Subscriber and Commenters Part2
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:
- 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!
on May 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Hey there - just wanted to let you know that I got the Gravatars working again with some help from the WP support forums. I had to change the code from
<?php
echo get_avatar( get_comment_author_email() );
?>
to
<?php
echo get_avatar($comment);
?>
on May 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
Thanks for the link! One of the best ways to attract people who leave comments is to go out there and make comments yourself. When you comment on other blogs, and then readers click through to your link, those readers are the kind of readers who read the comments and are far more likely to be commenters themselves rather than the vast majority of people who just read the post and nothing else. Good luck!
on May 5th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Thanks Cynthia! Now I just need time to update my wordpress!
Caroline - I’ve been leaving lots of comments lately - I think like around 20 today. Doesn’t seem to help me much. Maybe I’m not commenting on busy enough blogs.
on May 11th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I find time has been my best friend comment wise. Now both blogs are two years old I have lots of regulars.
Never did well via Feedburner although I got many posts on my Vegan blog published via them.