If you’re mentioned on a big blog it’s important to make the most of that exposure and that’s exactly what I did after being mentioned on John Chow’s blog when he wrote about the Seattle Blogger Meetup. I was near certain that he would link to my blog when he wrote about the so I purposefully wrote my thoughts on the meetup that night and followed up with an entry on 5 of my favorite posts the next day. I wanted the readers that came to my blog from John Chow’s to see some of my better stuff so that they might stick around and keep coming back. Much to my delight, I was linked to in his post about the blogger meetup.

I was excited about the link but I was even more excited with how my strategy worked! After getting mentioned on his blog my traffic has stayed at a much higher and consistent level of about 3 - 4 times the amount of page views a day compared to what I was receiving before. I believe part of the reason why the traffic has stayed at a fairly consistent level after riding the first surge of the wave has been due to the quality of my posts. Overall I’ve focused on writing more frequently and on topics I knew would interest my readers, but you can’t dismiss the initial tidal wave of traffic I received from his blog contributing to the higher traffic levels. This is the same type of strategy that was used when I helped launch my first forum with my halo 2 video Untouchable. The video was posted on one of the largest Halo websites in the world and targeted the type of people that I wanted to come to my website (gamers that enjoy watching game videos). Just like how a post on John Chow’s blog targets readers I’d like to check out my blog. Do I believe that being mentioned on John Chow’s blog was the best thing that could have happened ever? Of course not, but the fact that I have been able to continue on while consistently averaging more page views per day compared to before the traffic surge is great.

The important things to remember are that you must make the most of the traffic wave while you’re at the top. That’s one key element to riding the traffic wave coupled with your ability to spot opportunities to ride traffic waves. That’s why it sucks for people that don’t have a server that can handle the front page of Digg. They miss out on all the extra exposure and then have to deal with their server being down for the regular readers! In any case, I already have several more posts lined up that I believe will help me to continue to find more and more traffic waves to ride on.

Which traffic waves have you ridden on lately?

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I’m starting a series titled “Quick Blogging Tips” that will run every Sunday for all of 2008 and hopefully beyond. I’ve also decided to lump this series in with my Goals of 2008 post as well to provide added incentive to stay on track. This series of posts consist of Quick Blogging Tips that will help improve your blog. So without further ado or explanation of an already obvious title here’s the first Quick Blogging Tip:

Get into the habit of spending some time to proofread your posts before you publish them. When I took some time to think about the goals I was going to set out for myself in 2008 I looked through my old posts and noticed that the message I meant to get to the reader wasn’t as clear as I thought it was when I first wrote the post. The way I wrote my posts before was to simply do a very quick 15 second scan to see if there were any glaring problems before I published the post. What I’ve started doing in the past few weeks was to take the time to read through the entire posts and look for ways to improve it.

Here are some examples of the questions I ask myself in the time I spend proofreading:

“Does the opening sentence do a good job of pulling in the reader? Does it explain exactly what the next few paragraphs will be about? Or does it turn the reader off?”

“Does this sentence in the paragraph work best here or should it be moved to the end of the paragraph where it will possibly provide a better transition into the next paragraph of the post?”

Overall I believe that the time I’ve spent in the past few weeks proofreading my posts has greatly improved the overall message I send to the reader. It’s also helped me come up with more ideas for my blog too. I thought of this series for Quick Blogging Tips when I was writing a post about proofreading your posts and found that there wasn’t a lot I could write about the topic, yet I still believe it was something that has improved the posts on my blog and could improve some of my reader’s blogs as well.

How much time do you spend proofreading your posts or do you even proofread them?

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I finally got around to upgrading to WP version 2.31 a week ago and had been installing new plugins in an effort to drive more traffic and encourage more interaction on my blog. Naturally I upgraded to 2.31 exactly two days before version 2.32 came out which is a trend I’ve continued to follow after several years of upgrading forums to the latest version of vBulletin only to find another new version out shortly thereafter. Either way, I took the time to upgrade the blog to 2.32 and throughout the last two wordpress upgrades I’ve been testing out new plugins. Here is the list of new wordpress plugins I’ve recently installed along with the other plugins that I have been using for a while:

All in one SEO pack: This plugin features several different options to improve the SEO optimization of your blog with minimal effort. I’m still playing around with some of the options but I highly recommend testing it out.

Comment Relish: This nifty little plugin provides a way to automatically send an email to someone that has commented on your blog for the first time. In the email I thank the reader for commenting on my blog and encourage them to read my about me page and subscribe to my RSS feed. If you’re interested in seeing it in action and you haven’t commented on my blog before do so now and you’ll receive the email I send out to readers. I really like this new plugin

Share this: The wordpress plugin avaliable through this site allows your visitors to share a post or page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. You also have an option to configure which sites show up after clicking share this. Again, if you’d like to test this out simply click the “share this” button at the end of this post.

Subscribe to comments: Provides another way to allow users to keep track of the conversation that’s going on for a particular blog post and give them another reason to come back again.

Top Commentators: This plugin displays the top 10 posters (or whatever you set) for a predetermined length of time. It’s a great way to recognize readers who comment frequently by sending them a free link.

NoFollow Free: This plugin removes the “nofollow” attribute from commentors posts which gives even more incentive for readers to comment on my blog. You get a free link out of it :D. I think it’s only fair to give a free link back to someone that comments on your blog. It’s cool because you can also set various limits on when the links will lose the nofollow attribute to help deter people that make a single comment with links to several posts on their blog just to get the link back. I added this plugin after the top commentators plugin listed above, so I’ll probably get rid of my top commentators plugin sometime as this plugin comes with a top commentators widget as well.

Related posts: This plugin was one of the more harder ones to install properly on the site. But it does just as it describes, provide links to related posts elsewhere on your blog. It helps to generate more page views and is an easy way to refer readers to material that is related to the post they just read.

Feedburner Feedsmith: This plugin makes sure all your RSS feeds are forwarded to your feedburner RSS feed. So if I tell people to subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking this link. Even though it’s a URL on my blog it forwards onto feedburner so you can keep track of your RSS subscribers.

WP-ContactForm: This plugin allows you to put in a human logic question like the one I’m using “What planet are you on?” and requires the reader to answer it before they can contact you. This helps to cut down on the spam and I haven’t received too many spam emails yet actually.

Several of these plugins are probably pretty common and ones that most everyone uses like feedburner feedsmith, or the WP-ContactForm plugin. However, I wanted to give some details surrounding even the common plugins for readers that may be new to blogging or looking to start a blog. I love using cool wordpress plugins like the ones I’ve posted above. It reminds me of vBulletin :).

Which plugins are you using? Any good ones you don’t see here that you suggest?

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It’s that time of the year and everyone’s making their New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the next year. I never made a concerted effort to make goals in the past, so my New Year’s Resolution is to focus on hitting the goals I set out in this post ;). In fact, I didn’t make any goals in 2007 for this blog or the other websites in my company. I came to the realization a month ago that I must set goals and check up on them otherwise I’ll just go along without a plan or a focus on where I need to be. So I’m starting this year off with my specific and measurable goals for 2008 as a part time web publisher and blogger that I will revist on a quarterly basis:

Blog Specific Goals:

a. Get the custom blog design paid for and implemented Achieved March 18th
b. Make $1000 a month from my blog (All income from my blog will be disclosed)
c. Break the four digit RSS mark by getting to 1,000+ RSS subscribers
d. Hit the front page of Digg at least once
e Break the top 10,000 Technorati mark
f. Improve and maintain my posting frequency and by the last quarter of 2008 I want to look back at Q4 and see at least 92 posts.
g. Do a quick blogging tip every Sunday for the entire year of 2008.

For the other websites and forums I run:

a. Increase my online income to $2,000 a month (Blogging goal not included.)
b. Have at least one forum hit the 1,000,000+ page views a month mark
c. Be mentioned on a major video game related website (i.e. GameSpot.com)
d. Only launch two more forums (So that I will focus my time on growing the sites I have)

I know I took a while to post my goals for 2008, but I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I can reasonably do while at the same time providing a significant challenge. I know that I can reach the goals I’ve set out for 2008 and am really excited to mark off goals and provide quarterly updates with recaps on all the goals.

If you haven’t set any goals for 2008 I urge you to try it. Make sure you write specific and measurable goals so that it’s easy to keep track of how you’re doing.

What do you think of my goals?

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