Mind the Beginner

It’s Saturday and that means the bloghallenge update is here again.

Things were slow this week, very slow. For the first time since the 1st of May (with 35 views) the number of pageviews dipped below the 50 yesterday, reaching only 38. If you read enough about blogging however you know that at certain times a dip wil occur in these numbers and so I’m not to depressed about it. The solution is not to give up and keep writing the best you can. I might just have to stop watching these stats every day and just have a peek on saturday for this update.

I am having a slight problem however. The guy how has my domain somehow doesn’t seem to be active online lately. His last tweet was a long time ago and he hasn’t commented here or otherwise let me know he’s alive. But let’s not let that stop us so it’s on with the numbers:

Average number of pageviews over this week: 83, a decrease as expected. I wonder where the counter will stop at the end of the month.

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 30, but that’s also to be expected in the weekends. Some of you might not know this but the number in the counter on my main page doesn’t resemble the number of people who have subscribed, but the number of RSS reading tolls that have requested the feed on this day. At least, that’s the simplified explanation. That’s why the numbers fluctuate so easily.

Where the traffic is coming from: The usual sources again. Forums (my signatures), blogs I’ve commented on, a bit of twitter and some search engine traffic. It seems more and more people are bookmarking my site and coming here directly.

What I have done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: This week I added a page about my RSS feed and what RSS is. Moulded after probloggers page. I also added a more attractive RSS button to the main page and a counter below it. According to various sources having a counter on your site can motivate people to subscribe. This works best when you have more than 100 subscribers but that will come in due time. Humans are followers by nature and if they see that you already have 100 subscribers (or more) they are likely to subscribe as well thinking “If this blog gets so many subscribers it must be good, I want in on the action.”

Yes it actually can work this way, amazing isn’t it.

I haven’t done much actively this week to get my blog bigger, shame on me. I’ll get back to the commenting on other blogs next week and see if there is anyone who wants a guestpost on their blog. If you want one just let me know (mail me) and I’ll see hat I can write that will appeal to your readers.

That’s it for this week. I hope the numbers will be up again next weekend. Have a nice day everyone.

Here we are again, another week has passed and what an eventful week it has been. I’ve set my three goals for the oncoming months, I’ve set my life goal and my reason for wanting to achieve it and I’ve entered the Project Mojave to make this life goal (which is a dream) become reality. Although we must not forget that goals are not the things we should be trying to reach, we should be enjoying the route that takes us there. Also, keep in mind what you want to do after you reach your goal. Many people who worked all their lives and saved up for retirement now sit at home, depressed, because they had no goal, no life plan, no idea what to do when the time came for them to start enjoying themselves.

Let’s have a look at this weeks numbers shall we?

Average number of pageviews over this week:118, a slight increase.

Interesting to me is the growth this blog has experienced in three months. If we look at the number of pageviews a month it get’s interesting. Remember, my first blog entry here was on March 13th.

• March: 145
• April: 1637
• May: 2240 (And we still have a week left! I’l probably get 400-500 more views)

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: This has been fluctuating quite a bit. Google reader is still being a total git when it comes to displaying my feed. The number of subscribers maxed out at 40, but is now back at 32.

Where the traffic is coming from:I had another “powertweet” this week. Someone promised me a guestpost but things fell through as my post wasn’t exactly what they hoped. (Multi-author blog) So I could post it on my own blog instead and they would tweet it for me. It has resulted in some nice traffic coming this way although I doubt I’ve made them stick. If you must know, it was the blogpost about using twitter to climb mountains. Another small contribution in traffic has been made by the forum over at Project Mojave. Traffic sources are becoming more and more varied.

What I have done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: I’ve learned that you can make friends in the strangest ways, as I wrote yesterday I’m now participating in Project Mojave and all the knowledge I’m getting there will certainly help me grow this blog further. As you might have noticed my blogposts are getting longer almost every day. I started out with blogpost containing no more than 400 words. My post on hormones this week was over 2000 and I felt comfortable with it. I can really tell my writing skills are getting better. Not only that but I’m making fewer  typo’s and grammatical errors as well.

I’ve also learned that google reader can be a real pain.

I did a new setup on the feed and found the problem, faulty HTML coding… Things are back to normal now.