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?

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.

Are you blogging in the right direction?

I am quite confident that I am going the right way with my blog. Are you?
Did you learn something from this post? Your comments are welcome.

17 thoughts on “Are you Blogging in the Right Direction?

  1. Welcome back! I was one of those who looked at several of the posts listing in your top poss list.

    It is interesting to see your statistics. I have more visitors each day than Inspirit, but only have about 30 subscribers. That number has been constant for months. Can’t seem to increase it.

    I have also found that getting a post submitted to Digg and StumbleUpon works well for my site. But it is really hard to get that first digg or stumble. I think people are reluctant to have to write the initial review. Once a post is submitted it is much easier for people to just click to add another and it builds. An idea that stimulates people to digg and stumble posts would be the biggest benefit for my site.

    Wills last blog post..Non-Stick Cookware Safety

  2. I must say you are very lucky mate
    i know a time when i haven’t update my blog for 1 week and have lost more then a 30 subscriber and my page view have drop to half of its usual mark

    Pradeeps last blog post..What is Long Tail Keywords And How to Increase Your Search Engine Result With It

  3. Congrats on gaining steady traffic, but could you check something really quick? If you have analytics or any way of seeing where your traffic comes from, please tell me how much traffic was coming from Entrecard during the days you didn’t do anything on this blog. I’ve been doing some research on Entrecard and how it is horrible and fake traffic.

    -Mike

    Mike Huangs last blog post..Contest Update

  4. Wonderful news Abhi, I only wish I could be so lucky!! I have a really hard time staying consistent enough with my blog and trying to promote my artwork in other ways as well. I know I am one of he people who values your site for the information you provide and I check in fairly often.

  5. Great idea…I would have never thought of this. You can bet I’ll be using this method on my blog sometime down the road.

    Ben Joness last blog post..Business Plans are OUT! Here’s the New Way…

  6. Great job, and great blog.
    I’ll have to remember your idea.

    Sarahs last blog post..One Site, One Goal= Free Traffic

  7. What an idea!!! what really matters is to hold on to your present viewers and get unique page views at the same time….

  8. Your idea of having a couple / list of posts in a single post clicks and interests me. Let me try out in my blog. Thanks for the cool idea 🙂

    – MS

    MSs latest published blog-post ………. What is a Netbook? The Buzz around the Netbook

  9. I think that most people who read blogs just jump from one blog to another to read one or maybe two blogs. Different thing is if they are your followers or even fans. They could search the whole blog to find anything that could be interesting. And I think that any blog that is successful must be updated as often as it is possible. People like the new things more even if you have a lot of posts and information, new posts is something desired and when someone finds new blog the first thing he does is looking for new posts. If the newest article is old a guest will think that the blog is dead and nothing is going on. That also mean that there will be no new posts here in near or even far future. He maybe will even read something but will not be interested in following you. So I think that updating is the key here.

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