I have a diary blog that is just a little "hole in the wall" Wordpress.com blog. It's called My Public Diary and is located at www.davidsaidit.wordpress.com. I'm putting this down here so I don't get reamed out again by a total stranger who decides that all of his life's many frustrations have just found a nice home.
You wanna go there! There it is and don't accuse me of promoting my own blog or I will lose it right here at Christmas! Smile.
This little blog-et surprised me by actually starting to serve some useful purposes.
I have these strong urges about once a week to find a new template and try it out. That would not be good to do with Virginia Breeze. Especially now that it sports a premium template and is looking better than ever before. So I go to the diary and in about five seconds find a new one. File under the simple pleasures of blogging.
Exploring Google Analytics the other day lead to the surprising discovery that My Diary is number four in traffic sources for my main enterprise, Virginia Breeze. And the average length of visit is 13 minutes! That compares with 1.1 minutes for StumbleUpon which is the number one source of traffic and 4 minutes for Google which is the number two source of traffic. Direct traffic comes in at number three and is only slightly about SU in terms of length of visit.
Why is this? I'm not sure. Maybe readers of the Diary develop a connection with me that motivates them to stay longer when they go to VB. Maybe there is something going on here that I need to ponder at greater length.
Ryan says, " .... First, discover what people want, respond to, and get excited by and then give it to them.
Don’t fall for the illusion of self-projection. Most of the world is dumber than you, and most of the world has different tastes. Give them what they want, not what you want. Then, as they say, you’re golden."
The entire article is posted at MY Public Diary and I read it once in awhile because this is a difficult challenge for me. I want to write about things that give me pleasure. And the same goes for taking photos.
I wonder how readers feel when they read this? It's not exactly flattering? Am I giving them too much credit when I create something and post it at Virginia Breeze?
Do they really prefer My Public Diary and unflattering remarks, templates that change weekly and boring personal posts about a cough that won't go away or my sudden desire to give up blogging? There are not a lot of visitors there but the ones who show up certainly seem to enjoy themselves and become great readers.
What do readers want? I'm not sure that I want to know the answer to that question.
#4: 1%
> Word Deserts are being irrigated with waterfalls and photos of flowers.
Love to hear that :-)
> This Diary 1%
Yep, that's a great #4.
> I put together a post about toy trains and it was well received over at StumbleUpon. We had over one thousand views in about a day.
It seems like you know how to do the SU dance. Maybe you want to write about your SU experience?
Thanks for your response. I
Thanks for your response. I am still figuring out how to navigate around here. But that's a good thing because I plan to stay here and invest a lot of time next year in learning whatever I can about blogging.
I am discovering that stats are tricky because some of them don't filter out my own movement from one place to another.
I later realized they are called text deserts not word deserts. That is a good example of a 58 year old mind at work. In either case the waterways are open. I don't know if they look better or not. Maybe somebody will tell me someday.
In theory they should but are they too solid, too bright, or too repetitive? who knows?
My SU dance accounts for about sixty percent of my traffic. But this month I started trying to replace it with keyword traffic which is currently up to around twenty five percent. I will write about it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Have a great holiday and thanks for taking the time to comment.
Onward and Upward
--C.S. Lewis
Virginia Breeze/ http://davidnotes.com
how to navigate around performancing.com
Subject send to my to-do notes.
Structure: The performancing.com community is:
Following the tracker ('track discussions' in your menu) is basically all you need to be up to date.
Too bad that there is no RSS feed for the tracker and/or ALL new comments and articles...
Thanks. That tracking page
Thanks. That tracking page really helps a lot. And if you have any suggestions about my latest issue posted here please let me know.
Onward and Upward
--C.S. Lewis
Virginia Breeze/ http://davidnotes.com
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