Tuesday, March 14, 2006

10,000th Site Visit!

I am very pleased to announce that, as of today, I have surpassed the 10,000 visitor mark. And I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has helped make that possible: you guys, the viewers!



I began writing my blog on December 19th, 2005, so just under 3 months ago, out of frustration over the United States’ handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and this will be my 207th post. My goal was to write some quality material that would make people think, and hopefully gets a good dialogue going that my viewers and I would learn from. I started to accomplish this goal in February, as volume really picked up at that time, and I began to get 4-digit weekly hits.



So what lead to this increase in traffic in February? Well, for starters, I found a topic I really liked, and I wrote about it consistently. I was interested in the Mohammed cartoon protests, and read everything I could on them, not only from the news but from other bloggers. I tried to make sure my posts had some original perspectives, but that they also examine other people’s points of view and the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments. I sited people with original thoughts, and commented on their posts as well.



Now it seemed like everybody and their grandmothers were writing on the protests, but the more I wrote, the more people came to my site to view my posts. I was one of the first to write on the cartoons, after a small protest in January, and I tried to stay on top of the news cycle and ahead of other bloggers when I had the time, so that when other bloggers were going to write on a news article, they often found my post and sited it in their post. And slowly, I started finding my rankings on searches related to the cartoons



In mid February I read a timely post by AbbaGav http://abbagav.blogspot.com/2006/02/first-year-of-blogging-whew-i-made-it.html on how he had made it through his first year of blogging, and if you’re trying to make it through the initial stages of your blog, it’s a real help. Of particular importance were the Technorati tags, Carnivals, and the emphasis on reading and responding to other people’s posts. The last is especially important; I know, it takes time to write your posts, but other people put time into their posts as well, so give them a bit of time back, and comment!



There are a lot of things that helped me, and that could help you too, things like article submission sites, regular posting (and times for the posting), a clear and distinctive look and feel, and regular pings, but really each of you has a success story, right? Otherwise you would have given up on your blog long ago. So tell people here what is your secret is, what really helps you drive traffic. I’ll give people BE credits for their comments, but more than that, you’ll have the gratitude of the people who read your comments and learn from them.



And regardless of whether you comment here or not, you have my gratitude, for helping to build up my site, and for making the comments and writing the posts that have challenged me to develop my own ideas. If you get a chance, click on a couple of the blogrolling links to reward these great bloggers. And keep writing!




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Posted by Scottage at 2:59 AM / | |