I had loads of free time in June and did a wee experiment to see if commenting on other people’s blogs more than usual would have any sort of imapact on the number of visitors and RSS subscribers for Nerdy Nomad. I figured it was a pretty sure bet that commenting more would lead to higher traffic, more subscribers and more comments on my own blog which turned out to be the case.

On the flip side, I also wondered what sort of an impact not participating much in the blogging community would have on my site. I spent July travelling around and maybe left a total of five comments on other blogs over the course of that month. I was fully expecting that not commenting would have the exact opposite impact of commenting lots and was really surprised to see my traffic and RSS numbers rise substantially despite my month long vow of silence.

• RSS Subscribers - At the end of May my subscribers were at 129 and with all of my commenting they rose to 158 by the end of June. Now at the end of July they’ve jumped up even more and are sitting pretty at 225.
• 45n5 Top 100 Blog List - I started at 234, moved up to 205 and now I’m at 191. I had been up around 170 before Google dropped me from PR4 to PR3 which affected my ranking.
• Comments - I had 55 comments in May, 148 in June and 104 in July.
• Traffic - I jumped from 42 unique visitors per day in May up to 58 in June. July saw a further jump with an average of 62 unique visitors.

So… what does this all tell me? Not much! I’m confused. My best guess is that once you get the word about your blog out there, it takes a while for everyone to catch on and you can see the benefits of commenting for several months.

Who knows. Any thoughts? How did your blogs fare in July?

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A month ago I decided to run a little test and see what kind of an impact commenting on other blogs would have on Nerdy Nomad. I was even keeping track of how many comments I had left and on which blogs but I seem to have lost that file somewhere into the abyss that is my disorganised hard drive.

Here are the results. I know you can hardly wait.

• RSS Subscribers - My feed subscribers rose from 129 to 158, a jump of 29 people. Hello new people! It took me ten months to get to 129 so I’m really happy to see it jump by so much in a single month.
• 45n5 Top 100 Blogs List - I jumped up 31 places on this list from 234 to 205. The list uses Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati stats to come up with some sort of system of rating blogs. I’m not sure how meaningful it is but I’m pretty competitive and something like this is a good motivator for me.
• Comments - I went from a measly 55 comments last month to 148 in June. This could be attributed to me having made more blog posts in June than in May, but a jump this big has got to have more behind it that just that. There have been lots of new faces and I know that many have found Nerdy Nomad through my comments on other blogs. They’ve told me so.
• Traffic - My visitor numbers rose from 42 to 58 uniques per day and from 85 to 140 page views per day. This seems to be a pretty big leap forwad too. I am guessing that my page view rose more because people new to my blog spent some time sifting through old posts which is cool. It’s always nice when long forgotten blog posts get a bit of reader love.

Obviously any number of factors could have had an effect on my improved stats but I have to think that leaving more comments and getting my name out there has been a large factor. Things have actually jumped up by a lot more than I expected. But stats aside, becoming more active in the blogging community has been rewarding in a lot of ways. It’s a great way to meet to people, exchange ideas, find new blogs and it’s even better when more and more new people find you.

As great as I think commenting on other blogs is, I doubt I’ll be able to devote much time to it in July. I might even not leave a single comment on another blog and see how that effects my numbers. Ya, let’s do that. So in July, no comments from me. This might be a stupid move and all of my hard work might go down the drain, but I’m curious to see what happens.

So are you guys surprised with the results or are they pretty much what you would have expected? I’m happy with my little experiment but lets see what July has in store.

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Since I started travelling in January I’ve pretty much stopped reading most of my favourite blogs completely. It’s sort of strange because I really do like reading blogs but it just seems like my time is completely taken up with working on my own sites. That, and Facebook. Way too much Facebook.

So I thought I would try to motivate myself to participate more in the blogging community by turning June into a bit of a test to see how much of an effect commenting on other blogs really has on this blog’s stats. My RSS feed had 129 subscribers on June 1st and this is what I’m most interested in increasing. I just submitted to the 45n5 Top 100 list a couple of weeks ago and am currently ranked at 234. This list uses Technorati and Alexa stats to rank blogs so I figure tracking my ranking on this list is more meaningful than keeping track of those stats individually. Last month I had 55 comments and I’m curious to see not only if that will rise, but also if I’ll see comments from new people. In May this site had a daily average of 42 unique visitors and 85 page views.

I have a list of about 30 blogs that I genuinely like reading and am going to attempt to interact with them a lot more. I’ve got some make money online ones, some self improvement/motivational type blogs and a handful of travelogs on there so my main interests are covered. Some of the blogs are new discoveries, some are old favourites, some are really popular, others are smaller, but all of them are blogs that I consider to be interesting and well written.

Lets see how far ahead participating in the blogging community really pushes a blog in a month with some cold, hard figures!

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It looks like I’ve fallen victim to the difficulties of keeping my blog updated. It’s not because I don’t have time to do it but that I’ve sort of lost touch with the blogging world for now. It’s difficult to write about blogging and earning online when I don’t have much time to check out other blogs, message boards and tinker with methods of earning online.

I’ve got lots to report on the travel side of things though and am still amazed at how easy and cheap it is to get online here in Bangladesh! Work as a volunteer is really great and rewarding and the people here are really cool. It rained today and I managed to get some little things done on my Wanderstruck site which is encouraging but I’ve still got loads to do. Luckily we’ve got two more days off and I’m planning to hit the site building thing really hard tomorrow.

I’m hoping to finally get this sponsers/fundraising page done so I can put the word out. I’m hoping that other bloggers will be interested in writing a post about what I’m attempting so it will be interesting from a marketing aspect to see if I can generate a bit of interest from around the web. I think I’ll make it my aim to get included in those weekly round-up type posts that bloggers tend to do.

On Friday a bunch of us are planning to head to the Sundarbans National Park which is a UNESCO World Heritage site and apparently home to Bengal tigers. We’ll be attempting to bribe our way in in order to avoid having to hire an official boat and armed guard. I think we’ll be taking our interpreter with us who knows which strings to pull and we’ll see what happens. Should be pretty funny if nothing else!

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As usual I’m a bit behind on the goings on in internet world but better late than never, I guess. A couple blogs that I read on a regular basis have been sold and it seems as though there are plenty of others that have been offloaded recently as well. I’m not really sure what to think about this flurry of blog sales. Part of me is confused, part is annoyed and part is impressed.

• The confused part - I don’t read that many blogs regularly. The more I like what the blogger is doing or has to say or the more interesting I find them, the more likely I am to become a regular reader. Based on this, I wonder why people buy blogs. Sure they’re getting a design that is up and running but they could pay a lot less for a much better custom WP design. True, they’ll be adopting a set of regular readers but how many of them are likely to continue reading? Lots of incoming links is a good thing I guess but that’s not hard to do with some serious commenting. I figure if a blogger is good they should be able to start a blog on their own. If they’re crap then people won’t read the blog anyways so it’s a big waste of money.
• The annoyed part - I think blogging is about building relationships and when the author sells the blog it sort of feels like a very nerdy betrayal. I thought he loved me… I guess I was just another notch on his RSS belt. *sniff*
• The impressed part - I have to give kudos to anyone who can create something from scratch and turn it into a saleable item in a few months. Even though the whole process leaves me feeling used and abused, I can’t help but admire them for it.

Are there are people out there who flip blogs like real estate? It might be an interesting thing to look into if you’re a talented writer and know how to turn a new blog into an established one pretty quickly. I wonder if they’d be able to continue attracting readers to their new blogs after each sale. I would be unlikely to read a blog knowing that the author plans to sell it in a few months.

I wonder how many more blogs will be sold during this mini-frenzy? I would feel strange selling my blog, I think. I would need bucketloads of money to sell any of my websites and I’d have a hard time letting go of them because of the zillions of hours I’ve put, in. I guess everyone has their price though!

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I’m writing this post with a hellish hangover so if parts of it don’t seem coherent it’s because my head is about to explode. It can tend to cause a bit of a distraction, the old head exploding thing.

Well I’ve been blogging now for one month and I though I’d check in with a sort of progress report. I’ve hugely exceeded my expectations! Of course, not having any expectations to begin with sort of helps.

Stats

• Posts - I’ve eeked out 31 posts and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with myself for keeping it up. I find it pretty enjoyable when the topic is something I love talking about.
• Comments - At first I felt a bit like a psycho who was talking to myself but now that I’ve got a wee group of fab readers who’ve contributed 81 comments so far, I don’t feel so crazy anymore.
• Visitors - Lately I’m getting about 30 to 40 visits per day. My best day was last weekend with 93 people wandering over for a read.
• RSS subscribers - This one can fluctuate quite a lot but at the moment it’s at 54 subscribers. I reckon this is a decent number for a month old blog but who knows.
• Technorati - My authority thing is at 20 and my rank is 324,580. I don’t know much about Technorati except that the first number needs to go up and the second needs to go down so here’s hoping that happens.
• Alexa - I think Alexa is a pile o’ poop but for the record my rank is 805,232.

Other Stuff

• Search engines - I get barely any traffic from search engines so that’s something to look forward to. I’ve had a couple of obscure searches point to me though such as “banner ads play music” and “2007 money found this site”. However I don’t think those will be keywords I’ll be targeting.
• Links - I seem to be appearing on a few people’s blogrolls which is sweet. I like how bloggers share links pretty freely. With my websites I’m very careful about who I trade links with and rarely give a link without swapping. It’s nice to throw caution to the wind and send out some link love and it’s even better to see the love coming back my way. There’s a lot of love in the room.
• Contacts - This blog has reminded me that the internet isn’t some big faceless void and making contact with so many people with similar interests has been great. Hopefully I’ll see some of you out on the road working and travelling and we can have beers, get drunk and fall down.

I’ve said it many times that blogs are crap but I’ve changed my heathen ways and am really glad to be a convert on the road to recovery. It’s been good times so far but I’m really looking forward to sharing tips and advice on working on the road. That’s when things will start to get interesting! Bring on January I say.

Just one last thing… without going too much into arse kissing mode, I just wanted to say thanks for reading and commenting, your emails, link love and sharing your ideas and all that good stuff. Arse kissing done.

Woohoo, my hangover is gone!

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Most of us bloggers don’t make the kind of coin that makes it possible to do this full time. We have to trek into work every day to be able to pay the bills and, as a result, blogging becomes a part time gig done in our spare time. Well rejoice because it doesn’t have to be this way! If you you can manage to land a cushy office job for yourself then you will be able to blog at work on the sly with these super sneaky strategies:

• Use your time wisely - Save your work (the stuff you’re paid for) for when your boss and co-workers are in the office and and try to do your blogging when nobody is around. You’ll be able to relax a bit and won’t have to constantly be on your toes.
• Blog under cover - If being on the internet becomes too obvious, do your blogging in Word or Outlook and then copy and paste the text over at a more opportune moment. Working this way gives the added bonus of a spelling and grammar check.
• Make office-type noises - Sitting in silence for too long can cause suspicion so if you’re doing a lot of reading and things are starting to get a bit quiet, make sure you hammer at your keyboard a bit or rustle some papers around every now and then. Asking your boss if there’s anything they need done is good for added effect.
• Make lots of tea/coffee - Keep your boss sweet by offering to make tea. Bringing in donuts or cookies occasionally is also recommended. Be careful not to kiss too much ass so as to not raise suspicion.
• ALT -TAB switcheroo - Bosses can be known to spring on you with little or no warning. To counter surprise attacks, open up another screen (preferably something important looking like a spreadsheet) and follow these instructions: Hold down ALT… that’s right, do it with me now… and then press TAB and let go. Watch that screen change in an instant! Saves you from frantically clicking on the minimise button as your boss approaches. Super sneaky and an essential strategy for blogging at work so make sure you practice.
• Keep on top of your work - As much as I’d like to burn all of my filing and ‘accidentally’ misplace all of my data entry stuff, I can’t. Being able to get away with murder means being good at your job and get things done on time.
• Get a corner computer - If you’ve got a prime spot in the office so that nobody can see your screen then you’re in luck. If not, try to swap your way to the deepest, darkest corner of the office to be able to have a blogging free for all. Continuing to rustle papers every now and is still important, you don’t want to get too confident. If a secluded screen isn’t possible, make friends with the people who can see it so they don’t raise the alarm. See the point above on cookies and donuts.

Being a part-time blogger need not mean you have to lock yourself in your room on evenings and weekends tapping away frantically. Use these strategies and you’ll be blogging at work in no time! It also helps if you don’t have any work ethic and aren’t the guilty type.

WARNING: Do not, I repeat, do NOT under any circumstances go out for drinks with your boss and co-workers, get ridiculously trashed and drunkenly admit your evil plan to one and all. Very bad.

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I’ve been going pretty hard with the whole blogging thing for the past few weeks and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that posting 7 days a week will be the death of me. So in the interest of staying alive, I’ve decided that I’m going to spend my Sundays recovering from hangovers, eating takeaway curries and lounging around.

While there won’t be anymore Sunday posts I’ll still be chained to the computer working hard on my websites. Except for today though… I’m off to the pub to watch Canada destroy Wales at rugby. I am an eternal optimist, after all!

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I’m into my second week as a blogger extraordinaire and I’m really enjoying it so far. I’ve been writing every day and it hasn’t been as much of a chore and I thought it would be. Of course I’m only around 15 posts in so ask me again when I’m floating around post 200 and trying desperately to think up something to write. If you start to see posts detailing how many socks I have of each colour or listing my all time favourite TV shows from the 80s then you can bet that I’m out of ideas, but for now things are going well.

I often have amazingly wonderful ideas for posts pop into my head only to see them fall victim to my dreadful memory and vanish into thin air. I always expect to remember them, but that never happens. This is probably really nerdy but I’ve started carrying a notepad around with me to jot my ideas into. Not one of those fancy electronic things either, I’m talking old school pen and paper.

If I come up with even a vague idea for a post or even just a title, I’ll jot it down. I’ve been doing this for a week and end up with half written posts, unfinished lists and little pieces of paper with blog post titles scribbled everywhere. Then every few days I consult my notepad of amazingly wonderful ideas and type everything that doesn’t suck into my blog as draft posts.

At the moment I have about 30 draft posts on the go. Some are feeble efforts that may never see the light of day and some are mammoth essays that I might be able to break up into a handful of posts. Whenever I get a spare second at work (or decide that I want to avoid work for several hours) I’ll fire up the blog and delve into my drafts, adding to each a bit at a time.

So far this has worked really well for me and I haven’t forgotten too many ideas lately. At least I don’t think I have, I don’t really remember.

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It looks like I’ve finally done it. I’ve accepted that my current system of building websites with Notepad, HTML and some very crappy CSS just isn’t gonna cut it in the fickle Web 2.0 world. People want gadgets and gizmos and content that’s updated 3 times an hour and RSS feeds and all the bells and whistles that, until a couple weeks ago, I had pretty much zero knowledge of.

Why I am a Blogging Convert:

• Community - This is by far the major advantage to starting a blog. They’re interactive and you will be almost instantly connected to a community of like-minded people. Bloggers are a lot less anal about sharing a bit of link love and following people’s blogrolls is a great way to find other people who are into the same things as you.
• Instant Feedback - No matter how great the content on my static websites is, it’s very unlikely that I’ll get any feedback on it. Sure, I can see how popular a page is in the stats, but it can’t compare to getting a comment with feedback on what you’ve written. I know I can set this sort of thing up on my sites but I’m too lazy to figure out how to do it and using Wordpress makes the whole process painless.
• Loads of Templates - I hadn’t realised how many websites there are out there with free Wordpress themes for me to get my greedy paws on. Even if customisation is beyond the blogger, the availability of templates means that we’re not subjected to loads of sites that are clones of one another.
• Customisation Easier Than I Thought - When I made my first few head exploding attempts at customising my Wordpress theme I was downloading and uploading everything with a separate FTP program. I hadn’t realised I could do all the customisation in the admin area and this discovery has made everything a lot less confusing.
• Widgets - Why didn’t anyone tell me about the wonderful world of dragging and dropping plugins? Now that I’ve discovered the mighty widget, all is clear. It’s great being able to add cool features to the sidebar without having to wrestle with coding I don’t understand.
• Can Be Up and Running in Minutes - There really isn’t much to getting a blog up and running and that’s a totally new thing to me. Most of the sites I design from scratch take a month or two before they’re alive and kicking. Setting up a blog gets things going quickly and if I want to add static pages to teh site later I still have that option. Things move fast in the online world and wasting a month tweaking a design really isn’t the best use of my time.
• Non Techie People Have Things to Say Too - Ok snobbery aside, I suppose I can share the net with people who might be a bit HTML challenged. There are pleny of people out there who have stuff to say but might be a bit techie challenged and I still want to be able to read their ramblings. Blogs have opened up the internet to one and all and for every crappy blog out there I’m sure there are a few that I’m glad I’ve found.

So I have been mostly converted to the powers of the blog but still have a few reservations. I’m still a bit dubious about a few things like the long layout of the intro page (although I know this can be tweaked) and I think static website have an advantage with search engines (this isn’t based on anything really… just my own experiences) but I love the interactivity and sense of community and that outweighs any negatives.

Once I start working on my mighty web empire full time I might experiment with moving a static site over to Wordpress. Travoholic.com is in shambles so I think this site might be a good candidate. I always seem pretty resistant to change (I still use Notepad to build my sites!) but I think I’m sold on the merits of blogging and Wordpress as a content management system.

Is anyone else an anti-blog convert?

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