I observe that depending on the counting mechanism, I have written or am about to write the one thousandth post for this blog. Since few of the posts are particularly short that adds up to a lot of writing over the past two years. Thus a few comments are in order.
I started this to provide a handy day book as part of my ongoing writing efforts. It quickly became a very handy research tool and diary. Material reviewed on a given day can be commented on and if practical, copied and linked so that it is never lost.
This way I do not lose important links through the passage of time and the vagarities of our search engines. When one trolls through obscure subjects covered by obscure articles decades old, one finds that refinding them later can be easily impossible through the search engine. Thus repeated searches in an area of interest become necessary and copying the material in a post is a good practice.
I try to provide a good link to the original article and I make no attempt to present images but often do provide links. That allows the information to be quickly scanned and if interesting beyond that the way through to the source itself.
All this makes it fairly easy to assemble a larger manuscript in rough form on demand as wished. My article on the reverse engineering of the UFO is a good example. The core source articles fell into place allowing the article itself to be naturally written in a couple of days.
It took a while, but I attract an average 10,000 readers per month with 83% hanging around for additional pages. Not bad for an unadvertised and little promoted blog dealing with a range of often obscure subjects. It is also noteworthy that Google drives a lot of my traffic and I have often seen my post jump to the top of a presently public topic. Occasionally a post gets discovered and its sharing triggers another blip of readers. The readership spans the globe which I find satisfying.
The bottom line is that I have a readership that is slowly growing quite nicely and your comments are always welcome and often trigger additional comment and clarification.
Now that I am comfortable with the product, I will investigate ways to expand the audience, although I know that such methods as are available cast too wide a net and produce meaningless results. Readers can help here by old fashioned word of mouth to friends.
I have found the feedjit tool to be very useful. It is that list of visitors on the upper right hand corner. Go into it and bring up the map. It will show locations of the last one hundred visitors. Most interesting is to click on one of the flags. That will throw up a list of the pages read by that reader. So if you are at a loss to know what to read next, perhaps looking over another’s shoulder can help.
I started this to provide a handy day book as part of my ongoing writing efforts. It quickly became a very handy research tool and diary. Material reviewed on a given day can be commented on and if practical, copied and linked so that it is never lost.
This way I do not lose important links through the passage of time and the vagarities of our search engines. When one trolls through obscure subjects covered by obscure articles decades old, one finds that refinding them later can be easily impossible through the search engine. Thus repeated searches in an area of interest become necessary and copying the material in a post is a good practice.
I try to provide a good link to the original article and I make no attempt to present images but often do provide links. That allows the information to be quickly scanned and if interesting beyond that the way through to the source itself.
All this makes it fairly easy to assemble a larger manuscript in rough form on demand as wished. My article on the reverse engineering of the UFO is a good example. The core source articles fell into place allowing the article itself to be naturally written in a couple of days.
It took a while, but I attract an average 10,000 readers per month with 83% hanging around for additional pages. Not bad for an unadvertised and little promoted blog dealing with a range of often obscure subjects. It is also noteworthy that Google drives a lot of my traffic and I have often seen my post jump to the top of a presently public topic. Occasionally a post gets discovered and its sharing triggers another blip of readers. The readership spans the globe which I find satisfying.
The bottom line is that I have a readership that is slowly growing quite nicely and your comments are always welcome and often trigger additional comment and clarification.
Now that I am comfortable with the product, I will investigate ways to expand the audience, although I know that such methods as are available cast too wide a net and produce meaningless results. Readers can help here by old fashioned word of mouth to friends.
I have found the feedjit tool to be very useful. It is that list of visitors on the upper right hand corner. Go into it and bring up the map. It will show locations of the last one hundred visitors. Most interesting is to click on one of the flags. That will throw up a list of the pages read by that reader. So if you are at a loss to know what to read next, perhaps looking over another’s shoulder can help.
