The story of a blog, from birth to...?

Saturday, October 07, 2006

A couple of new directions

I came across (and adopted) a goal at 43things.com called "Get more people to read my Blog." There were well over 600 people with this goal, which surprised me; not sure why, but it did. Apparently people are blogging, and thinking about this question, but they don't appear to be working too hard at it. Comments left there are mostly along the lines of "Gee, only 2 hits a day. This sucks." But a couple of people have posted serious questions about how to promote readership, and others have offered some novel ideas. I proposed starting a team to promote some real discussion and mutual support, but to do that, I actually have to invite people to join the team - not hard, I just need to do it.

One idea proposed that was completely new to me was to play blogshares. It's a fantasy blog-stock market game. You list your blog(s), each of which comes with a few thousand shares, start off with $500 (fake, and you don't actually need your own blog to play), and trade in blog shares. I'm no day trader, but this seems like a simplified, interesting way to learn about how the stock market works (well, that may be pushing it) and to expose your blog. At any rate, it's yet another way to kill time on the internet, because you can never have too many of those. Ahem.

On a different topic, I want to confess that it's really hard for me to remember to include Technorati tags in my new posts. I can't tell you how many times I've had to go back and edit them in after publishing a post. I made a little text file that I keep on my desktop with the code, and I am trying to keep it in plain sight to help me remember. When I grow up to be a real geek, I'll have this code committed to memory.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might find some of these
tips from Lifehacker
helpful.

burekaboy — said...

hi em, decided to check out your other blog/s and saw this. check my blog in the links 'for your betterfication' under blogbloke. look at his blog he has good information about all sorts of blog related things. he is also very open to answering your questions.

life is about self promotion, isn't it? and, ummm... $ 9.84 is 9.84 more than i've made!! lol.

chag sam'eah :P

Emily DeVoto, Ph.D., said...

bb, chag sameach gam l'cha! I'm spending mine drooling over the photos in your blog. Next time just Fedex the results to me directly, will ya? ;-) Do you take orders, by the way?

I will check out your blog guru; thanks for the hint.

burekaboy — said...

lol, todah rabah. :P

hope you manage to get some holiday cooking in. i have a few things i want to try from you, actually. will let you know when i do. as for the orders, yup! haven't done it for a the past little while though.

btw, made a mistake — it was under another section....it's www.instabloke.com