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.

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.