I had such high hopes for my blog this year. In fact, I wrote a post back in December listing various goals I hoped to achieve as a blogger in 2009. I write this today as a follow-up, to see if I’m on track to accomplish my goals. After five months, I’m not really sure what to make of the data I’m seeing. But I’m coming to the conclusion that the credit and blame belongs to Twitter.
Content, Circulation and Hits
First, let’s take a look at the three goals I had that dealt with the creation and circulation of my posts.
- Goal: Two posts each week. Reality: At that pace I would have published 42 posts this year by now. This entry will be my twelfth posts this year.
- Goal: Increase RSS subscribers to 40. Reality: I’ve had as many as 38 this year; presently I have 27.
- Goal: Add one original video each month. Reality: By now I should have five, but so far I’ve added only one such video.
Logically you would assume that since my site isn’t being updated frequently I would have seen a major drop in traffic. One of my goals dealt specifically with traffic, and I’m amazed at what I have seen.
- Goal: 100 page hits to my site each week in 2009. Reality: After 22 complete weeks, only 4 times have I not hit my goal. The last time I missed was two months ago. The week of May 18 I had 232 page hits, my highest total ever in any one week.
I’ve had dramatically increased traffic to my site even while posting substantially less content. How did this happen?
The Twitter Effect
The answer lies at Twitter. I’ve had a Twitter account since 2007 but I never did much with it other than automatically re-post my Facebook status messages there (using TwitterFeed). But toward the end of last year I started to use it independent of my Facebook account. Here’s what has happened since I started using Twitter more seriously.
- I have 146 followers on Twitter, up by 102 since I wrote my blogging goals post. My year-end goal was to have 150.
- Since January 1 I have tweeted 674 times. (I should note that publishing a certain number of tweets was not one of my goals.)
The reason I’ve had dramatically increased traffic to my site is because I have been posting substantially more content than ever before.
The difference is my content isn’t showing up on my blog, but rather it’s on my Twitter stream. Most of those 674 tweets included a link to something that I found engaging or interesting somewhere on the Internet. While most of that content wasn’t mine, per se, I was the one who brought it to the attention of my followers (and others, as you’ll see). Once that happened, many of those followers came to my blog to see what else I had to say.
Twitter drives traffic to my site directly and indirectly. Whenever I post a new blog entry, a tweet is automatically generated alerting all my followers, along with a link to that new post. But a lot of my Twitter traffic comes to my blog because readers of my tweets click on the link to my website on my profile page. From there they might go to one of my popular posts (listed in my sidebar) or read one of my recent posts.
But who’s reading these tweets? Who knows! It’s pretty incredible when I stop to think about it. Most of those 146 people who follow me on Twitter are people I don’t know in real life. They’ve decided that the short messages I compose are worth reading on a regular basis. But even beyond that, all public tweets are searchable. So, if I tweet about the iPhone and someone who isn’t even following me searches for tweets about the iPhone, that person very well could see what I wrote. (Both these facts explain why I don’t tweet overly-personal messages.)
Oh, it also didn’t hurt that I had one of my tweets directly quoted in this article by Lifehacker. I saw a big spike in traffic to my blog after that.
The Downside: A Higher Standard
The beauty of Twitter is that each message must be short: a maximum of 140 characters. Very little time goes into composing a tweet. Usually, when I see something I like on the Internet that I think others would like to see too, I’ll tweet about it (and if I think that link is something my Facebook friends would like too I’ll then share it there too). If what I see is especially epic I’ll also create a blog post for it where I’ll talk about it in more detail.
My problem is that writing a blog post can take days or weeks before it arrives at a quality level that passes my personal standards. So as you might imagine, I have equally high standards regarding what sort of content is worthy of more than just a tweet. This fact, combined with my already busy schedule, has contributed to the substantial decline in number of posts published on my blog.
I’m Still Figuring This Out
I’m a writer. I’d much rather take the time to talk about a topic in detail. But like I said, there just isn’t the time to do this with everything that strikes my interest on the web, so I settle for alternatives. Sites like Facebook and Twitter make it so easy to quickly share content with friends and followers. But most content shared like this never hits my blog in any meaningful way, which I also don’t like.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve this problem. Early in last December I wrote a post that listed out all the links I had shared during the course of November. I stated that I’d be doing something like that each month. I didn’t realize I was biting off more than I could chew. As I started to share more and more links it became such a daunting task to put them all together into one post. But I think I was on to something; I just need to refine the idea a bit. So, starting in June, I’m going to experiment with different ideas I have to bring some of my tweets and shared links to my blog in visible and meaningful ways.
As for my original goals, all I can do is try to get back on track. I’m going to do my best to write twice each week, and hopefully I’ll be able to add some original videos soon. (I have quite a bit of footage that I just haven’t had the time to edit yet.) Feel free to give me some grief (kindly, please) if you see me slacking off again in a month or two.
