Yikes. Week #5 as a Full Time Blogger kicked my butt!
It’s been a long and rough week with a missed flight to a conference (first flight I’ve ever missed) and a lot of tough “dry spots” where I wasn’t inspired or motivated very much.
And that’s actually quite normal for me; I’ll jump up and down one moment excited about something and then I’ll be feeling down and out about the exact same thing a few moments later. I’m not manic; just a normal human being making sense of his work and world (and people for crying out loud!).
In regards to people, I also found myself challenged into a defensive posture for some of the content produced as well as a bit miffed by some insensitive comments that also challenged my self-control. I was able to handle these well but there’s still plenty to be learned. I have understood why people like Seth Godin refuse to have comments on their blogs for a long time and I’m constantly reminded of how darn smart they are for doing so!
Yet, through the past week there were a couple neat wins that I enjoyed celebrating (Remember, What is Celebrated is Repeated!) silently to myself (that I now share with you):
- Blog passed 10,000 visits and 20,000 PVs since I started.
- This blog is now a revenue-generating blog and business! Starting to make back that initial investment of capital!
- This post will mark the 50th blog post! That’s neat. Half-way to the big 100!
- We now have more than 1,000 comments throughout our posts and crossed 100 pingbacks.
- @TentBlogger now has more than 300 followers. Make sure to follow!
- Just about to pass the 300 RSS Subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed, do it here!
- 6 posts have broken the 1,000 PVs mark while 8 posts have broken the 500 visits mark.
- We have 24 email subscribers for RSS as well as 28 subscribers to our upcoming newsletter.
- Hosted my first “Live” broadcast with 20 or so people joining in. It was off-the-cuff with no prep time but I really enjoyed it! Looks like I’ll be doing it regularly too, so that’s neat.
- A few blogs are beginning to steal the content here wholesale with crazy hotlinking action. A weird metric for success but it means that what I’m creating is deemed valuable enough to product content theft.
And a few more less-interest facts that I personally celebrated because I wanted to.
Please note that I share these facts and figures not to boast in them but rather in an effort to be as transparent as possible as I built a blog from scratch, so to speak. My hope, of course, is that you can replicate and learn the things that I’m doing for your own blogs (and that’s why you should subscribe right now if you haven’t!).
It’s been a good week and I’m looking forward to starting a much-needed 10 part series (hinted at in the live event) and moving forward with some strategic architecture.
A blogger’s work is never done!
How was your week? What did you learn? Teach me something that you learned this past week!
Just curious…how do you combat the theft?
working on hotlinking catches for my CDN. .htaccess files… yikes.
I took the week off from a hectic schedule as Communications Director at FBC Conyers…
I purchased standard theme and have started to tweak it….
I installed a captcha on my wiredworship.org blog and it messed everything up, so I had to re-start my blog over after I couldn’t log into control panel…
Re-sided my house after installing french doors…
Met with a church planter in Atl this week and dreamed about some cool concepts…
Ate at Maggiano’s on Friday with my crew from my Dinner Club…
Slept in today and didn’t do the church thing…much needed rest.
i love the last one.
thanks for sharing duane!
It’s been amazing to follow this blog as it has evolved over the past 5 weeks. I’ve learned a lot already and look forward to whats to come here.
thanks brian! this is getting quite fun…..
You say you hit dry spots this week but I think this has been my favorite week on your blog.
I am learning a ton and it is actually stuff I can and have used!
I really enjoy your video tutorials.
Keep up the good work.
it’s all about perspective, right?
apparently great good can happen out of dry bones!
Excellent.
What I learned this week, well I already knew it but was reminded of it again, is that if you want to grow a following then you have to work at it proactively.
Merely posting good content on the blog rarely does it by itself, especially if you don’t have an existing following to leverage. Sure, over time a slow build could happen but to grow it and help it along a little faster… getting others to post, repost, retweet, etc the content will widen the exposure level tremendously.
Example:
I posted an article on my blog and shared it via my Twitter and FB feeds only. Didn’t ask anyone to share beyond the normal implied sharing on the post. Post received a couple hundred unique visitors and I picked up a few more RSS subscribers.
Next day I posted another post and did the same as above but this time I asked a few influential people on Twitter to share a link and submitted the post to a couple other blogs who have higher traffic than me. One of them picked it up and published a link back. Net result was tremendously more traffic than my previous days post and a significant more RSS subscribers.
WIN! i remember that post; you asked me right?
Week was good. Domainr is great resource; thanks for the tip!
I know you do a great amount of work with non-profits. Have you heard of “Square”? Mashable did a post on it Friday. This (Square) may be a good solution to help boost their contributions.
i have. we had a guest post on churchdrop about it. it’s looking pretty neat.
So sorry to hear that you had some internal struggle last week, but I have to say that it helps me to hear it.(In an “if even John lacks inspiration every now and then, I must be okay” kind of way.) Thanks for sharing that.
One thing I did last week was get familiar with EverNote, which turns out to be something I can’t believe I ever lived without. Heard about it on your live chat!
Awesome! i use it every single day… i can’t imagine life without it.
Congrats! Yes I been in my ups and downs as well. Finally, went ahead last week and started hosting my own blog: http//jizaul.com
I am motivated and looking in to getting a mac for various reasons.
Slowly, I am giving in to the dark side.
I highly appreciate everything you do. You came in the nick of time. Right when I was about to give up. But here we are!
oops http://jizaul.com
sweet! glad to hear about it josue!
Well…finally made the move to self-hosting and uploaded Standard Theme. Continuing to fine-tune the site and catch up with your blog posts. Busy week in the “pastoral business.” Hit a little block on writing, but getting back into the swing.
keep it up randy! glad to have you a part of this community!