s sake, as always, if there is nothing worth saying, I don’t mind breaking the plan at all.
Comment Wherever Relevant
Comments bring traffic, gain backlinks and above all, Comments helps in networking. Being active on Twitter helps me find interesting posts to comment on. I try to leave as many relevant comments possible wherever I go.
A Firefox Add-on, Autofill Forms help me fill out the comment forms easily. Saves a bunch of time, you can get it here. Thanks @theAnand for sharing it with me.
Related: How to get Quality Traffic by optimized Commenting
Be active on ReTweet Groups
I have memberships in a bunch of ReTweet Groups; I used to be a dormant member. I have started getting active on a couple of them and wish to join more of them as well. Such groups helps in networking well, plus they help you push your best articles on Twitter.
If you are the moderator of any such groups, I would like to join in, get in touch.
Massive Guest Blogging
Daniel of DailyBlogTips presented an interesting idea of how guest blogging on many blogs in the same week can increase the returns from those guest posts dramatically.
I like the mass guest blogging strategy because it creates synergy. That is, the results you will get with the 20 guest posts packed in a single month will be larger than the results you would get if you were to publish these same posts scattered through a longer period, say one or two years.
Why is that? Because when people see your name (or the name of your blog) everywhere on a short period of time, they start wondering what the fuzz is about, and they get curious or motivated to visit your site and possibly to subscribe to it.
A reader following a popular blog in a given niche is highly likely to be following other popular blogs in the same niche as well. If you can manage to get your posts published on a number of blogs in a short time, the reader gets to see read your post on all of them (before he/she forgets you). That reader is more likely to come over to your blog and/or add yours to his RSS reader as well.
I am hoping to do that in the last week of April, once its done, I will let you know how it went.
I hope I can stick to the plan as long as possible, seeking your cooperation and suggestions.
I am a WordPress product developer and creator of Image Attributes Pro. I am passionate about solving problems and travelling the world.
Recently a noticed that certain posts published during particular time get indexed fast compared to other posts. Is it just a coincidence or has it got to do something?
I am not sure about it, here is a possible explanation.
Google indexes your site at a definite frequency (depending on your posting frequency and other factors). If you post it at about the same time Google bot comes in, it gets indexed fast, if not you will have to wait till it comes next time.
I am more interested in testing how people respond to posts when you publish at different times of the day. I read a report that it is more likely to get more attention if you publish a post during the day than at night.
I’m back with 1000+ photos clicked 🙂
To the point: In addition to that, I also observed that the articles that doesn’t receive any click through’s (from the Google search) that are indexed in a fairly quick time (~ 30 mins) gets removed from the Index.
This perfectly matches with the assumption that posting in a day time helps than in night where the number of search queries goes down. Again, there is the time zone factor, if the article is aimed at the other part of the world, publishing it at night helps and vice versa.
Welcome back bro, I know you had an awesome time! Me too planning for a tour in June, wait till I get my pics 😉
I should start posting at day, I always post at night, but thats day in US. Most of the traffic is from US.
Thanks for you reply
I always does Arun 🙂
Posting everyday has really helped the traffic at my blog. I find that it gives my readers a regular reason to keep coming back.
I have seen slight improvements myself, but its a bit too early to say anything. Hope it works for me as well 🙂
Posting daily would do the trick in terms of traffic. Don’t worry too much about the RSS feed count – I doubt if that matters at all.
In my case, even if I take blogging as a career, I doubt I will be able to post once a day lol.. too boring.
To be honest with you, I am working on the RSS count more for the other benefits, it has nothing to do with earnings, community etc, I guess. I am seeing an increase now, its 600+ already.
Class room is a good place to get blogging ideas, all my notes have post ideas noted down here and there, lol. I wish I had more time to write 😉
I too am just starting on daily posting. Thx for the insight into how google will pick up on it.
Just wondering if you figured out what time is best to post and if you will write another post on that?
I have been doing 9am in the morning…