I have talked a lot in the past about how you should begin marketing your blog – leaving comments on other blogs and developing real relationships with other bloggers. These are both critical steps in securing the future of your blog.
However, there is one aspect of this process I left out and feel should be written about further. When one goes to market yourself, it isn’t a “let’s tell everyone about our product today” and be done with it, but a continual process—once you start a blog, you can’t stop marketing.
Why Many Bloggers Fail at “Marketing”
Marketing to some is the same as it was ten or fifteen years ago. At the core it is the same – the more work you put into the promotion of your blog, the more return you will see. The aspect many fail to see is that simply having your name spread around won’t cut it any more.
Quix is a new bookmarklet and service that makes it painlessly simple to access common services, and even easier to interact with your WordPress blog or social networking services like Twitter. While the service isn’t completely new, it surely does replace some of the bookmarklets that I had kept in the bookmarks bar. For bloggers, it can help improve the time it takes to perform common functions, such as shortening links or sharing pages through Twitter.
Before I look at the features, it might also be worth looking at where the service stems from. There are many services only that provide these bookmarklets – links you drag to your bookmarks bar to shorten links, share links, or get information about websites. When each has a specific function, it can dramatically clutter an area that you want to keep as clean as possible, defeating their purpose. Shortwave is a similar service, but doesn’t contain nearly the same level of functionality out-of-the-box.
After more than ten years, Blogger still doesn’t have a way for its users to create static pages. That is until now — pages have been announced and will soon become available to anyone who uses Blogger “in Draft.” At this point, the feature has been turned off due to some issues, but the feature will eventually become available again.
To create a page, simply go to the Edit Pages tab, which will be displayed next to the Edit Posts tab. The process couldn’t be easier. You can only create up to ten pages (there really isn’t a reason why you need more than this for a simple blog). In addition, a new Pages widget will become available, making it easy for you to list your pages.
Aa you know, a lot of visitors traditionally don’t navigate too far beyond the initial portion of your site unless there is a reason for them to continue. For example, you can place posts or links to your featured categories at the top of your site.
Even though visitors may not be interested in this content, there is a much greater chance that they will click on them, as there is more emphasis placed on these areas.
On one of my other sites, I created an image that pertains to a specific category. I was normally receiving about 50 visitors clicking through the specific categories per day, but once I implemented the new category-specific images, traffic jumped nearly 250%, and may continue increasing as time goes on.
This technique is quite simple, as it makes your visitors really want to explore your content. However, it may also work better on “static” pages, where you don’t need to place as much emphasis on your latest posts.
While there may be millions of blogs out there, around this time each year, many of them mysteriously “die out.” In other words, the holidays consumed the blog owners, or they have simply moved onto “bigger and better” things for the new year. Quickly moving to some stats, you’ll notice that each year (at least for the term blogs) there is a noticeable swing up at the end of the year, which peaks around mid-year, only falling towards the last month of each year.
The trend has repeated for a noticeable portion of the last six years, and it can also be seen in the news reference area (bottom graph). What this means for you, as a blogger (if you are still interested in blogging) is that many bloggers simply call it quits towards the end of the year.
