Week 6: Successful Blogging Tactics Case Study

Strategy image by docbaty

A few weeks ago we put a 'tag' on John Mellem to record his successful blogging tactics. This is a playback of his recent actions at SurvivalStew.  Be sure to read the original case study post for a complete background. This article will generalize the techniques and provide additional resources so that you can apply them to your blogging success.

Lesson #1 – ask for help

"Whenever you’re ready for the next rung on the ladder of success, look for a hand to steady the ladder as you climb. That hand can be a person or many persons you’ve befriended online or an anonymous forum member or even someone else’s blog post or tutorial." - SBA

John not only asked for help but in the last couple of weeks he widened his sphere of resources:

• Joined StumbleUpon - this made it easy for us to refer 'read more' information and provide examples of what others think and implement on their blogs.
• Restored Google Analytics tracking code - John had somehow lost the code so Analytics showed zero visits.  He reactivated after reading ' How can I confirm that I've entered the tracking code correctly on my blog?'
• Integrated Adsense with Analytics. Why? This gave him new information about how ads performed based on traffic.
• He granted me access to his blog's Analytics account, for viewing only. This makes communication a lot easier.

Lesson #2 – take action

Put your efforts into learning, understanding and getting more experience under your belt. Prioritize your efforts and set short measurable goals.

Here are the actions John took to advance his goals to increase readers and income.

Monetizing

John settled on placement of his AdSense ads: One content ad above the posts, after every two posts, as well as one text link ad in the side bar. The ads are color blended with his design.

He also published a Google Search box that returns pages in his blog first.

RSS- Readers

Subscriber count is around 24, up from 15 a few weeks ago. John has admitted that monitoring and tracking visitors is like a foreign language, so things are going slowly. He's putting the priority on content and promotion.  But here are a few things we can learn:

1. Remove your (frequent) visits from the analytics count - Go to 'Analytic Settings', then click 'Filter Manager' in the lower right hand corner. Then 'add filter' where you must key the IP(s) to exclude. Find your IP with this tool: What is my IP?
2. Visits climbed steadily, spiked to 50 on July 22, dropped back to 18-24 daily. The spike was mostly from a discussion group that linked to SurvivalStew ---  36 unique viewers, looking at 2 pages for over 3 minutes. The bounce rate was 61%. Whatever he said was targeted!

Content

As we said before, SurvivalStew's content is on target for John’s niche. He publishes almost daily. Posts are short to average length with attention-getting images.

Design

Only minor changes were made to the template since the columns were expanded. However John added a large picture to the header background and changed the color of the description. The top section now stands out more. Take a look for yourself.

Promotion

I had told John that guest post and blog carnivals were good for attracting readers. He continued those actions. He also searched for blogs in his niche to develop friendships and do more commenting and visiting.  There's still more to do in this area to build a stronger community around the blog.

Summary

Here's a wrap-up in Johns' words:

"I have had a decrease in traffic the past few days.  Haven't had a lot of time for promotion but managed to get a few short articles up. Even so, I got a couple of relatively good days of increased income somehow.

...  I have such a limited knowledge of what is working the best. I haven't been able to figure out what to concentrate most on because a lot of this including the google analytics seems like some kind of foreign language that I have almost no grasp of and trying to study it does not seem to clear it up a lot. ... but I will keep writing articles and networking on the social sites/guest posting and see what happens... "

Don't forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to see the next case study 'playback.'  Some of this will suddenly click for him! Why not give John some of your experience in placing your ladder of success against the right building. Leave your comments here.