Unexpected New Traffic

I don't monetize this blog. I don't actively promote it. The blog is, after all, for people who know me or have some other relationship with me. I don't write much for the random surfer who winds up here by accident. That doesn't mean that I don't welcome new people to the KG Wanderings Community.

I recently signed up with feedburner.com after reading an article about simple things that you can do to a blog to make it more interesting and "sticky". (Sticky means that people explore your web pages and come back for more.)

FeedBurner.com is a set of tools that make subscribing to rss feeds easier. It turns out the many more people prefer to read websites as rss feeds than I would have ever guessed. MyAOL, MyYahoo and a bunch of other portal type websites allow you to put feeds on the home page. It is possible to read the latest "KG Wandering" on your MyAOL page. If I ever have a magazine again, I will make an rss feed for it so people can subscribe to it this way.

Blogger creates an rss feed, even if you are not aware of it.

FeedBurner.com was easy to configure. Feedburner has a page for creating links so people can subscribe to your page easily. I made a whole slew of them that you can see on your left and a little down. I have been averaging 9 or 10 NEW feed subscribers a day on my various websites. They are subscribing via Yahoo, AOL, Google and Roho (whom I had never heard of before). All of my blogs now have sign up links.

I added Digg.com "digg-it" links to all of my individual blog entries. Digg is supposed to be one of those communities that people trust more than a search engine. I am hoping that people will start Digg-ing my posts and I will get hits back that way.

I signed up for a Del.icio.us account and bookmarked all of my sites. I was amazed to find that most of them already have bookmarks by people that I've never heard of. Del.icio.us is one of those sites that is an alternative to search engines and if you get on the popular list, you get millions of hits.

I get quite a few hits to FreeNameAStar.com from www.Stumbleupon.com. Even this blog gets hits from stumbleupon from time to time. You have to join stumbleupon and install their browser plugin and use that to rate sites that you like. Use it to rate your own sites and ask other people to do the same and eventually people will star stumbling in.

I added MyBlogLog.com code to my blogs a long time ago and since Yahoo bought them out I have been adding the code to all of my sites. They have some neat features, including a myspace style community of surfers. You can list the images of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page, which is cool. They also keep link statistics on outgoing links so you can see when people link off your page where they are going.

Use Technorati.com or Google blog search to make you pages more accessible. Add the "search status" firefox plugin to your page and keep track of your Alexa rank and your Google page rank. These stats will help you monitor how users find your page.

I've tried a few other widgets, with little luck. If you want to see all of them in action, go to Katheryn Cramer's blog. She has so much crap on her pages that it takes a couple of minutes to load, sometimes. She is a widget collector. Right click and view source and you can see a whole bunch of these little JavaScript-lets on her page. Her web page is like the little girl with the curl.

There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

As a result, I have seen a 10 percent jump in readership over the last few days at all of my sites. The JavaScript widgets and the rss subscriptions from feedburner seem to account for this. I am surprised that it was this easy. I expect that the growth will continue for a while. I am always happy to welcome new readers.