Stats for Week One
I began posting on this blog on the 26th June (last Thursday) and have made 12 posts so far, within 7 categories and 34 tags. In this week the site has received a total of 148 hits, 58 of which were unique.
These statistics are very low, but I am happy with them, for now. Although I have been posting much more regularly than on my (now non-updated) ‘1 Man’ blog, I haven’t done all that much in the form of promotion. I have discussed using directories and Entrecard as means of generating traffic but haven’t used them to their full potential myself.
There is one place in particular I want to mention, who at the moment has brought more visitors to my site than any other and that is the Nicusor Do Follow List. Thanks. If you own a do-follow-list of your own, either let me know, or feel free to add my blog to it.
Checking FeedBurner, I also have two people currently subscribed to my feed. I’m quite happy about that, as I haven’t actually gone ahead and subscribed myself (as I’m sure many people have in the past).
Please don’t forget the small Entrecard contest I have going, drop your card to win - it’s that simple. Full details can be found here.
Promotional Contests
Holding blog contests can greatly improve traffic to your website or blog. If you have a product for sale, offering free samples as a reward/prize can increase publicity even more.
The blogging community tend to love giveaways and I have been on the receiving end of one with my Winning The Web T-shirt last week.
One of the best known bloggers out there, John Chow, is currently holding a contest alongside Bic Promotional Pens and is giving away two Flip Video cameras. In order to be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is reply to John Chow’s post here for one point into the contest and blog about the contest (like I’ve done here) in exchange for an additional five entries.
Contests like these are exceptional for promotion of new products and are a great way to expose your website and brand to more people. A website selling Bic Pens will be expecting a lot of traffic from this contest; with great exposure on John Chow’s blog and then posts like this one to further boost their brand, it is not directly marketed at their existing customers and looks to increase their market considerably over the next month.
Best of luck to everybody, although I would really like one of those cameras and don’t forget my current contest where you get a link in my blogroll (wow, I really do need better prizes!)
Page Peel Adverts
All of my blogging efforts with this site have so far been focused on generating traffic, and this has yet to have made an impact. The numbers of visitors are small, but I am hoping that this will grow slowly as time goes on.
As for making money from this blog, it isn’t a primary goal (not that I have a set of goals laid out) and I don’t intend to plaster each page with adverts for other websites and products.
One of the newest forms of online advertising has been page peel ads, which you can now see running at the top right of each page of this blog. Unlike traditional banner advertising the page peel doesn’t distract the user from the content of the website and it is only when they wish to view further information that the advert opens up to reveal a portion of a 500×500 pixel image.
I have decided to use AdToll as the publisher for these ads, as I have had previous experience with their services and believe them to be superior to many of the alternatives available.
How about the opportunity to buy a months worth of advertising in the upper corner for just $0.50 per week, click on my advertising link here to view more details.
DoFollow Blogging
I’ve just installed two more plugins to this blog which I hope will encourage more people to visit and begin posting relevant comments regarding topics I am covering.
The first is a removal of the nofollow attribute that is, by default, attached to links on the name of people who comment on your blog posts. This plugin is called NoFollow Free and is very simple to install and customize. Customisation options include the ability to only remove the nofollow attribute once a user has posted a certain number of comments and the addition of a CSS stripe in the corner of your blog to publicize the fact you are now ‘nofollow-free’ . I have opted to remove the nofollow from all comments (aslong as you get past Akismet and my approval.
The second plugin is called CommentLuv and will display an exerpt of your latest blog post when you comment on one of mine (if it is able to ‘grab’ it). In order to better explain what this plugin achieves, here are the plugin authors comments:
“Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking in the standard locations for a feed. If no default feed is found, it will attempt to parse the users page for a feed link and parse that instead.“
If you like the sound of either of those two plugins, be sure to comment and let me know :) I have also got other plugins currently installed and running, I’ll be sure to keep you updated shortly with what they are, and how they are benefiting my blog.
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