Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Blog Lessons and ROW80 Check In

30 days into blogging and I see a couple of points that are starting to become obvious.

  • No matter what time of day or night you post a link on twitter. you're going to get some hits on it. Hits yes, but very few (if any) comments. This leads me to believe that mostly I'm being read by bots. This would also explain why I've gotten so many one-off views from foreign countries.

  • I can't compare my blog to others. My blog is mostly personal and boring, and I know this. Still, it's having some kind of online presence, a platform. That's what publishers and agents want to see, right?

  • I don't have enough interaction with my human viewers. I'm not sure if it's the site design, some option I don't have checked, or if I'm just that boring with my posts (likely!). It's something I need to work on.

  • The other thing I know is that this post is over and I can go have breakfast!

* * *

ROW 80 Check In:

9 days in, 9 daily goals exceeded. I'm getting writing done every day, but I'm finding that most of these goals are being met just under the wire! I seem to write better/more consistently at night than I do during the day. This makes it a challenge when you haven't written all day and it's 10:30pm, and you still have 750 words to meet your goal. May not sound like much to some, but I type slow. Word goal for every day this week is 750. Until Sunday's check in then.

Comments always welcome. (hint hint!)

9 comments:

  1. Way to go on your writing goals!

    With blogging, I find that as long as you write about what excites you, there will be an audience engaged. Some people are shy about commenting. It comes around eventually.

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  2. Just a thought - my comments (real life people comments) increased quite a bit when I took away word verification. People who read lots of blogs may not want to take the extra time to comment if they have to go through the extra step. (And taking it away hasn't open the spam floodgates)

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  3. Wosushi, so far as I know, I don't have word verification, captcha, or the like turned on. (Or if it is I don't see it.) Am I mistaken?

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  4. Well, I can take a hint! ;) Congrats on meeting/exceeding your goals for ROW - Makes me wanna try writing with goals again.

    I've never heard of bots visiting tweeted links, but it's possible. Do your stats show how the traffic reaches you?

    Don't take the low number of comments as indication that no one is actually reading - getting blog comments is a whole separate art from building blog traffic, and both can take a long time to build up. I'm curious to know what others say publishers want to see, too!

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  5. and yepp... captcha is still turned on. And something else odd happened when I hit "Post Comment". I'll let you know what happens this time.

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  6. When I submitted the first comment, nothing seemed to happen. A tiny red box thing appeared. Then I clicked "Preview" and another window popped up, with the comment and a captcha box. I entered that, and it went through. Second comment seemed to go through without it. Not sure if you're changing things as I'm typing, or if the same name/url was auto approved. I'll try this one as Anonymous ;)

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  7. Tori, well I say bots, I mean search engine bots, spiders, webcrawlers and the like. I do see top referral URLs and links, but not who's visiting from them.

    The writing goals so far have been little - 500 words/day last week, 750 words/day this week. On Monday it's up to 1000 words/day. (Who saw that coming? lol) I've hit everything so far. Ramp-ing up my production in stages, so that I'm tuned up for NaNo, and I've actually been doing something between Dec 1 and Oct 31! ;)

    Wosushi, I looked at my settings and discovered I DID have word verification switched on. Remedied that problem. Let's see if it makes a difference.

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  8. Blogging can feel very lonely at times. And yes, sometimes it feels like the only attention I get if from spammers and bots. :( Keep it up though. These things take time.

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  9. Hi Jessica, thanks for stopping by! I know that it takes time to get onto people's radars. I've only been at it a month, some people have been doing this for a decade.

    Watching stats today I had 19 hits from Germany, all on a Linux system, using Fire Fox as a browser. A bot you think?

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