Nobody Dugg Me
OK, so what did I learn on day 1? I learned that in order for Digg to produce traffic for a blog, you need to have a decent sized readership to begin with. You need regular readers that will come to your blog and digg the post right off the bat in order to keep it up on the list. The fact that I started with 0 traffic caused my digg submission to go down faster than Tara Reid after a couple of whiskey sours. This would tempt a person to join in on a “Digg Group” where a rather large number of bloggers team up and Digg each others articles in order to move up the rankings and get insane traffic. For the time being, however, I’m going to build my readership and hopefully I can win at the digg game by writing useful, original articles.
According to Google Analytics, which any blogger should use, my first day went as follows: 32 unique visitors, 2.09 avg page views, 2.5 avg minutes spent on the site. At first this was a little depressing, but the good news is that with only 39 readers, 4 signed up for my rss feed, so 13% of new readers have committed themselves to coming back. Extend that percentage to when natespost will be getting, say…200 new readers a day and traffic volume should increase exponentially.
So how to get the traffic? Starting yesterday, I went to USAToday.com and MSN, found articles having anything to do with unemployment, and posted an on topic comment with a link to my blog. I also emailed several other bloggers and introduced myself, asking if they might want to write a snippet about my blog. Out of the 10 that I emailed, one has responded and said he would let me write a “guest post” for him and provide my link details after the post. So there it was, DAY 1. If you’re new, please be sure to sign up for my rss feed at the top right!
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February 26th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Do you have first hand knowledge of Tara Reid?
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February 27th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Geez, I have reg readers and I don’t get digg. I have gotten stumbled.
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February 27th, 2008 at 2:38 am
Great read, nice to see a great guy from Bloggerforum coming out and being straight forward.
You made the day, really…
heh…
-Swapw
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February 27th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Thanks, guys, and I will ALWAYS be straight foreward.
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February 27th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Saw your post on the other blog about unemployment.. and I can SO relate. I actually get a bit more than you get but it’s still not enough to keep you above the poverty line over the long term.
I know just how you feel, BUT… here’s a suggestion? Take up exercise, buy a punching bag, kick the cat, get it out of your system any way you can… but don’t write angry. Might take awhile to get the blog to feed you financially and in the meantime, you don’t want POTENTIAL employers to find this and decide they don’t want to be on your hit list if things don’t work out.
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March 5th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Setting up Digg/Technorati/StumbleUpon and others on my blog is still something I need to do… I don’t really rely on these (though I know they can really help your traffic). As to Google Analytics, I haven’t used them, but am using sitemeter, that’s the same, gives me the same info about my readers. Commenting on USAToday.com and MSN seems like a great idea, I’ll try it! Thanks! tell you how it went
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March 5th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Oh, and…PLEASE, people, don’t kick the cat!!! I have one, and they’re adorable creatures
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March 5th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Hope it goes better for you than me….with USAToday, even when I stay on topic, I’ve been banned twice.
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