The assigment for today’s class and this week is as follows:
Pick a topic that you want to write three posts on
Check Google search results for keywords related to that topic and take a screen shot of the the top results. Look at who is coming up on these topics already.
Plan your three posts, considering…
- Titles of each post (write for findability)
- Tags (what series of tags will give this series of posts a stong theme and help it be found)
- Links (who or what are the important sites and people to link to on this topic… wikipedia and a google search results page are always easy sure winners).
- Overall theme – how will these posts work together to give you a strong theme.
Write your posts, publish them, and promote them
Prepare a report for next class, including…
- Traffic (who checked out your posts, where did they come from, how did they find you?
- Incoming links (is anyone linking to your posts? what are the results?)
- Subscribers (does your blog have any RSS subcribers? how many? how did you find them?)
- Comments (did anyone comment? who? do they have blogs? how did they find you?)
- Results (where do you come up on Google? Have you gotten any feedback? How do you feel about your blog?)
Hi Kris: Here is a breakdown for my blog this week following my three-post series on Film Ethics:
(1) Traffic: Sex does sell. After my post entitled “Sexy Cinema” (http://andysaur.com/2008/02/08/second-intermission-sexy-cinema/), I received my greatest single day of traffic (49 page views). Most of my traffic is generated from my Facebook page or from people clicking through to my page from a link on my classmates’ blogs. I have over 725 unique visits to my blog since its inception.
(2) Incoming Links: As of yet, no one has linked to my posts except myself. In my series on film ethics, I regularly linked to previous posts on the same subject to establish the string.
(3) Subscribers: I added a “MyBlogLog” button to my blog, but as of yet no one has subscribed through that service. Truthfully, I’m not sure how to find if my blog has an RSS subscribers. I know that my classmates have subscribed to my blog (as part of our earlier class assignment), but beyond that I’m not sure. Could you refresh our memory on how to determine this statistic?
(4) Comments: Yes, I had three comments during my series on Film Ethics. Two were friends from my college days and one was a VFS classmate; we had good continued discussions on the given blog topic. All three have blogs of their own (which I read). One found my blog through my Facebook page, another because I sent her an email to her know I had a new blog, and my VFS classmate obviously found me through this class.
(5) Results: As mentioned, the topic for my series of posts was “Film Ethics”. In Googling the term “Film Ethics”, my highest posting was page 2 (around #17) and I have slowly fallen since my last post to page 3 (around #29). A few folks found my post by Googling “Sex” or “Sex Cinema”, but most purposely searched me out. I really enjoy blogging, but I just don’t have enough time create more than one posting every three days. I thought my series on film ethics was an interesting exercise, but not something I want to make a regular feature on my blog (I would prefer to do more film reviews). The blog is still a work in progress, but this is definitely something I want to keep up after graduation. Thanks for introducing me to it!
Traffic – it was initially up due to a post I did about a new SFU device that collects energy from everyday walking. After averaging 30 hits/day, this SFU post resulted in 75 hits on a Saturday. My theme after that was “Love” in accordance with Valentine’s week. I considered the posts pretty fun so I took the opportunity to do a facebook message blast while I had this content up. That resulted in my biggest day which was 138 hits. To date I have received 1,386 hits total.
Incoming links – none to report.
Subscribers – don’t know how to find that info.
Comments – none to report.
Results – I am so far from being on the first page of results when googling “Love”.
Hey Kris, Here is my report on my 3 Spring Break blogs:
Traffic: This whole week has generated the most hits every single day and has had a steady increase then I ever have since I first started this blog, about 300 hits since the beginning of last week, my best day was 62 hits — Tuesday, February 12, 2008, most of the hits come in because of the Spring Break posts.
Incoming Links: Nothing yet
Subscribers: There have been a steady number of subscribers from Digg.com and from the company StudentCity.com
Comments: Not many yet
Results: All the Spring Break blogs have generated a lot of traffic for me and has gotten attention especially since Spring break is coming soon I seem to increase everyday. I have generated leads and potential sales from this blog to the company I worked with StudentCity.com. My biggest post was the Top 5 Spring Break Destinations.
Traffic (who checked out your posts, where did they come from, how did they find you?
- Incoming links (is anyone linking to your posts? what are the results?)
- Subscribers (does your blog have any RSS subcribers? how many? how did you find them?)
- Comments (did anyone comment? who? do they have blogs? how did they find you?)
- Results (where do you come up on Google? Have you gotten any feedback? How do you feel about your blog?)
Hi Kris:
How are you doing??? My traffic is steady!!! People through wordpress find me, and through keywords they find me, but when i type them in I cant find myself. I use Orkut through which people see my Blogs. I don’t think anyone is linking to my blogs or have subscribed to mine. I do receive comments from people and I think form last week I got like 3 comments. I don’t know who they are and don’t know if they blogs. I feel that I am doing better than what I thought I will do when it comes to blogging. Trying to get better at it too. Write more articles that I know very well. There were 2 random people who told that I am doing a good job blogging who are not my friends. I guess thats my report at short!!!!
Thanks
Hi Kris,
I did four blogs about some annual music festivals. I talked about Bumbershoot, SXSW, Coachella and All Points West.
When I googled keys words like music festivals, art festivals, and the names of the dif-ferent festivals last week, the top results were either the official websites or Wikipedia.
So I did one blog that sort of announced that I would be blogging about different music festivals over the next few days. For the titles of my blogs I kept it to the name of the festival, where it took place and the dates.
My first blog was about Bumbershoot festival is Seattle. I gave a little background about it and what people could expect when they attend. I went last year so I gave some feedback on how it went. Tags included: Bumbershoot, music, Seattle, Labour day weekend, and some of the different artists that played. I also drove quite a bit of traffic to this specific blog by sending the blog to the Bumbershoot website and they put a link to it in their fan blog section.
Traffic – A lot of traffic came from the Bumbershoot website and fan blog. Also a lot of traffic came from the WordPress Dashboard and links through different links on the WordPress website and other posts. Traffic came from posting my blog link on my Fa-cebook page generated a lot of traffic as well as different links from MSN and Gmail. People also visited my site through searches with the keywords and tags I put on my blogs.
There are no additional RSS subscribers to my blog expect for everyone in class.
I received one comment on my Bumbershoot blog about how awesome the festival was, from a guy on this hip-hop website.
Last week I had about 250 hits on my blog, now I am up to 400. The traffic has been pretty consistent throughout the week. On the day when I post and the day after is when I find I have the most traffic.
I am pretty happy with my blog so far. I need to do some more linking and categorizing. But overall I have been pretty happy with it.
Thanks
Lindsay