Checking my blog statistics each month is important because I need to know how many readers are coming to my blog. That is a function of my marketing prowess and my writing to keywords that are popular. For the past three month,SEO has been a principle focus. The bulk of my keyword popularity lies with arcane posts from over a year ago. They will flare in popularity and then wane but don’t do much to make my blog more popular. The encouraging sign is that targeted keywords show up more frequently these days suggesting that my efforts to appease the gods of SEO are meeting with some favor.
Countering this positive is the continued drop in page loads (93 to 76), unique visitors (55 to 49), first time visitors (47 to 49) (Whoops! That;s an increase.) and returning visitors (8 to 6). I was all set to go whiny here with the negative growth but the increase in first time visitors, though small is a definite boost. Chalk that up to keyword focus and my hardworking VA. But it is no reason to slack off.
Last month I hypothesized that new readers didn’t know what Ralph Carlson Blog is about and after a 5 second scan moved on after Google sent them to my site. I made a small fix on my blog with a new byline The original byline was Finishing Strong which was too cryptic for David Risley so I amplified it like so: Finishing Strong:Creating your own retirement lifestyle design. Probably a step in the right direction but not enough to make a real difference. Some of the search engine readers surely want to create a retirement lifestyle. Right now they have no reason to think that Ralph Carlson Blog is the place to learn how to make it happen? This month I am going to try a more dramatic byline hoping to get those first timers to stick around and (better yet) come back for more.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Some blogs like DavidRisley.com might be successful from day one but in David’s case, he had long experience with blogging before he created DavidRisley.com. I can’t expect to do better. I am also working to improve my writing. If I have valuable information but present it poorly, I can’t expect people to wade through impenetrable prose and pedagogic rhetoric to find it. It is a daunting task when you find out that you are your biggest problem but the good news is that if there is anything that I can fix, it is me.
If you have waded through this self-serving post and have a comment about me, the blog, or what I need to do to make it better, by all means leave me a comment. When your only ideas are the ones rattling around in your head, it is easy to get confused.
