This blog has been in the “getting established” phase for years. I had been dabbling at it before, but since I left my last full time job at Hostopia, I’ve gotten more serious about this blog and I’m seeing the results:
Visitors per month are up 121% in the last month. (Went from double digit to triple digits.) Here are some things I’m doing differently to kick things up a notch. Consider this post my tips for bloggers from a newbie. More to come as I learn.
I’m posting a steady stream of posts. Thanks to WP’s scheduling feature, I even scheduled the last two to post days after I wrote them. This helps me post steadily with less pressure.
I included a video for the first time this month. Hope to use more rich media going forward. I think it is an increasing expectation of surfers these days. I know I prefer sites with pics and videos.
I installed Ronald Heft’s Google Analyticator and started tracking traffic with Google Analytics. You improve what you measure!
I wrote and installed my own Feedburner plugin for WordPress so I can track RSS subscribers. (The whole source code was about 5 lines and is included in that post. I’ve never written a smaller piece of code that had a practical use.)
This morning I installed the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress: All In One SEO Pack. All I wanted to do was change the header title of the home page to include some keywords. I was shocked (like many others, I noticed), that WordPress does not let you specify the page title in the header independently from the name of the blog.
I activated WP’s Askismet to prevent comment spam. Comment spam was so bad before Askismet that I actually turned commenting off on this blog. Very few people comment during the “getting established” phase – you just have to wait for it – but I’m ready to receive them now.
