More blog readers and more blog comments mean more people are clicking on adverts and increasing income from the blog. It makes sense. Thus most people will list their blogs with all of the blogs listings services that are plastered all over the internet. Some even pay to popularise their blogs. This blog even had several popularisation widgets attached.
Did the blog popularisation widgets do anything? Absolutely not. They do increase apparent visits to the blog but those "visits" are just phantom hits. There's nobody actually viewing the blog. As an example, somebody listed one of the pages on a Romanian website. Within two days, that page had racked up 1,500 viewings. Now if those had been genuine visitors then at least 3% would have clicked on an adsense advert. That would mean 45 clicks on adsense adverts. Instead, try zero clicks.
Getting visitors for a blog is a matter of constant promotion. Some people will return. This blog gets about 24% return visitors. Of course, what screwed the figures up for a long time was a cyberstalker that used to click pages before and after work. All those hits came from a roadrunner user in the Irmo area. There'd be between 180 and 200 a month. Heaven knows what that was all about but those seemed to drop off around mid February and have not returned.
Promotion consists of getting as many back links as possible without having to give away forward links. That means, getting people to link into the blog rather than anything else. Content is another issue. The blog has to have content people want to read. In bewilderment at the lack of interaction on this blog, the problem was put forward for free marketing advice since a link had been placed on LinkedIn. That link led here. It transpired that there's absolutely nothing wrong. The articles are of high quality. There could be some links to other sites (which are commencing today) and the layout could have been better. The layout has been changed. The old layout looked very newspapery and was quite pleasing to the eye but the number of advertisements shown plummeted as did income. Now the traditional templates are back in use and while less visually stunning, are easier to navigate.
The goal of any blog is to gain engaged readers. This blog is failing spectacularly at that. In fact, both this blog and the other blog are failing. Controversial posts and posts with a perceived sexual edge seem to be popular. The rest just don't get many views at all. Posting links to pages in discussions that people are engaged in online does get views - sometimes hundreds of views. Very few of those views seem to result in advertising clicks. Clearly the target audience has not been reached.
Microblogging, using Twitter has the same issue, namely lack of worthwhile viewers. Ages ago, a Twitter follower adder was used and across several accounts, 14,000 followers were amassed. None of those "followers" was at all responsive. Then auto-retweeters and auto-tweeters were added. There was absolutely no engagement. Then a new Twitter account was started. There was no auto follower adder used. Largely people known were added and yet - very little engagement. It was only when politically controversial tweets were added that engagement levels rose slightly. Whether that will lift blog engagement levels remains to be seen.
The general look of things is pretty dismal. The blog is interesting. The posts are of good quality - and that's according to independent reviewers. Visitors are just not arriving. Perhaps photography has had its day? It could well be that since 90% of people use smartphones for their photography that photography has become so commonplace that few take any real interest in it. This would be a bit like calligraphy - people try it and play with it then put it to one side and carry on as normal.
So, blog readers and more blog comments? Most of the tricks suggested have been tried and found not to work with these specific blogs. Perhaps they will work with others? If anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to comment below.
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