Netizen: RSS

Showing posts with label RSS. Show all posts

Saturday, August 20, 2011

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?

Friday, July 16, 2010

Reclaiming My Twitter Account

Image via Wikipedia

I have decided to reclaim my Twitter account. What I mean by that is I am no longer going to be feeding TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek and Time into my Twitter stream like I have been doing for over a year now. They have had their free rides. Now I have a blog that intends to compete with them. I am going to link plenty to them on a near daily basis. But now the feeds into my Twitter stream are going to be only from my blogs. Most of the fed tweets will be from this blog itself because this is the most active of my blogs.

I did that feed thing because when I was desperately trying to accumulate followers on Twitter, I figured I could not fail in my attempt to create a great Twitter stream if I fed from some of my favorite blogs, news sites to visit, my favorite magazines.

That worked for a while. It no longer works for me now that I am toying with the idea of pro blogging in a serious way.

A spike in blog traffic can boost your self esteem. It has boosted mine. Now TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek, and Time come across as crutches, possibly even competitors. Why am I giving them all that free traffic again?

TwitterFeed tells me the newest feed from CNet into my Twitter stream has 700 clicks. Those clicks could be mine. Those could be clicks for my blog.

Hello people, the free lunch is over.

I never really did the RSS thing, and I tried Google Reader but I did not become a regular. I was using Twitter for all that. But no more. Now I create my own news feeds in the form of daily blog posts that link to many news items from many different sources.

A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada
Traffic: Canada Top Country, 2 AM Peak
What Just Happened? 3,000 Page Hits

Monday, August 31, 2009

Anil Dash On Google Wave

Image via CrunchBase

Best Of Anil Dash

Anil Dash:

What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way

Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies ..... whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web ...... I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way. ...... When RSS feeds were new, it was easy to understand their potential immediately ........ Combines chat, document editing, and message threading — wikis + blogs + comments + IM ....... Delivered as a very polished rich user interface

Bill Gates, Chrome OS, Natal, Wave
Blog Carnival: Google Wave
The Google Wave Developer Community Will Be Vibrant
Five Blind Men And Google Wave
Google Wave: Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy

Friday, June 12, 2009

15 Ways To Boost Traffic To Your Blog

Put your blog's address down as your email signature.
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.
Become active and popular at Twitter: How To Increase Your Following On Twitter. Anyone can end up with 20,000 followers. Anyone.
Every time you put out a new blog post, promptly feed it to your Twitter stream.
Sometimes feed the same blog post to your Twitter stream twice, with a few hours' gap.
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.
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.
Engage those who leave comments in your comments sections. I recommend Disqus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing top quality, regular content is the number one thing to do to boost your traffic.
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.