Are you Blogging in the Right Direction?

I’ll share a very recent experience. If you have been visiting Inspirit Blog for a while now, you’ll have an idea that I published my last post before this one, on 24th May. That means, I am posting today after a gap of exactly 21 days! I could not post for so long because I started to prepare for the 2nd semester university exams 5 days before they started on 29th. The exams lasted till the 10th of this month (they went all good, thankfully), and in the past 3 days I was engaged in a major theme upgrade and customization round.

A gap of 21 days is not a no-deal, and you probably know that things like this can simply kill your blog. Whenever I didn’t save for a rainy day, and the urgent need to skip blogging arose due to travel, studies, project work, or any other reason… The number of daily visitors and page-views, the number of RSS subscribers and other important metrics at my blog dropped considerably. And when I used to get back to blogging, I had to almost wear myself out, to revive my position in the blogosphere. Just like one does for a new blog, I had to start building my readership base over and over again, many times. The longest gap that ever happened to be between two consecutive posts, before this one was 11 days! And at that time, I lost over 60 subscribers and my Alexa ranking rolled back by a few thousands. Yeah, it hurts!

But this time, even after a gap of 21 days, the statistics at Inspirit have been amazingly stable! I have been getting 160+ unique visitors each day this month, on an average and the number of RSS Subscribers has incredibly rose from ~100 to a stable 180, after touching a peak value of 206, a few days ago. The only loss that I have noticed this time is a slight drop in my Google Adsense earnings, and an Alexa rank roll-back. I am hopeful, I’ll build it back, soon.

What does this tell me?

After an exhausting yesterday, I was checking out some blogs that started around the same time as this one. Those blogs, that offer equally good and informative content and were as much read as Inspirit Blog 21 days ago, have either the same number of subscribers as me, or probably less. Even when they are active and serving their niches well !

I do acknowledge that there also exist those blogs that have risen much above me, but that’s a principle. If you don’t work- you definitely pay a price. If you don’t run, you lose the race.

But I am just glad that I am not out of the game and am probably going in the right direction with my blog. I could have advanced much quicker than my competition if I could continue. But nasty life. Anyway, I am back and all geared up. Stay tuned for some insightful articles that I have been building up all these days.

How did I do it?

The readers kept visiting all the days I was away. Why? Simple. They liked the content. The first and the foremost thing to do when blogging is to write in the best way you can. Offer content that your readers find useful. I have stressed it a number of times that, discouraging anyone from reading your blog is bad! You should take special care that you’re not doing this.

Is that all?

I had to be away for a good number of days. One would get bored every time he saw the same blog-post over at the top of the blog. I needed a special formula to keep my visitors interested in my blog, through the same static page that they would see again and again. The idea that then struck my mind was amazing!

The Winning Idea

Instead of putting up a notice at the blog, that I was going to be away for a while, I only notified my followers at Twitter and other social networks that I use. I did this because I thought the notice would discourage the visitors to visit till I was inactive. But, in the few minutes that I spent online to check my emails in study-breaks, I used to interact with my readership through twitter, instant messaging and Blog Catalog, etc.

Someone visits your blog only if they know you are there! Interaction like I talked about above, kept sending visitors, subscribers and comments flowed in, to many posts.

The next part of the Winning Idea is the cleverer part. Read on, here’s what it is–

Instead of writing a post on a particular topic, I wrote a list. This was no ordinary list. I compiled a list of all the useful tutorials, blogging-related discussions, posts about RSS and subscriptions that I had ever published at Inspirit Blog into a single post called the list of most useful and popular posts at Inspirit Blog.

A blog post on a single topic would not interest some one every time he visited over the days I was inactive. However, with this list of useful blogs, I offered my readers not one post to read but many. And they all were indeed the most useful and popular posts that I published. The best ones that I wrote here.

I offered the visitor 30+ posts to read in a single post!

How many posts do you read at a blog in one go? Two, Three, Four or Five?

Even if my new visitors, coming from search engines as well as from forums, social networks, and not to forget StumbleUpon read one, two or three posts a day.. they had enough posts still left to benefit from. And in the mean time they were done with it all, I would be back again and give them more stuff.

The Positive Side-Effects:

Building traffic at this single blog-post meant building traffic at more than thirty other posts published here. The number of page-views and hits thus increased manifold. The bounce rate decreased. A large number of comments flowed in to the component posts, than the list itself. Then, I reaped the benefit of better internal linking (I revised a few posts mentioned in the list).

All the side-effects of a writing this ‘one’ list were POSITIVE.