FeedBurner Messing Up

Image via CrunchBaseThese numbers were close to 3,000 on my three blogs not long back. Such "dips" have taken place before. But each previous time the numbers have bounced right back up within a day or two. This time it has been over a week and the numbers have still not bounced back. What's happening, FeedBurner?

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Executive Change At Twitter

New York Times: Why Twitter’s C.E.O. Demoted Himself: for all its astonishing growth, Twitter has succeeded in spite of itself ...... I’ve screwed up in many, many, many ways in terms of managing people and product decisions and business ..... he excels at understanding what Internet users want and contemplating Twitter’s future, but isn’t a detail-oriented task manager.

I don't know much about Dick Costolo, except that he sold FeedBurner to Google like Evan Williams sold Blogger to Google. To Ev's credit, Blogger remains my favorite social media platform, more so than Facebook and Twitter. It is that sentiment that gave me the confidence to speak my mind here: Twitter Is Massively Complex.

What Just Happened? 3,000 Page Hits

The page views count for this blog for today stands at 3,000, and the day is still young. What just happened? This makes it the best recorded day for the blog. The previous record was 1200 for a blog post that had the word Bill Gates in the title.

But most of the page hits for today have come from Google. Looks like this blog has managed to hit some kind of a sweet spot with the Google search engine. I am happy. But I can't explain. My blog posts today and yesterday have not been extraordinary.

On another note, my Feedburner count went from 2300 to less than 200 yesterday, and is still stuck around there today. I know Feedburner sometimes does that random act. But I am still anxious. Go back up, will you?

What Just Happened? May 2009

My page views for my Barackface blog yesteday stand at 1200. Most of that traffic is also coming from Google. That is the good kind of traffic.

Maybe I should put the Google ads back onto the blogs.

They say at 10,000 daily hits, you can make a full time income.

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15 Ways To Boost Traffic To Your Blog

1. Put your blog's address down as your email signature.
   
2. Collect names and email addresses of everyone you know. These are people who can recognize your name and face. There are no other requirements. Reconnect with all of them. Send out one liner emails. More than one line and they might miss out on your punch line, the signature.
3. Become active and popular at Twitter: How To Increase Your Following On Twitter. Anyone can end up with 20,000 followers. Anyone.
   
4. Every time you put out a new blog post, promptly feed it to your Twitter stream.
   
5. Sometimes feed the same blog post to your Twitter stream twice, with a few hours' gap.
6. You must give your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. You must give them the option to subscribe with their email addresses. You can do both for free with Feedburner. That mailing list is key. They say, in the long run, that is the best kind of readership.
7. Read other blogs. Leave meaningful comments in their comments sections. Link to blog posts by others from your blog posts. That works great if they have the trackback thing. Zemanta makes it easy to link to blog posts by others. I got quite some traffic from the Google Wave Developer Blog that way. I have a feeling this post will get me a lot of valuable trackback traffic: Mashable Did It.
   
8. Engage those who leave comments in your comments sections. I recommend Disqus.
9. Find your passion. Find your niche. You discover your passion as the topic you blog about the most. Your niche is what Google Analytics tells you it is. If you are lucky, there is an overlap.
10. Once you find your niche, you have to work very hard to occupy it. There should be at least one word, one phrase - not your name - that when you google up, your blog shows up on the very first page. Work at it. You can do it. In the short run most of your traffic will come from the referring sites. But in the long run, if you are meant to be a professional blogger, most of your traffic will come from the search engines. That is why it is very important you discover and occupy your niche. You can have several sub niches, but you need one or two very well defined niches that you occupy.
    
11. Find a group or two to belong to in your niche. Do a search on Google Groups. Find one with a large enough membership. You have to be an active member of a virtual community or two of people who share your passion. That will bring you traffic. Some groups I have signed up for: Google Wave API, Wave Protocol, Android Beginners, Android Developers.Of course every message by you is going to carry your signature.
    
12. Say hello to Arianna at the Huffington Post. When she puts out a blog post, read it, and say something mesmerizing in the comments section.
    
13. Remember, every page hit counts. Just like every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents, not dollars. You are going to 100,000 visits a month one visit at a time. Every visit counts. Every click counts.
14. Writing top quality, regular content is the number one thing to do to boost your traffic.
15. But that alone will not cut it. You have to go out there and network feverishly in your part of the blogosphere. You have to read blog posts by others, engage them in their comments sections. Ending up on other bloggers' blogrolls boosts your blog's PageRank. High rank means more show up in search results means more traffic.
    

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Content Is Queen, Marketing Is Princess
Content Is Queen
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Spamming Om Malik
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Blog Daily
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