Making a Web Site Sweat

 

I've been doing something similar as an experiment with a web site. I won't give the name here as then everybody would go and look at it and that would ruin all the stats. Sorry, you'll just have to wait on that.

Basically, I've created a WordPress blog, which I've expanded in WordPress with extra pages to form a complete site exclusively in WordPress. I'm about to change the template, so that the site looks better, but I won't do that until I have a large amount of traffic, so that I can assess whether the new template makes a difference.

Wordpress gives people all of the hooks they need to come back again and again and if the content is good, then they will. I've also found that the blog gets an average of about 1,000 page views a day, with a maximum of about 3,000. This means that in most searches it is in the top ten in Google. So I think we can say that it actually doesn't take much to get to the top in a non-competitive market, as it seems most web sites are lucky to get perhaps a hundred page views a day.

Now what gets you looked at.

1. Blogs seem to get read by the search engines much more often than ordinary web pages. I commented about a BBC program in the blog and that appeared in Google the next day. I may have been lucky, but usually Google picks up the blog entry within a few days.

2. I go into forums, find topics and post messages. In one case I sent an e-mail to the moderator and he published an article on the blog and traffic tripled for a week. When it settled down it was fifty percent higher than before the post.

3. I generally post to this blog about five or six times a week. This keeps it fresh.

4. I also add posts, which are in essence not really connected to the blog. For instance, if your blog is about marriage, you might put in a story about swans being monogamous. Or even one about how the weather is really good today and you went out and had a lovely walk in the park. These off topic posts tend to bring in visitors, who aren't really looking for you, but when they see you are a serious site, they take a good look.

5. If your blog is about something like marriage counselling, which is a distress purchase, keep a light tone in some posts. I've known my wife for over forty years and sometimes we've gone through some stale patches, which have often been relieved by some silly and very erotic incidents. There was the incident in Berlin in a two star Michelin restaurant...

6. Answer all comments quickly and promptly. As in the previous post be upbeat and funny where it helps.

7. Think about RSS feeds. Most Wordpress templates incorporate these.

The biggest advantage of this approach, is you spend all the times on the words.

It was Lindbergh who when asked if he should take a navigator when he crossed the Atlantic, said that he'd take the fuel instead. You're better off in the first instance adding the words and then doing the style later.