Another month has gone by. Some progress was made, some articles were published and some fun was had.
New Traffic
Articles in the Best of SamirBharadawaj.com list in the sidebar really started to pickup this month, and I have started to see about a half-a-dozen articles here become the major traffic magnets. That is a good thing and exactly as planned. In fact this month I even did a planned assault on creating some new major articles to add to the arsenal (see below).
The other improvement is the increase in search engine traffic. Articles here are being found for more and more search terms which is resulting in search engine traffic to this site growing from negligible to almost 15%. I am sure that figure will steadily increase in time, as it should. Now that this blog is a few months old and the search engines are ageing it a bit, they seem to take it more seriously for relevant results. The hot favourite search terms that are bringing people here at the moment are how to crash a wedding, pop up card, best action movie, feedburner alternative and taking professional photos. There are actually hundreds more, but these are the star athletes of the group for now.
Content Building
One major task I took on this past month was my try at the ProBlogger group writing project again. This time, I decided to write a series of posts rather than a single one and that resulted in the Be Yourself in Blog Land series. I came up with a clean new layout element for series articles, a spiffy drop-cap (as you can see at the beginning of this post), and managed to finish the four parts I initially planned.
All four were linked by ProBlogger throughout the month of August and some of these are already getting a whole load of traffic as a result. If you are a blogger, these articles should be of interest, so I highly recommend you go over to this article on the importance of a unique blog design and start reading.
Blog Carnivals
August was actually a slow month for Blog Carnivals on this site, because I didn’t submit to any for the first three weeks of the month. Then in the last week I got back into the mood and those submission came through as you can see below:
- The good people at Open Innovators included How entertaining is your 3D software in the 1st Edition of the Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing Carnival. Theirs is a very interesting site and the carnival listing itself is very educational and fascinating if you are into the subject of open source and distributed development. The host has taken the trouble to introduce each of the articles they link to and that makes the carnival post almost as interesting as the content it links to. Great site and definitely worth you time.
- Raj Dash over at Performancing included How to Assemble a Feedburner Alternative using WordPress Plugins in the 2nd Edition of the Carnival of Internet Pros. He went to the trouble of selecting some of the entries (including mine) to comment on individually. The attention is much appreciated and welcomed.
- Blue Skelton over at the Blue Skelton Production Blog included The Village – a review in the 2nd Edition of the Film Junkie Carnival. It’s nice to see more carnivals on the subject of movies and cinema sprouting up. It is a subject a lot of people write about, so the more ways to find these writings the better.
- Steven Fisher over at Startup Spark included 5+1 Simple Ideas For Brainstorming With A Dictionary in the Carnival of Entrepreneurs #36.
- Mark A. Rayner over at the skwib included How to Start a Conversation with an Urban Indian in the Carnival of Satire #82. That is the kind of material I wish I was writing more of, so I’m interested in seeing what sort of response it gets as more people read it.
- Once again Raj Dash, this time over at his blog Bootstrapper, included 5+1 Simple Ideas For Brainstorming With A Dictionary in the Carnival of Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs #7. Not just that but he went a step further and selected the article as the Editor’s Choice. A big thank you to Raj for that honour. For everyone else out there, this post was always meant to be just the beginning of an entire thread of brainstorming related content on this blog. So subcribe and watch out for more.
ToDo
“More great content”, is really my only aim for the near future. Hopefully the content will find its readership and its search engine traffic. Above all else, I would just like more people to read this stuff, and judging by the increase in commenting here, I think I am on the right track. Make sure you don’t miss any of the upcoming new content by subscribing to my full text RSS feed.
If you need more guidance in the realm of blogging and starting or running your site, I found these resources to be very well put together and comprehensive. For my take on making the right choices for your blog, do have a look at my article series Be Yourself in Blog Land.
Another month lies ahead and there is plenty to do. See you around the comment threads.
Samir
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