What blogging means to me, and why my blog isn't popular

Agenda

About my blog - The Integral

Blogging platforms

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress

Multi-platform blogging, comparison of various platforms

What have I blogged about and what people generally read on my blog

Blog analytics

Some numbers and trends of visitors on my blog

Relevance of statistics to me

Analytics tools

What I must do to increase the visitors hit count

Started blogging in my first year at engineering…

Registered on Blogger for a free blog (April 2005)

http://adityamarathe.blogspot.com

Fascinated by Calculus, the blog was named “The Integral”

The place where Life is the curve integrated over various elements that we see in and around us.

Wrote mostly on life in hostel and college

Migrated to wordpress.com during final year

Registered domain for a website and a blog

http://www.aditto.info

http://blog.aditto.info

Why did I move from Blogger to Wordpress?

Wordpress had and still has more blogging tools

Import feature from multiple sources

Static pages apart from posts

Password protection on posts

“ Cleaner” look, though Blogger has almost infinite customizable themes!

Ad-sense was not a feature that could stop me from moving from Blogger

At some point of time, I would like to move to externally hosted Wordpress blog

Wordpress is ‘cool’ for blogging

Comments handling is far superior

‘ Reply to’ comment email and end with !END straight from Inbox!

Wordpress.com is always adding newer features

Blogging Platforms

Multi-platform blogging, does it make sense?

Maintain personal blog on Wordpress

http://blog.aditto.info

Photo blog on Tumblr

http://photos.aditto.info

Micro blog on Twitter

http://twitter.com/aditto

Which is an easier option? What factors influence the decision?

Find a good paid host

Install Wordpress

Add some plug-ins

Integrate everything

Blogging Platforms

Twitter and Wordpress are like the two extremes of personal blogging Trust Wordpress / Tumblr to preserve my data more than any paid host, and then I don’t need to pay to host Blogging Platforms Quick opinions / sharing links / get quick news / killing time Photography Articles, incidents, and basically anything substantially / worth sharing What I use it for You can spam! No spam Good Spam management N/A Free Paid Domain mapping Very limited Complete Complete / Limited Customizability Minimal Limited Always growing Features Very easy Fairly easy Not so difficult Ease of use Micro blogging Limited blogging capacity Full feature blogging Platform Twitter Tumblr Wordpress Feature

So what have I blogged about in about 4 yrs?

Travel

South Korea [2007]

East Sikkim [2008]

United States [2008]

Photography

Childhood

Memories

Phantom Sweet Cigarettes

People and Life

Eccentricity

Conversations

Humours

Inside The Integral

Why do people land on my blog? And what do they check out?

Most commonly visited post (since 2008)

#177 East Sikkim Trip - April 2008

#156 Busan @ 300 kmph... KTX

Most common search engine terms (since 2008)

Bibimbap

South Korean food

Seoul

Random search terms reaching my blog…

cute girls

specs frame

birthmark in center of palm

shock laga laga laga advertisement

Inside The Integral

Few basic statistics about The Integral

Number of posts – 258

Comments – 786

Categories – 14

Hits (since 2007) – 36,000

But these are not the only trends I love to observe… 49% 27% 3% 3% 2% 2% 14% India USA South Korea Canada Singapore UK Others Blog Analytics

Does the number of hits matter to me?

Average hits per day at The Integral: 60 (current)

An ordinary blogger gets anything between 10-100 hits a day

A very popular blogger gets 100-500 hits a day

Marketing blogs can get anywhere from 1K to 1M hits a day!

Theme based personal blogs end up getting 100-1000 hits a day

Number of subscribers – Whats that?

Blogger vs Wordpress when it comes to search results

Google indexes Blogspot blogs instantaneously

Wordpress.com users always suffer indexing issues

But it’s ok! 

Yes it does matter, but I wont stop blogging even if nobody reads  Blog Analytics

Spikes in the visitors trends? Blogged something PERSONAL Blogged something VERY INTERESTING No blog, hyper active search! Blog Analytics

77 % of visitors to my blog give it no more than a glance… Blog Analytics Longer than an hour From 20 mins to an hour From 5 mins to 20 mins From 30 secs to 5 mins From 5 secs to 30 secs Less than 5 secs

For a very famous personal blogger too, 57 % visitors stay for less than 5 secs The key however is to increase the number of visitors who spend more than 5 minutes on your blog! Blog Analytics Longer than an hour From 20 mins to an hour From 5 mins to 20 mins From 30 secs to 5 mins From 5 secs to 30 secs Less than 5 secs

There are a lot of free tools to perform good analysis of visitor statistics Wordpress Stats Google Analytics Blog Analytics

To make my blog popular, I must…

Visit tons of other blogs, and comment!

Write stuff that people want to read…

Politics

Entertainment (Movies, music)

Humour

Geeky technology!!

Sex

Register my blog on tons of social networking and bookmarking sites

Write less of personal and more of general stuff

Isn’t that what a personal blog is meant to be? more less some But I… Blog Popularity

Creating content, and creatively sharing… Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. http://wiki.creativecommons.org Creative Content Sharing

Thank You! The Integral: http://blog.aditto.info Photo Blog: http://photos.aditto.info Email: [email_address] Aditya Marathe