I haven’t not been posting here because of a lack of things to write about - I’ve been overwhelmed with trying to get so many things done! I hadn’t posted in my butterfly gardening blog for a while either, and it doesn’t take long for that blog. I wrote some posts for it tonight though, finally.

And now I’m here. I’ve got several things I want to write about over the next days. Stuff I’ve been reading and learning about to apply to my blogs.

I think I get it now! Although I’m still a big shy when it comes to tweeting about my own posts.

I’ve been hanging out at Plurk too: me at plurk.

Here are some tweets that made me laugh last week:

eMom @commonsense4 A bunch of Twitterers got together and hung out - get this - offline. I know, very un-geeky of us!

rmsylte I had a dream last night that I was in the middle of Second Life. I’m not even registered for Second Life! Symptom of social media overload?

Busymom I have an idea to deal with Twitter downtime: what if we each made webpages and visited each other’s pages and commented? Nah, crazy talk.

bigbrightbulb @jtnt Maybe the Twitter dudes took Amazon down so the Internet would have someone else to bitch about?

I did finally get around to reading all the posts about Twitter I had been collecting, and a few more. I even installed Twirl yesterday. But I have to say - I still don’t totally get it. I guess I mostly can’t figure out what I would say with it that anyone would care to hear.

I’ll keep watching on Twirl and maybe I’ll get the hang of it after a while. I’m thinking I may stop following some people though - its nothing personal - just more than I can keep up with.

One of the posts I read suggested having multiple accounts - I wish I had thought of that before. That could be helpful. I know different people from different contexts and some of them just would not be interested in things that people from other contexts would be.

Here are the posts I read:

5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence

Building Your Twitter Presence Part 2 - Pre-Prepared Tweets

Building Your Twitter Presence Part 3 - TweetBaiting

How to Use Twitter - Tips for Bloggers

9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers

Twitter: A Desktop Client Goes A Long Way

How to Get More Twitter Followers: Some Methods That Work

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

I still haven’t had the time to read about how to really use Twitter effectively - but I’m getting more involved with FriendFeed. I started a room there for Women Bloggers . It is a sort of sub group of the AB Blogging Pack for women and also for other women bloggers who are serious about blogging and want to network with other women bloggers.” - please join!

No, I didn’t have time to follow up on any of the Twitter stuff I’ve been planning. It took me a good part of the day to write my post for tomorrow. Which I think I did pretty well with. The posts I write for the rest of the week won’t take as long though.

I just read an article Chris Garrett wrote for Blog Herald too: Are You a Solitary Blogger?

I’m definitely introverted. He says:

“The lesson, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if nobody notices.”

Yes, I’m learning that.

I’m trying to do stuff to make myself better known - but I need to write faster still to have the time. I’ve been offered a couple opportunities to guest blog too - but I haven’t found the time yet!

I didn’t do any work today! I spent the day outside gardening!

I still haven’t had time to read the twitter articles I’ve been collecting - but what I have done is join Chris Garrett’s Authority Blogger Forum. I wish I had known about it sooner!

It kind of reminds me of a WebmasterWorld for blogging. I think I will learn a lot there and meet lots of other bloggers.

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.