Measuring Success: ProBlogger’s 31 Days to a Better Blog Days 1-3

October 1st, 2005 at 11:34 pm (Blogging)

Well, it only took a month, but I’ve finally fully implemented what I learned from Days 1 through 3 of ProBlogger’s 31 Days to a Better Blog.

Here’s a follow up to what I learned from Day 2 and Day 3:

Day 2

  • I’m doing a bit better at posting more often, but time is still a factor there.
  • I’ve taken to positioning the Google Adsense ads closer to the content, putting it at the beginning of each post.
  • I’ve stopped using Blogger (can we still be friends?) and started using WordPress, which has been a good move. I really like the WordPress interface and its flexibility, especially how it allows bloggers to utilize post categories. I was also able to find a unique look and feel for the blog that distinguishes it from the handful that are available to the hordes of Blogger users. In addition, WordPress can do so much more than I know about at this point, and I’m looking forward to learning and unleashing its capabilities over the next several months.
  • Finally, I’ve moved from the blogspot.com domain to my own joelhollingsworth.com domain. I’m going on faith right now that the move will reap rewards because search enginges prefer dedicated domains rather than easily available, commercial domains. I haven’t actually noticed a difference yet, but I do get the feeling that I’m taken more seriously having made the leap. The cost really isn’t that bad — I went with PowWeb.com for $7.77 a month for 5,000 meg storage and 300 gig transfer. I haven’t come close to using this much yet. Tech support when I needed it wasn’t bad, but I’ve had several hours of down time this past weekend, so the jury’s out on them for now, too. Again, the net effect is hard to get a handle on at this point, but I think over time, it will be a positive move.

Day 3

I’ve also been careful about placing keywords in titles, as I learned from the Day 3 post. One thing I had to figure out in WordPress, though, was to change the default setting to use permalinks. Basically, this means that links to individual posts are identified by title rather than by number. In theory, the posts will rank better in search engines because the name of the link itself contains keywords.

The net effect of all of these changes is difficult to measure at this point, but I think that over time, it will pay off. I’ve basically doubled my page visits and page views since implementation of these techniques, with a total of over 2,200 visits and over 7,100 page views as of today’s date. A lot of the increase in traffic, though, has actually gone to my blogspot.com address. I think that this is primarily due to my old domain having been around for awhile and my new domain spending some time in the Google Sandbox, which is a metaphor for the probation period the Google crawler and indexer imposes upon new sites until they prove themselves over time.

The bottom line is that the blog, for whatever reason, is trending positively.

Day 4 coming soon.