XC Mountainbiking

XC Mountainbiking

Spring Time On The Home Trail

Birdsong, Sun breaking through the trees, and the leaves growing again. Spring. My favourtie time of year.

Singlespeed racing

Breathing hard. My face hides how much I love racing even on one gear!

Downhill Mountainbiking

Downhill Mountainbiking

Tour de France

Sunflowers on the Tour

XC Racing

World Cup Racing where the best fight it out over some of the most demanding terrain

Freeride

Taking the sport to extremes

No matter what or how you ride, enjoy the trails out there.

Saturday 17 August 2013

Successful Blogging - Oh and Following the Chainline is 2!

My little blog passed its second birthday without so much as a mention from me last month.  I have it seems been far to neglecting and should really get my head down and write the blog posts I've been meaning to write.

However, despite my lack of attention to my blog things have gone all a bit bizarre with the statistics.  I often wonder how much people pay attention to how many visitors they receive to their blogs, I know I for one will check in at least once every day to see what is viewed the most and see how many have viewed the blog for the day.  Its probably a little sad I know but a part of me wants this blog to be viewed and enjoyed by people.  I never set it up as a diary and I always admit my aim lies more in bringing fellow bloggers together, so seeing a few people drop by and leave comment makes my blog and to a greater extent myself feel loved.

So about the weird statistics.  No one really shares what or how many hits their blogs get each day.  I know I follow some who no doubt would laugh a my figures.  A few months a go a friend asked me how many hits I got per day.  I proudly said that I averaged around 100 per day.  I say proudly because last year it varied between 30 to 50 hits. However, last month things changed and my blog sky rocketed from this to about 600 reaching an amazing 800 odd hits.  My chart had gone nuts!  I was in the realms of 12,000 hits a month.

This month its now showing 30,000 hits, with an all time high of 1696 hits in a day.  I'm feeling the love. I'm now celebrating my blog reaching over its 100,000 mark!

So what's my secret?

There are a lot of excellent blogs out there who will give tips to help you get going. Everything from using certain wordings in your titles, presentation and advertising.  From a cycling point of view doing reviews on popular wanted products is a good way of getting visitors.  Use forum sites and refer them back to your blog.  I use my blog address in the bottom of comments and it does work in bringing people to your blog.  I've also tried adding my blog address to various websites to get some referral visitors.

All of this works, to some extent.  You will draw in some viewers here and there but I'm afraid to say not many.  So why my increase?

I read on one blog that the secret to blogging is to stick with it.  There are a huge amount of blogs that die a death after about 9 months.  BlogSpot is a graveyard of such unloved blogs.  Some promising ones too but whether through other commitments or a lack of gained love they are left.  I would say it has taken two years for my own blog to notice a significant gain and that is not through doing anything new or ground breaking.

So my big tip is stick with it, keep going.  Visit other blogs, leave comments and try and build friendships with fellow bloggers.  Try and put your blog out there.  Try some forum sites or something like Stumbleupon.  Well worded titles go a long way so give some thought to what you are about to put.

Enjoy your blogging people and remember to drop by from time to time and let me know what you think. Lastly, a big thank you to all those of you that have visited and taken time to comment. It always means a lot!