The real reason nobody reads my blog is that no one, or at least hardly anyone knows I exist.

The above link says the following:

The real reason why nobody reads your blog is this: massively successful blogging is about establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships. It’s all about who you know. Really!

I need more people to know me. I don’t think its so much that I don’t know many people. I’ve spent years on the internet lurking - too shy to say anything. I know a lot of people, they just don’t know me.

I’ve been planning to work on using Twitter more, but too many things have came up and I haven’t had time yet.

I can’t even start thinking about adding more blogs at this point - I’ve been working hard writing - but still hardly any readers.

I wonder how accurate feedburner is with the number of subscribers? I know people unsubscribe - but I’ve lost a lot of people just since Friday. They couldn’t have been subscribed for too long, so it seems odd that that many people would unsubscribe so soon.

So, needless to say I’m way behind on my goal regarding that.

Not doing well with comments either - getting lots of friends at Blogcatalog though - that’s about it.

The other thing I’ve had on my mind - I haven’t really been using Twitter. I found this at Performancing recently: Twitter As Resource?. It looks like something I could learn something from. That’s next on my list to do.

As I mentioned earlier, I need to increase the number of people reading my first blog before it would make sense to start another one. As a way to quantitatively analyze my progress I’m setting goals based on the average number of comments I get a day, the number of feed subscribers and eventually (once I get Faststats installed on this computer) I’ll look at the number of unique visitors too.

Subscribers

I’m not doing too well so far. I set a goal of getting 1000 subscribers according to Feedburner in 6 months. That would mean I would need around 5.5 new subscribers a day. And its already been around half a month since I started this, so at this point to reach the goal I need to get about 5.9 new subscribers a day. Now, over night I did get 7 more! But I know that won’t happen everyday, at least not now. I remember seeing a post about how someone got some such number of subscribers in so many days. I need to look that up and see what they recommended.

I’m still not going to say how many I have so far, its embarrassing but if someone wanted to do the math they could figure it out.

Comments

Not doing so well here either. Most of my recent posts have not had any at all, although one had 3 and one 2. I don’t see any pattern yet for which posts are getting more comments than those that aren’t.

A while back Caroline Middlebrook wrote a post about how to encourage comments: 10 WordPress Plugins for Encouraging Comments On Your Blog. I went through that post pretty carefully and added some of the plugins she suggested. I added:

- Lucia’s Linky Love

- a top commenter plugin

- recent comments — – although apparently 2.5 comes with one that automatically links to the commenters blog. But my theme isn’t based on 2.5 so I need to find out what to modify it to make that work.

- a Subscribe to Comments plugin - I really like this a lot as a blog reader/commenter. Its the only reasonable way to continue in a discussion on a blog post, otherwise its just too much to keep track of. I have no idea if anyone is using it on my blog though.

- gravatars - I found the code to modify my theme so these show up automatically, but I heard from Cynthia Armistead that when she upgraded to 2.5.1, hers no longer worked: Where are my Gravatars?.

Hopefully that will help some - I want to get to an average of 10-15 comments a day in 6 months. Of course though - people still have to know I exist to be able to comment or subscribe - so that is still my biggest challenge.

I tried a couple things yesterday that may have led to those 7 new subscribers. I don’t want to say what they are yet though!

Before I continue on following the steps in How to Launch a Blog Network and 46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network - I still need to work on this step: Work hard at building a blog with a good profile and traffic base on a single focused topic.

Now, I’m continuing to work on getting more subscribers and more people commenting, and I’ll post on how that’s going later in the week. But - how do I get people to find the blog to start with so they can subscribe and comment?

Chris Garrett had a post over a year ago titled: Where To Find Fresh Blogs and How To Get Your Blog Discovered. In in he suggests:

1. Get linked, any way you can - The more blogs that link you the more bloggers will find you. Obvious point but overlooked.

But how do you do that? I’ve so far avoided doing link exchanges with other blogs - but maybe I should reconsider that.

2. Link out, link well, link often ….

I’ve been trying to do this, and pretty often I think - but maybe not ‘well’. Maybe I’m not linking to the right people.

3. Comment well - Same advice as above, comment intelligently and a lot. …

I wonder what people consider to be a lot? Its time consuming, but I try to comment as much as I can. I think maybe I need to expand the number of blogs I comment at. I’ll work on that.

4. Play tag - I need to tag more.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been doing this. The new wordpress even has something built in for it, but I still haven’t. Way back when I did and it didn’t seem to help much, if at all. So I wonder, does it really help that much?

5. Email good stuff …

I’ve been trying to email more people lately - those who comment, etc. But maybe I need to do this more.

So, what have I learned? I’ll reconsider link exchanges with blogs, work on my linking out, start commenting on more blogs, tag my posts (I’ll even start with this one!), and think about using email more.

Really, what most of this comes down to though, is networking. Liz Strauss has a new post: Hunters, Gatherers, and Stars of Networking. And I’m not real good at networking. She divides people into three groups:

The Hunters
The Gatherers
The Stars of Networking

Oh, and the nonparticipants. That’s what I’ve always been. I don’t fit the descriptions of the other three at all.

I need to work on that.

I’m now one day ahead with my writing, which is much better than last week. I’ve gotten a few comments and a few subscribers too - I still have a long way to go though.

I write way too slowly. It has taken me pretty much the whole day to write one post. Of course, looking back maybe it was a bad decision on my part to write a 4 part series related to Earth Day. There’s so much to cover and as much of it is technical it takes me quite a while to do the background reading and then the writing.

I feel good so far about these posts though. I think I summarized some of the issues involved pretty well. I have no idea if anyone will actually read what I wrote though - so maybe I just wasted a whole lot of time. I did at least learn something from it all though.

Next week I will have to try pick things to write about that won’t take so long. And I will have to start getting something written ahead of time so I can have it posted in the morning. Instead of like now where I take all day to write and can’t post anything until late afternoon or evening - 8:30 pm, when I finished today.

This is kind of where I was a few months ago too. It took me so long to write, that I didn’t have time to do anything to promote the blog at all. So I ended up more or less just writing to myself. I don’t want this to continue so I will have - like I said above - to write shorter, less time consuming posts.

A couple days ago I decided that I need to set a goal for how big of a traffic base I need before I can add another blog. I decided the number of feed subscribers I have and the ave. number of comments I get per post would be a good way to quantify that. Since I don’t really know what would be some good numbers to shoot for I decided I would go and see what some other people have to help make an estimate.

Comments: (ave. per day for month of April)

Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason: 2.87
Sparkplug CEO: 21.59
Eye on DNA: 5.05
Genetics and Health: .57
GenBetween: 5.13
Successful Blog: 23.02
Aetiology: 18.27
Caroline Middlebrook: 34

Subscribers:
Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason: Bloglines: 29
Sparkplug CEO: Bloglines: 232 FeedBurner: 1763
Eye on DNA: Bloglines: 40 FeedBurner: 659
Genetics and Health : Bloglines: 50
GenBetweenBloglines: 24
Successful Blog Bloglines: 156
Aetiology: Bloglines: 42
Caroline Middlebrook: Bloglines: 318 FeedBurner: 2100
Problogger: Bloglines: 840 FeedBurner: 46940

After collecting that much data, I got kind of bored. Counting and averaging comments was rather tedious. I can’t say that my numbers are 100% correct either.

One thing I noticed right off is that a high number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to a high number of comments. And whether or not blogs seem successful to me doesn’t necessarily correlate to a high number of comments or subscribers.

At any rate, I think an average of 10-15 comments a day would be a good number to shoot for before thinking about adding another blog. 15 would be much better, but I include 10, because I can’t even imagine getting that much based on where I am now. I’ve been quite disappointed that I haven’t had more comments in the last few days. I’ve worked really hard on the posts I’ve written - but I guess no one is going to comment if they don’t know it exists.

I think 1000 subscribers seem reasonable to shoot for for Feedburner. Bloglines seems harder to go by - I wonder if less people use it now and maybe newer blogs are less likely to have as many people subscribing through it. Maybe 100-150 would be good. Again, my subscriber numbers are pathetic at this point.

So that is my goal - unless of course I modify it sometime - I will try to get 1000 Feedburner subscribers and around 10-15 ave. per post in six months.

Today I just had time to get my first Earth Day post written and to write something in the Butterfly Gardening blog (which needs a lot of work). I didn’t have the time to analyze how many comments and subscribers other people have and to estimate what I should aim for. Hopefully tomorrow. Right now, I need to start on tomorrow’s post. I really wish I could get a big ahead with my posting.

I’ll start today with the recent post from Darren from April 5th: A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks.

In this post he says that if he were going to start a blog network fresh today as a single blogger that he would make it focused on a single niche.

I don’t know exactly how he defines a niche, but I’m going to say that a set of blogs all focused on issues of interest to women would count as a niche.

The advantages he lists in doing this are (1) being able to cross promote across the blogs and leverage the traffic, (2) Selling advertising, (3) SEO. I believe all 3 of those would work with my ideas for blogs.

Next section in the post: “How I’d Start a Niche Focused Blog Network”.

1)Work hard at building a blog with a good profile and traffic base on a single focused topic

He says its a mistake to start out new with a bunch of blogs all at once. Definitely agree with that. He says he would pick something reasonably wide that could be broken down further. Mine could be considered too wide, but at this point its what I’ve got. It won’t be any problem breaking it into more specific topics later.

He says he would work on this first blog for 6 months or so ‘before even thinking about launching more blogs’. That sounds good, but I’m already cheating a bit - I’ve already thought about more blogs - but then I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t been would I?

That gives me some specifics to work with. I’ve had the blog longer than 6 months, but since I went for a time without writing I’m considering myself to be starting at the beginning. But I will try to make it no more than 6 months before adding another blog.

So, 6 months to build up a “good profile and traffic base”. I wonder how he defines that? A good profile isn’t something you can quantify too well, at least I can’t think of how. “Traffic base” - I could look at 1) unique visitors a day (from log files), 2) how many feed subscribers I have and 3) how many comments on average I get per post.

1) Unique visitors. I got a new computer recently and have not installed the statistic software I used to use on it yet. I will probably have to upgrade it too. It is FastStats by Mach 5. I don’t have time now, but I will have to check into it soon and see how much it costs and how to go about upgrading.

2) Feed Subscribers. I just a few days ago got a feed burner feed, so I don’t have many subscribers yet. I think the feedburner subscriber number would work well as an overall way to gauge how many people I have though. I’m too embarrassed to say how many at this point. But it can only go up at this point. How many subscribers should I have before launching another blog? I’ll look around the next few days at how many other blogs have and make an estimate for what would be a good goal for me.

3) Comments. Not doing too well here yet either. I’ll come up with a number to shoot for in a few days with this too.

Well, that gives me some homework to do! And meanwhile keep writing at the other blog. I have plans for the posts for this week, but don’t have anything written yet, so I will be busy!

Back when I had a regular job, one time we had to write goal documents and they made us come up with ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals. Which turns out not to be just some silly thing the company had made up to annoy us and waste our time. Well, it did annoy us and waste our time, but it has some usefulness too. So, I thought I would try the ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals approach to what I’m doing here.

Each of the letters in ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ stands for something but it seems to vary a bit. According to Wikipedia:

“A SMART objective is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.”

Where I worked I believe we used ‘trackable’ for ‘T’, I don’t remember what else was different.

Anyway, I’ll give it a try. The goal I’ll use it for is creating a small blog network. In the bigger picture though - what I want is a successful web site, one that could be sold for a decent amount of money and to get there I see building a community around the site as a good first step. And an blog network is a good way to start the community building. That’s kind of goals within goals within goals I believe. Nevertheless for this exercise I will stick with the creating a small blog network as the goal.

Specific - “Is there a description of a precise or specific behavior / outcome which is linked to a rate, number, percentage or frequency?”

Yes.

Oh. I guess I’m supposed to actually say what the specific objective is. Ok - I’d like to add 8-10 blogs to this site. I already have a good idea of what the topics will be about, although I realize that could change. I could go into more detail, but I think it best to wait until I’ve gone through the blog posts I mentioned a few posts ago in more detail (A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks, How to Launch a Blog Network and 46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network).

Measurable - “Is there a reliable system in place to measure progress towards the achievement of the objective?”

Not really much to measure here - I count the number of blogs added.

Achievable - “With a reasonable amount of effort and application can the objective be achieved?”

Yes, but can it be achieved by me is another matter. Am I capable of it? I don’t know that anyone can answer that. I think all I can do is try my best and see. I don’t know how they define ‘reasonable’ either. But I’ll stick with ‘yes’.

Relevant - “Can the people with whom the objective is set make an impact on the situation? Do they have the necessary knowledge, authority and skill?”

Yes, it is relevant to me and I can make an impact on the situation. But do I have the knowledge and skill? I don’t have all the knowledge and skills, I expect to have to learn a lot along the way. But hopefully it is something I am capable of doing.

Trackable - “Is there a finish and/or a start date clearly stated or defined?”

Well, its starting now, that’s easy. A clearly defined finish date? How do I come up with that? Maybe asking other people how long it took them. But everyone’s situation and skills are different so I don’t know if that would be very helpful anyway. How about I say 1 year?

Ok, so this ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals thing may not have been very useful. I don’t know that I got any more out of it than what I already knew. Maybe I’ll come back to it later once I’ve fleshed out some more details from the blog network posts I mentioned above.