This week was crazy and it is hard to believe that just a few days ago I was back home. (Wisconsin) Now I’m here again in uncomfortable but warm California. I’m homesick already.
My kids crack me up every day. Courtney is turning into a beautiful young lady way too quickly. But she still reminds me that she’s still a kid. Just last night she decided she wanted to snuggle with Mommy on the couch. I wonder when she will get too old for that. Ciara had a fever of 102.9 late last night and scared me half to death. I was up with her all night and had to stick her in a cool bath in order to get the temperature down. She’s fine now, thank goodness. Conan is getting better at expressing what he wants. Most of his sentences begin with, “I want.” But they usually end with ” cookies, crackers or pizza.” Because of his multiple food intolerance he can’t have tomatoes so last night we ordered a pizza with creamy garlic sauce just for him. Feeding my son is very challenging.
Okay I titled this meme “Blogging.” and I am going to stick with it. I’ve been active on the blogosphere for quite some time now but am still unhappy with the progress of my blog. I’ve read tons of ebooks about how to stay on top of the blogosphere I’ve even fell for Internet products and software that claim to rocket your blog to the top and increase your traffic and readership overnight. Yes I’m a sucker. I will not disclose how much money I’ve spent. But it was probably too much.
All the experts say that the best way to make your blog popular is by doing these things.
1. Write original content
2. Visit similar blogs and comment
3. Join forums related to your blog’s topic
4. Start a meme and stick with it
Okay here is my progress on these four tips. Nearly 98 percent of my posts are original content written by me. Maybe I need to write better articles or more articles? I try to make 3 posts a day but with three children, dealing with my anxiety and depression and all the housekeeping involved with being a stay at home mom sometimes it is difficult. That is why I am up at four in the morning writing this post. I don’t know if I should sacrifice sleep for my blog. Do you?
Number two, “visit similar blogs and comment.” I visit all the blogs that follow mine about every other day or so. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours visiting blogs and commenting on them. I also make sure I visit everyone that comments on my blog. I’m trying to visit new blogs too. I think I need to designate one day a week to finding different blogs to visit and comment on. Maybe that will increase my readership. What do you think?
Join forums. Okay I’ll admit I am not an active member of any health, parenting or women’s forums. Do these actually work? If you are an active member of a forum please share your tips. I haven’t tried this one. Maybe I should.
Start a meme and stick with it. Here is my meme that I started months ago. I even use Mr. Linkey’s. This is my 35th Weekend Reflection and I still don’t have any participants. Hmmm, sounds like something is wrong here. Maybe I should start a different one.
Blogging is frustrating but also addicting. It is frustrating for me because I still don’t have as many visitors or readers as I would like. My technorati ranking isn’t that great and I’ll admit I get a bit jealous when I see blogs with 50+ followers, feedburner reader stats of over 100 and technorati rankings over 500. How do you do it? I don’t even advertise my feedburner or technorati stats because I am embarrassed by them. Please help me out. I need all the tips I can get to reach my blogging goals. Maybe I just need to be more patient.
To participate in this meme add your link to Mr. Linky’s. Then make a blog post reflecting back on your week with a link back to Weekend Reflection Sponsored by Healthy Moms. I will visit everyone that participates.
http://www.blenza.com/linkies/autolink.php?owner=cltalbert&postid=06Dec2008&meme=wr
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I really like your blog. I came across it when 5 Minutes for Mom had you listed for your maternity gown giveaway, and I’ve been an active reader since! I don’t always comment, because maybe I just don’t have anything to add, but I assure you, you’ve got readers! 🙂 I don’t have a lot of readers myself, or I have silent ones. Participating in the 5 Minutes for Mom blog activities (like “tackle it tuesday” or “wordless wednesday” drives a lot of readers to my site, and in turn gives me some new reads. I’ll agree though, whether or not you have a popular site, blogging is definitely addictive!Also, I was going to mention, if you are looking for more followers, maybe try making that a requirement for future giveaways. Or say, for an additional entry, become a follower of this blog. I know a lot of sites do that.*thanks for stopping by my site! 🙂alexandra
Since I live in CA, I’m curious to know why you say “uncomfortable” in CA?Best,Stephen
Thank you, Alexandra and Stephen. To answer your question, Stephen, I grew up in the midwest and the culture out there is very different from California. What I mean by “uncomfortable” is I am out of my comfort zone living in a state that is different from what I am used to. The midwest is more laid back, slower paced, there are less people living out there and a lot less minorities. I grew up in a Norwegian town of about 12 thousand people. Everyone spoke English. California is very different and I’m not used to it yet.
Well, we finally have some snow here in Northern Wisconsin! 🙂This whole blogging this is pretty rough sometimes, of course I just have a “personal” blog, but it is very time consuming and most of the time I end up doing more visiting than posting… and then I see my subscribers go from 50 to under 30 🙁 when I first started I got on all the lists and waited for someone to start reading. I didn’t get any comments until after I started doing those weekly memes. And now, I get the most comments on Wordless Wednesdays. So those memes really helped me gain readers. But around the same time is when I also learned that you had to do a lot of visiting other blogs 🙂 but that is the funnest part!
btw: I’m going to try to join your meme today 🙂 it is a really good idea, and as I am still having photo upload issues 🙁 Also, I haven’t really joined any forums, I keep myself too busy with blog visiting and such…
I appreciate that you come by and comment on my blog!You do have original content and that is such a bonus. It’s good to have something different.One thing that I have noticed, is that if I follow people, they tend to follow me back. You probably already do that..but it does help.Also, I didn’t look very hard..but are you a member of twitter? That seems to help as well.Also, if you are a member of a few groups like twittermoms or mombloggers club I have received traffic from there as well as PR agents!Most importantly, I think that it just takes time!
Thank you for stopping by my blog and commenting.I definitely agree that it takes time to establish yourself in the blogosphere.Have you tried submitting articles to ezine.com? I found that to be helpful for niche blogs. I don’t recommend posting a lot at once, but maybe once a week or a couple a month. You can use one of the articles you’ve already written, but change it a little bit, so you’re not distributing duplicate content. Google seems to frown upon it, and ezine won’t post it if it’s exactly the same anyway. They have pretty good rules and it’s easy to get started. I haven’t used it for Simply Sophisticated, but I used it for a digital scrapbooking site I have and it helped quite a bit. I saw new traffic from them almost everyday. I posted 7 articles in one day about a year ago and I still see some traffic from them. It’s worth a try.Right now my inspiration is zenhabits.com. He has a great following and is very personable, I recommend checking it out, if you haven’t heard of it already.I’m on the same path as you, I want more followers, but more importantly establish new friends.Good luck!
Hi,You must be doing something right you have a PR of 5! That’s awesome. I have zero after almost a year of blogging.
hi cascia! our kids grow up so fast and i now have a 20 year old daughter but she still asks me to hug her. i guess they’ll never grow too old for that. 😉have a great week ahead.
Thank you everyone. I do participate in the Wordless Wednesday meme. Sometimes I get good traffic from that but I found that the only way I can get anyone to comment on my WW is if I comment on their site first. Sometimes I have to be commenting for a couple of hours in order to get 10-15 comments on mine. Frustrating. Felicia, yes I agree with you. I found that if I follow a blog they tend to follow me back. I might try adding more blogs to my follow list. Thanks for the tip.Twitter? I joined twitter months ago but I don’t frequent the site. Maybe I should put that in part of my daily blog promotion routine. Thanks for the tip!Penelope, yes I do submit articles. I am an expert author at ezinearticles.com. I am also a member of several other article marketing sites. And I agree article marketing does work. Thank you. I’ll have to look at zenhabits.com.Thanks for the tip!Thank you Sue and Liza for your nice comments. I think I need positive energy to help stay motivated with this blog. I also agree that maybe it just takes time. Maybe it’s a good thing that I lost my job and am now a stay at home mom. I have more time to devote to this blog.
These are some really great tips thank you.
Very Interesting!
Thank You!