I’m curious to find out a few things from bloggers who have been posting for more than a year:
- What is your blogging tool of choice (blogger, wordpress, etc)?
- Have you always used the same tool? If you switched why?
- How often to you post?
- Does traffic to your blog matter to you?
- Do you try to stick to one topic/theme or are you generalized?
- How many other blogs do you follow?
- Have you kept your blog in the standard templates offered, have you tweaked it, or have you designed your own fully?
- Do you blog internally for a company/organization or is it out there for the world to see?
- Do you try to promote your blog (increase its searchablility – is that a word)?
Hi there. Here are some answers for you…
1. My blogging tool of choice is WordPress
2. I’ve always used WordPress. I had a personal blog 3 years ago and used Blogger.
3. I post about 2 times a week on my personal blog and everyday on the Brandon Hall Research group blog
4. Traffic matters!
5. I try to stick to corporate learning but go on tangents semi-frequently on my personal blog
6. I follow ~450 blogs
7. I use a semi-modified template from Brian Gardner
8.I blog naked for the whole world to see.
9. I do promote my blog – I try to write for seo and use friendfeed, twitter, facebook, linkedin integrations
Q1. I use WordPress. (I used Blogger briefly, as part of an online course, on its site, but prefer WordPress’s features.) I also prefer having the blog on my own site.
Q2. Other than an early attempt with Blogger, I’ve used WordPress exclusively since February of 2006.
Q3. On Dave’s Whiteboard, my professional blog, I try to post four times a week. On the private blog I use for my parents, I shoot for five and get in trouble when I fall below four.
Q4. While I’m happy (and sometimes surprised) that people read my blog, traffic per se does not matter to me. To keep myself grounded, I remind myself that I get 100 spam comments for every actual comment. I don’t know what would increase traffic and probably wouldn’t follow up if I did know.
Since Dave’s Whiteboard is mainly for me, the interest that anyone takes in it is icing on the cake. (That’s a better framework than wondering how come X blathers all the time about the value of blogging but has never commented on mine.)
The greatest benefit of the traffic I do have has been making connections with people interested in similar issues. Running a close second: serendipity when I click three links out from someone’s post.
Q5. On Dave’s Whiteboard, I’m usually within a block or two of topics related to training, learning, performance improvement, or the science of the brain. I have a “side trip” category to cover random stuff. To my surprise, the side trips make up about 10% of the total.
Q6. The number of blogs I follow depends on what you mean by follow. I have maybe six dozen on my NetVibes page (not counting my own feeds, like from delicious or CoComment), but I don’t read each one every day… some I don’t read every week.
Q7. I’ve tweaked my blog quite a bit. Among the advantages of WordPress: myriad free templates, endless useful plugins, and the support forums where you can learn how to make the small tweaks that I like.
For example: a random-quote generator, a drop-down list for archives older than six months, a preview button, and a tool to make it easy to link posts in a series. I’ve also learned enough about CSS to tinker with the overall appearance, and to create a custom “attribution” paragraph to acknowledge the people who take the Flickr photos I use as illustrations.
I am by no stretch of the imagination a programmer, so this customization is a credit to the WordPress community.
Q8. I don’t have an internal to blog for.
Q9. No, I don’t try anything to promote my blog in general: I don’t actively seek to optimize it. I consider it part of how I go about my work, so it’s part of how I comment on other blogs. I like to think that when I comment, I’m taking part in a conversation, rather than trying to invite people over to my place. You’d have to ask them whether I succeed. My bias is that SEO matters much more to people who think of themselves as in the blogosphere. I’m a consultant who happens to have a blog.
That said, like Janet, I make sure you can get to my blog through LinkedIn or Facebook. I don’t know and don’t care how many people do that.
I collected my advice for new bloggers and posted it here:
How To Be Heard
http://www.downes.ca/post/2
Great post! 🙂
1. WordPress
2. Yes, I have always used WordPress.com, but I’m thinking of switching over to WordPress.org. There’s a ton more flexibility with WordPress.org…
3. I post at least once a week.
4. It’s nice to see some traffic to my blog, but it’s not my main reason for blogging. I’m more interested in seeing the search terms that bring people to my blog. That fascinates me for some reason.
5. I try to stick to general topics related to eLearning and/or eLearning professionals.
6. I follow over a hundred blogs. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader, and I check it a few times each week.
7. I used a theme built by somebody else.
8. My blog is out there for the world to see.
9. I do try to promote my blog to peers that may be interested. I don’t actively do any advertising or anything like that. I don’t actively seek to optimize it.
Tracy, quick answers:
1. I use WordPress
2. I started with Blogger as a Learning Circuits bloggerbut switched when I decided to have my own.
3. I try to post every business day, but I probably get 3-4 a week.
4. Yes, traffic matters in that I like to get comments and feedback, and people have to come to do that. No, in that it’s good for me regardless.
5. It’s generalized, as I am, but tends to fall into some buckets like mobile, games, social, strategy, the categories I think are important.
6. I have 34 in my blogroll.
7. I tweaked a template.
8. I am my organization, so it’s definitely ‘out there’.
9. I do list my blog in my profiles, and mention it at conferences, but no search engine optimization or anything. Just as a way to know more about what/how I think.
Thanks everyone for your comments. Clearly from the 5 comments WordPress is preferred for options and hosting ability. Thank you so much for your answers this will help myself and others get started with thier own blogs.
I am going on 14 months with a personal blog. I have been reading blogs for much longer and have never had a work-related blog. I haven’t bothered to register on blogger or any other blogging website. I am happy just using Name/URL for posting comments.
I am using wordpress. I can’t say that it was really a choice as it was the blogging software offered by my web host. There was another one available, but I couldn’t get it to work.
I have not switched or even done anything to upgrade software. I can’t say if my hosting company had updated the software either.
I would like to be able to post once or twice a week. I think I have more ideas for blog entries than I do actual blog posts.
I know that I could create a blog with more readers by switching from random thoughts to a focused blog on a single topic, but traffic isn’t really important and I am not being paid to blog. I actually made a decision to not blog about work in an effort to avoid saying something I shouldn’t about my employer, clients, or projects. I mainly blog about my life and view of things around me. I have posted about trips, vacations, shows, and the things I encounter every day. My most recent post is my personal forecast for this winter.
I follow about 20 blogs. Mainly training related, but a few are friends or people I have worked with on other projects.
I started with a basic template that came with wordpress and customized it a bit.
My blog is out for the world to see. I don’t advertise it much. I think more people know that I keep photos on my website and some have called it a photo blog as I like to show a series of pictures from a trip and include a brief story to go with them. It is entirely hand coded in HTML and does not have any of the features of a blog.