Timing is important for blogging

Over the last week or so, I've learnt just how important it is to blog at the right time.

I've posted twice on my personal blog in response to recent news stories - this in reaction to Tom Harris MP and this on increasing anger in society. Neither post was as successful as it should have been because I didn't post at the right time.

This wasn't as complicated as posting at the right time of day (which people often ask about). Whilst this can be useful (first thing at the morning, as Americans are logging in etc) it's mostly of marginal benefit to really good bloggers. My mistake was to publish over a day late. What that meant was that:
1. Lots of people had already had their say so I had less to say
2. When I promoted my post on other blogs, the comment was lower down so got less click-throughs
3. When I promoted my post, I didn't influence other bloggers because they'd already written about it

If you're going to react to an issue, do so early and amend your post as you go. There will be more opportunities to promote it on other sites the longer the issue continues, but your comments will be more prominent and more influential.

Self indulgent blogging must be done in moderation

Self indulgent blogging must be done in moderation. I will continue to repeat that to myself over the next few days. And, out of respect for the people who I advise blogging, I now recognise how hard it is not to indulge now again. But I also recognise how damaging it can be if you over do it.

Let me explain:

As I may have mentioned, I had a good few days on Matthew Cain's blog recently. I increased my blog readership and got lots of visitors, lots of comments and lots of links. And I'm still dining out on that (traffic and comments-wise). I wanted to maintain that momentum. And then I relaxed. Rather than remembering what was good about my first few posts to make an impact, I wrote easy articles that I wanted to write. And not just one but two or three.

I still got an audience for my thoughts on behavioural economics, the challenge of text ads to newspapers' editorial independence and the relevance of political parties. But it wasn't as much as previous posts and although the last couple of days improved, the trend is from a lower base than last week.

I call these self indulgent posts because:
* they were about what I was thinking, not what the wider community was thinking
* nobody had asked my view and I had no expertise to advance this view
* I couldn't initiate a wider online debate about these issues and so my thoughts were in isolation to the rest of the online world

To put it another way, I was like a pub-bore. Yes, there is a place for posts about pet subjects. But not one after another for a week. And not when your audience is fresh and new and still getting to know you.

Improving my blog using plugins

The content management system I use for Matthew Cain's blog is wordpress - my favourite blog provider. Having now generated some traffic, started to get some comments and got a few blogs linking to mine, I now want to improve the blog itself. I'm going to try using a few plugins - optional extras provided by the wordpress community.

1. Managing spam

I've installed the Akismet plugin to deal with spam. It's free, has a good algorithm which (apparently) also learns from all the other users so when spammers develop a new method, the system updates quickly to correctly flag new spam. It's not actually yet identified spam - a signal that my blog isn't getting particularly wide attention!

2. Using a site map

Lots of SEO experts say that you should have a site map. Apparently a site map helps search engines crawl through all your pages (rather than just the homepage) and it can even tell the search engine how frequently each page is updated. So I downloaded the Google sitemap generator (it works as well for other search engines) to create a site map.

Currently Google has indexed 57 pages on my blog - which appears to be all of them. I've posted 29 times and together with the tags and about pages, it adds up to around 57.

Google last visited my site at 15.30 yesterday - shortly after I published my last post. So it's visiting often enough.

I've got 10% of my traffic from search engines, thanks to people searching for my name (Hi Dad).

I'll be looking closely at these figures to see if there's any positive change as a result of the plugin.

RSS

I've added an RSS subscription widget. RSS isn't well used proportionately but heavily used be techies. What it does is take your blog posts and publishes them in the user's chosen interface - a bit like their own newspaper page. It's an easier way of monitoring updates on your favourite blogs than visiting each through your bookmarks. And it's a way of keeping readers who visit once.

I'm starting with a base of 0 so we'll see if my blog is popular through RSS subscriptions.

SEO

I've installed a search engine optimisation tool. My URLs and headers are already optimised for search engines, because I do that when writing them. However, this tool allows me to define the meta content description. I won't bother with the keyword tags as it doesn't make any difference any more.

New content feeds

I'm experimenting with 2 plugins which generate new content. One will take all my Newscounter Tweets from Twitter and publish them - ensuring 2 or 3 new pieces of content in between blog posts. The second, postalicious, takes feed from my bookmarking site. So every time I save a bookmark in Delicious, I can produce an aggregated bit for my blog - passing on articles that I find interesting. Currybet does this particularly well with his recent links feature.

Increasing interactivity

I'm trying a meet your commenters tool. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network. I don't know how well it will work, frankly. But because I'm trying to build a community, hopefully this will involve people more closely in my blog.

Monitoring loadtimes

I'm going to be keeping a close eye on the site load times. This is what they are currently:


And I need to make sure that it doesn't get too slow. I want my blog to be accessible to people with a dial-up modem. After all, if you want to build a community you need to be inclusive.

I will report back on progress shortly.

My blog lessons - generating an audience

I've been developing a Matthew Cain blog. As I wrote recently, it started with a wave of excitement and frustration that I had so much to say but hadn't setup the blog so far.

Post every day

I then stopped posting each day. Of course, there's no search engine reason to post every day. But I still tell people to do it because if they don't they will stop posting. It's just what happened to me.

Getting the posting habit

I started to talk about the snow in Stoke Newington. After the initial post, I needed to follow it up and did several days later. But then I found something else on my internet travels that I wanted to talk about. I'm one of the UK's few experts on political party funding.

Building an audience

I made a comment on Labour List about party funding. It didn't generate any interest. But now that I started, I got the bug. The more I post the more I want to write. So I wrote about the T-Mobile inspired flash mob. I followed my own advice and put links on 4 other sites, which generated a couple of comments - to which I replied (of course).

Generating comments

Then today, I made a quick post for the sake of putting up something new. But then I was thinking about blogging. So I posted twice more. Suddenly, I'd convinced myself that my view on George Monbiot was really important.

To build an audience, I:
1. put into Google Blog search Monbiot AND Blears
2. Clicked on the top 12 results
3. Re-wrote my headline to make it more provactive
4. Left a comment on 10 of them - 9 were anti Blears
5. Started replying to the comments

I now have 12 comments and have added those commentators blogs to my blogroll.

Key lessons
1. It's difficult to get into the habit of writing unless you do often
2. Being an active commentator on a live web issue does generate traffic and comments
3. The issue has to be of interest to a number of sites
4. Respond to the comments to open up further discussion, not close it down
5. Find ways to build the relationship with the commentator further
6. Have your analytics package configured. I didn't have - so can't measure the success of this!

I'm not trying to suggest this is best practice - but it's my experience and I'll record how I build on this.

My blog lessons - creating a blog

I've started a personal blog, against my better judgement. However, whilst I want to keep the personal and professional as separate as possible, I do want to use the lessons that I learn to help other bloggers. There will be a particular overlap as I try to chronicle my experience of building a platform for my views and then developing a community.

My most important task was registering an obvious domain name. I've registered www.matthewcain.co.uk for two years - costing less than £10. I used 123-reg out of familiarity but may move the domain at a later point.

I then created the blog, pointed to http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk so that I've got space for a personal intro page at matthewcain.co.uk at a later point if I need it.

Because I've got a couple of things I want to talk about straight away, I used the 123-reg content management system. It was better than I expected, although it may not be long before I migrate to wordpress because it gives you so much structured freedom.

I've created a meta description for the blog so that the text below the hyperlink will look better in Google.

However, I think that the most interesting lesson will be my battle between privacy, personal and corporate and getting the balance right. For that, you will need to follow my blog.