My  goal is to identify, through experimentation and learning from other’s experiences, the repeatable steps to a successful and profitable blog so that I can start other blogs/websites that deal more directly with my passions (such as helping other become successful). 

If this is truely my goal, I guess the answer is to push onward.  How can I ever hope to leave my fulltime job and do something I am passionate about if I am not working towards that goal.  I cannot just expect someone to hand over a successful blog with all of the steps, tips and secrets that made it so.  Hmmm…I guess you’re not rid of me yet!    ABloggersLog.com lives to blog another day…or something like that.  Thoughts?  Please share them.

Happy Blogging!

Don

Last Sunday I went a little crazy getting the site and excerpts of my posts out on to social networks (Blog Catalog, Delicious, Feed Burner, Friend Feed, Multiply, My Blog Log, Post on Fire, Stumble Upon, Twitter).  Prior to Sunday, I saw only a few new visitors per day.  Anywhere from 1 to 3.  Not bad in my opinion giving the site has only been live a little over a week.  On Sunday alone, the number jumped to 9 unique new visitors.   Here’s the interesting part, it stayed around 5-7 per day over the next 3 days and then dropped back down to the 1-3 per day.  The trick will be to find a happy medium for getting my blog’s existence out on the web and increasing quality back links.

For my (more established) other site, Loquacious Magpies, I have been steadily seeding the Internet with three specific forms of publicity; Facebook page and advertising, Twitter and My Blog Log.  This is a more established site and sees an average of 20 unique visitors per day.  The most effective of the three has been the advertising (capped at 3 clicks per day), followed closely by MyBlogLog and lastly using Facebook to share the link and use post excerpts to gain interest.

It seems as though a consistent routine of sharing your work on social network sites will really help get your word out and create credibility with readers.  After some time, you will have connected with enough people that become consistent visitors, you can slow down your publicity. 

What have you seen from your efforts?  Please feel free to share.

Happy blogging!

User Engagement

• WP PostRatings- Allows readers to rate your posts using a customizable format of numbers, stars, thumbs up/down or other forms.
• Contact Form 7-  Easy contact form to put on a page so that visitors can email you through your site.
• WP Mobile Edition-  Adds a mobile version of your site through use of a second theme that operates behind the scenes.  You don’t have to configure a whole mobile version if you use this plugin.

Admin Functionality

• Broken Link Checker-  Looks through entire site for links that lead nowhere.
• Forgot the Category- Great to remind you to add a category to your blog especially if you are using a permalink that utilizes the category name.
• WP TimeSheets-  Not such a big deal if you are the only individual posting blogs on your site, but on my other site it’s been real handy in keeping everyone pulling their weight.
• WP Admin Notepad-  Just a notepad to add to your dashboard.  I found it usefeul to keep track of social bookmarking sites I’ve registered with along with notes for blog topics.

Social Bookmarking

• Socialble-  If you read and followed the steps fromt he first blog, you will have no doubt signed up for some socail bookmarking sites.  If you didn’t, it doesn’t matter, I bet at least some of your readers will.  This lets them share your site with others in a long list of social sites.

Traffic Trackers- As stated earlier, redundant.  Just want to see which ones are accurate.

• WP.com Stats- Quick overview of visits, most popular posts and search queries.
• Google Analytics Dashboard-  Pulls data from Google Analytics and shows some stats on the dashboard of your blog.
• WP Stats Dashboard-  Gives a whole list of different stat sections.  Some are a little unique.
• WP Stats- Another stats tracker.  No dashboard view.

What have you found useful?  I’d love to see what everyone else is using.  Feel free to share and even promote your own plugins if you have developed any.  Thanks for joining me.

Happy blogging!  YW7MCJAHBZ97

• MyBlogLog-  Yahoo! owned community of bloggers looking to share their site among other bloggers.  I saw some quick vists from joining this site.  I’ll have to wait to see longterm impact to traffic.
• Twitter-  Everyone knows this site…I don’t think it needs explaining.  This can be a powerful resource to reach people on a regular basis.  Since Twitter only allows short status updates, if they want to read more, they will have to come to your site.
• Technorati-  Another community of bloggers.  After signing up with them, you need to claim ownership of your blog.  This appears to be a lengthy process, 6 hours and still no verification yet (I’m still wating for my other blog, Loquacious Magpies, to be verified).  There is alway the chance I’ve done something wrong.  I will have to wait before I can make any other judgements about this site but it definitely looks promising.
• Google Analytics- Fairly easy way to submit your sire to Google and get free tracking of visitors.
• Bing Webmaster Tools-  Mircosoft’s search engine and traffic reports site.  Again, like all of them, some knowledge regarding where to copy and paste the validation code is necessary, but there are help guides the take you throught he process.  (If you need some personal assisatance, I will try to help you out too)
• Yahoo! Site Explorer- You will need to get a Yahoo! login first and then you can go to the site explorer to submit your site to Yahoo! search engine.  Not nearly as robust as Google Analytics, there are some traffic reports.
• I know I said that I’d cover plugins later, but there is one that you should note and install ASAP-  Google XML-Sitemap Generator.  This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.  This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.  This was a huge help in getting the site to come up in the search engines.

I will tell you that just signing up for these will not lead to traffic overnight.  I have seen first time visitors on a consistant basis though.  If you can keep new people coming in, eventually you are going to find some that will become repeat visitors. 

Happy Blogging!

      Don

   Happy Blogging!