Blogs

This is a question I was recently asked by a reader, so I thought I’d answer it in a post.

My measurements are based on my objectives, so for each of the following I know exactly where I want to be in the future. I only allow myself to check my statistics once a week, but that’s enough to spot a trend and take some corrective action. Here are my key headings:

• Average visits per day last seven days
• Average page views per day last seven days
• Average hits per day last seven days
• Percentage of traffic from search engines
• Bounce rate
• Page rank
• Search engine saturation
• RSS readers
• Subscribers

Obviously none of these are income related – I have a separate set of financial statistics which I’ll share with you another time. This is about the general “health” of the blog, not how much money it’s making.  read more »

These are some comments I’ve read on blogs in the last hour:

“Great post! I’m going to think about that and maybe add it to my blog as well.”

“These are great ideas. When I start my blog, I will use them.”

“It’s something I’ve been considering for ages. I’m still not sure, but will see what other people say in these comments.”

These are all examples of procrastination! And it strikes me that procrastination is a pandemic in the blogging business, as I seem to constantly read these types of comment.  read more »

Here are this weeks special posts from my fellow bloggers:

Calling all entrepreneurs – introducing pitch TV

by Richard Branson on richardbranson

Yet another wonderful idea from the Virgin man. He’s giving entrepreneurs a chance to have a quick “elevator” pitch shown to Virgin travellers via Virgin TV. Several have already succeeded, so check the site for them.

How to cut through the noise? Everyone is using social media…..

by Gary Vaynerchuk on garyvaynerchuk  read more »

As soon as your blog begins to attract traffic, as sure as night follows day, it will attract comment spam.

Why?

Because blogs are a rich target! Anyone can post comments and links to the site, blogs rank well in search and people click the links on them all the time.

What is Comment Spam?

It’s where a comment is posted for the express purpose of gaining a valuable link and directing some traffic to an unrelated site.

How is it done?

At a simple level, individuals carry out a search on a topic, find your site and post a comment and link to theirs. These can be quite hard to detect, as the comment can seem relevant, so often only by clicking on the link will you find out it’s spam. There are also spam “robots” which simply find sites and post rubbish and a link – these are easy to spot.

What’s the Scale of This?  read more »

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1/ Posting Consistently. It doesn’t matter if your schedule is to post every day, or twice a week, as long as you remain consistent. Your readers will get into a rhythm and expect your posts.

2/ Managing Time Effectively. Blogging has a remarkable way of filling every hour available to the blogger. But we are all limited in some way – many of us have other jobs for example. So the effective blogger will make sure that the time available counts in producing effective action.  read more »

It’s actually taken me 9 years to do it, but I’ve finally finished the book about our move from UK to Lanzarote. I’ve published it in PDF E-book format and it’s available via the publishers Kiqlo.

 read more »

Here we go for my favorite posts of the last week:

Customer Service Twitter Accounts

by Kim on wolf21.com

Talks about how social media can become the “Wow factor” for conventional businesses. Kim’s a writer to keep an eye on for the future.

How to Make Money On Line

by Yaro Starak on entrepreneurs-journey.com

I have to admit to finding some of Yaro’s work to wordy, but this is the first post I’ve read that really explains the whole “long tail” thing to the point where I understood it.

What an Executive Blog Editor Needs to Know  read more »

…or as he insists on calling it 31DBBB. I can’t get used to that, I keep seeing a bra size!

Logo from www.problogger.net  read more »

Despite the disastrous hard drive failure at the end of the month, I still ended up very, very happy with progress on the blogs. All the key indicators continue to move in the right direction, and I was amazed to discover that this blog:

Moved from Page Rank Zero to Page Rank Three

in the recent Google update. Remember the site is less than four months old!  read more »

You may have noticed that I’ve been absent for several days from the blogs and from Twitter. My main PC suffered a hard drive failure! Here’s the story:

Blue Screen of Death

I went to bed on 31st March having turned off my PC. On the morning of 1st April I turned it on and it just went into a loop of starting, offering to check the disc and then closing down.  read more »