Today represents the end of the first week of the 28 Day Blog Challenge. I think I originally planned on doing my recaps on Mondays, but since Sunday is a slow blog day anyway, it seems like a fine day to look back at the week prior and see how I’m doing.
I started off with a post detailing the latest updates in my life, including taking care of newborn twin boys, writing for an iPhone blog, and attempting to take control of my time management. This was also the post where I officially kicked off the 28 Day Blog Challenge.
Total Pageviews – 42
When you’re trying to post to your blog every day, I think it’s perfectly excuseable to use that fact as fodder for one of your posts. On Tuesday I detailed the specifics of the challenge, as well as some of my metrics for success.
Total Pageviews – 64
One of the areas I was hoping to improve on was posting specific topic areas on specific days. In the past I’d had great success with doing link-lists every Wednesday. This post represented a return to that particular strategy. It also gave me a chance to post a shout-out of congratulations to my friend Doni for her new job at Lijit, and inclusion of unicorn-related content – and since my blog boasts about having “unicorn conspiracy theories” as a major subject area, that’s pretty important.
Total Pageviews – 38
Earlier in the week, I had done a little internal soul-searching on the usefulness of NetworkedBlogs as a promotional tool on Facebook. I posted a tweet about it, wondering what people thought about NetworkedBlogs as opposed to a Fan page, and got some interesting responses. This served as a catalyst for the Thursday post, where I emailed a few of my favorite blogger folks to get their two cents on the subject. One cool thing that happened with this post was that in the comments, I learned a bit more about how to tie the two approaches together – and the result was me completely changing how I promote my blog on Facebook.
Total Pageviews – 202
I like to post “fun” or silly things on Fridays – because who wants to think on a Friday? This week my post connected unicorns with the silly “Urban Dictionary” Facebook meme that had been making the rounds that week.
Total Pageviews – 21
Weekends are a VERY slow time for my blog. I imagine that most of my readers come by when they should be working (sorry about that, Corporate America!) That observation, combined with the fact that weekends are pretty busy in the Stratton household these days, resulted in a “lazy “post which was simply a very cute photo of my son, Joey.
Total Pageviews – 15
How am I doing on each of the methods I’d targeted to improve my metrics?
Organized and scheduled posting – I did pretty well here, I think. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday all fit my usual schedule (Web Wanderings, Tech Tips, and Fun Posts, respectively) and I’ve set a precedent that Saturdays will be “cute pictures of my sons or my dog”.
Improve “calls to action” in my posts – This area is doing okay. I’m trying a little harder to not be quite so “tell me about it in the comments!” with these calls to action, and let them develop slightly more organically. Still haven’t really generated any kind of true conversation in my comments, though – a lot of “fire and forget” from the folks who do comment.
Include images in each and every post -I succeeded with this one. Every post this week has had an image in it. Except for this one. I couldn’t think of a great image for it, so it will go without. But given the subject (it’s really meta), I think it’s okay. Or am I just rationalizing? Tell me what you think in the comments! (heh)
Just post more – Check it. I did post every day this week, so this was a gold star.
Here are the metrics for this week. The number in parentheses is the same metric for Feb 1-7 of 2009. As you can see, I improved in every area. Yay me!
Visits: 822 (787)
Bounce Rate: 77.98% (88.69%)
Pages Per Visit: 1.43 (1.35)
Returning Visitors: 247 (159)
(I’m going to cop out on Feedburner subscribers for my weekly updates, since it’s a real bear to puzzle that out for the individual weeks of 2⁄2009)