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Abe's Blog (LoL, internet)

Background

I have attempted several times to make and sustain a blog, starting with my use of LiveJournal in high school. I used it as a diary, as many people do, and the only readers were my girlfriend at the time and two other friends. I like to think that I am a good writer, but blogging doesn't come natural to me - I have a hard time thinking of things to write about. That said, I'm glad I was picked for the Blog project. It was my top choice (my other two choices were Personal Home Page and Placeblogging) because it would challenge me to actually succeed in keeping a blog alive longer than a few weeks, and hopefully longer than that.

Getting Started

I chose WordPress.com as my blog's host. Out of the possible hosting sites, it was the only one that I was not familiar with. I had to choose a sub-domain name (e.g. name.wordpress.com) and "blogophone" randomly popped into my head. Originally, I used this for my sub-domain, but upon the realization that my blog wasn't adhering to any specific category, I made a new blog entitled LoL, internet. The name is derived from the header photo on my blog, and also is explained in this post.

Strategy to Gain Readership

Overview

My strategy is to post everyday or even more than once a day. Also, in order for my blog to get some exposure to the outside world (i.e. not just friends and family), it seems advantageous to leave comments every day on some other blogs in simliar categories. This way, there is a better chance that a blogger, after reading my comment, will be curious enough to check out my blog.

Publicity Methods (Provided by WordPress)

There are a couple ways that WordPress facilitates blog exposure. When you create a blog, you have the option of checking a box that includes your blog in search results and directories:

This obviously is the easiest thing you can do to promote your site - it's as simple as clicking a box. How much this actually helps remains to be seen, since Google's PageRank algorithm ranks sites on the number of "backlinks", or sites linking to it, and I'm positive no one is linking to my blog.

Any time you post to your blog, you can use as many keywords (tags) you want to describe the content of your post. This way, readers of the particular topics you're blogging about can find your blog more easily. If you click on the individual tags, you can view a page that lists the most recent posts that carry that tag.

It seems that if you wanted to maximize your readership, you would pick a time to post new content at which you thought the majority of your target audience would be online. I tend to post late at night because that is typically when I think of things to write about. It is possible, though, that I would get more people to read my posts my publishing them at a different time throughout the day.

Another "ethics" issue is the actual use of tags. A post can have as many tags as you want. This could be abused by using popular tags (like news, sports, politics, etc.) for posts that don't even pertain to those topics. In other words, you may be able to gain readership by tagging to increase your blog's exposure in areas where it would otherwise have no impact. Again, I did not attempt this technique as it doesn't seem fair.

Publicity Methods (Not Provided by WordPress)

There are, of course, other ways that you can get the word out that you've got something to say. For example, I put a link to my blog on my Facebook profile, and not surprisingly, the majority of traffic to my blog originates from Facebook. In fact, during the first 12 hours of my blog's existence it was visited from five separate IP addresses:

This proves that Facebook reigns supreme for beginning short-term publicity. When I added the link to my blog to my Facebook profile, it was seen in the mini-feeds of many of my friends. The limiting factor, of course, is that I know these people and want to also expand my readership beyond this familiarity.

Conclusions

Consistency of Participation

Originally I had planned to post every day, but Spring Break derailed that plan. However, I did learn a valuable lesson by not posting for a week. The key to getting people to read your blog is to constantly supply the reader with new content. In my experience, there are very few instances where a reader will come back to your blog to re-read something they have already read. That means you have to post frequently in order to get readers to keep an eye on your blog. My blog views were skyrocketing and as soon as I stopped posting the views fell off drastically, reaching zero within a day and continuing for the entirety of my hiatus.

Publicity

Originally I had thought that the search engine listings would not help be at all, but I did receive some hits as a direct result of Google search terms, although the searchers were looking for something other than my blog. Still, a hit is a hit.

The Blogroll

A blogroll is just a list of other blogs that you can feature on your own blog. Over the last two months, I developed a mutual blogroll linking with another blog, and I am looking forward to more similar situations. Through the WordPress dashboard (control panel) I can see who clicks on what links on my blog and, conversely, what sites people came from. That way, I am able to see if other sites are linking to me, and if it generates a sizable reader jump, I can return the favor by linking to that blog.

Proof of Participation

This graph shows my blog's number of viewers from early April to date (I forgot to capture the previous months graph and it is no longer available). Usually, when the count stays high, it means I posted frequently. The dropoffs indicate when I was swamped with schoolwork and couldn't find time to write. The large spike near the end is my all-time high and it is solely attributable to this post.

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