Tag: social scientist

blogging

Blog statistics

Up until April of this year, I was blogging approximately once every 3-4 days (usually 4). Then after attending a webinar on social media, I began posting shorter pieces multiple times a day through April.  Did that result in greater traffic to my blog, as the “social scientist” suggested it would? Let’s look…

This image is taken from the WordPress Site Stats page which tracks the total number of unique visitors to my brentsampson.com blog on a monthly basis, since I started it in January 2010.  You can see the natural climb, along with specific “jumps” which I can contribute to certain tactics, which I will discuss tomorrow.   The last bar graph represents April.  Is it higher than March? No.  Will I be continuing to post 3 blogs a day?  No.

Now I am going to try something else through May, and then we’ll compare the stats again.  This new tactic involves shorter postings (like the social scientist’s suggestion) but rather than multiple times per day, I will post each of the shorter postings three days in a row…

blogging

Social science is not all its cracked up to be

Toward the beginning of last month I blogged about a webinar I attended by a “social media scientist” who suggested that multiple blog postings throughout the day translates to a greater number of blog visitors and better exposure for your company.

As a result, I changed my tactics on this blog for the month of April by writing 3 shorter blog postings throughout the day — one in the morning, one in the middle of the day around lunch, and one toward the afternoon. I agreed with the concept that multiple blog postings provided an opportunity to present multiple headlines, which would increase the posting’s exposure through RSS feeds and search engines. 

I just wasn’t so sure that the actual results would justify the additional time expenditure.  Each day ended up taking me twice as long to post. Sure, the postings were shorter, but as you can probably tell by the stream-of-consciousness content, it’s not the “writing” that takes me very long — it’s the mechanics involved in tagging each posting, scheduling it for a certain day at a certain time, etc.

So, did that little social science experiment work? I’ll answer that question tomorrow (which, in itself, might answer that question) with a graph of this blogs monthly stats so we can compare April with March.

blogging

Blogging Advise

Yes, I realize I’ve improperly used the word “advice” in the headline for this blog posting: “Blogging Advise” and here’s why I did it:  “Blogging Advise” is second in Google Search Suggestions, which means I’m not the only one putting the “s” instead of the “c” when looking for blogging advice.  It is apparently a fairly common thing to do. So when all those people are looking for “blogging advice” and they enter “blogging advise” into Google, there’s now a better chance that MY blog will appear higher in the search terms.  Do those people care too much about the contextual meaning of “advice” vs. “advise?” I doubt it.  They probably care more about getting what the are looking for, which is not a grammar lesson.

So, I’ve already given one piece of advice, which is, when it comes to blogging, it benefits you to title the subject of your blogs according to what people are actually searching for, and to use the terminology (and yes, even the actual spelling) of what they are typing into the search engines. 

I have a love-hate relationship with Google Search Suggestions, which I’ve discussed at length on this blog in the past, so I won’t reiterate it here, but instead, still coming up later today, I will mention another piece of blogging advice I gleaned from the recent webinar from the Social Media scientist, Dan Zarrella…  As you can see from these shorter, multi-day posts, one of his pieces of advice was to post multiple times throughout the day. So I’m continuing to do that. Another is to post on days of the week according to your objectives for the blog…