My M.A.G. for 2008 – Part 1

This is not about my magazine subscriptions for 2008 but about my Most Audacious Goal for 2008. 

And it is:- 

Bringing this blog to a readership of 15,000 page views a day.  

Why 15,000? Well, FMF has said he can guide me to 100,000 a day, but when I saw that JD of Grow Rich Slowly had 9,000 unique visitors a day (not sure exactly when, but I think some time after he started his blog), I thought, well, let me try for 15,000. 

(Actually, as at time of writing, I am not quite sure if FMF’s 100,000 and JD’s 9,000 refer to the same metric…but 15,000 sounds good.) 

So how do I intend to go about doing this?  I made 7 sub headings, and listed everything and anything that I felt would help me along, under these headings. Especially links that I thought would be useful. 

a)  Knowledge Gathering  

These would be my resources for understanding about blogging and learning tips about building a successful blog. The blogosphere is incredibly generous when it comes to sharing knowledge, so this list grew quickly. The main ones, not in any particular order are: 

i)                  Simple Dollar’s “Building a better blog for 2007”,  

ii)                Steve Pavlina’s “How to build a high traffic blog”,  

iii)             FMF’s “How to get your blog to 100,000 visitors”, 

iv)              Dumb Little Man’s “Blogging for Beginners”, 

v)                Blueprint for Financial Prosperity’s “25 steps to a wildly successful PF Blog”,   

vi)              Problogger’s “31 days to a better blog”, 

vii)           Clever Dude’s “50 tips for new personal finance bloggers”,  

viii)         Yaro Starak’s “Blog Profit Blueprint”. I managed to download this great E Book from his site, but can’t seem to find a link to it now.    

Some of these were in the form of a series, so I copied and pasted them into a form of one long article each.  I shall read all these carefully, make notes of the steps they suggest and follow the steps.  After all, the steps have worked for them. And hopefully should also work for me.   

b)  Content 

To quote, Yaro Starak, content is what makes people read our blog. So content is king! And everyone agrees. Write compelling content!  

(To be honest, I have always thought that I was writing compelling content…..don’t we all think our contents are compelling?)

Anyway, exactly what is compelling content? This was a little more difficult to figure out. But this question was answered in the form of a post from Skelliewag’s “How to avoid fool’s gold and create value packed content.” 

Her blog is just overflowing with guidance and tips on this. 

How do we keep churning out the ideas? How do we keep writing  compelling posts daily?

Problogger gave a helping hand in the form of using mind maps in this and also this way. 

Yaro Starak, too, gives his advice. In his E-Book, Blog Profit Blueprint, he makes the very logical suggestion that Content + Marketing = Traffic.  He suggests that we should have pillar contents. By pillar articles he has listed :-  

–         How to articles on what we have learnt, 

–         Definitions, 

–         Theory or an argument – a fresh view, 

–         A resource, like an E-Book, 

–         List article, eg 7 ways to skin a cat….(the example is mine, by the way), 

–         Technical Blueprints 

And can you feel JHS’s thoughts and feelings as she reads the most powerful, thought provoking and moving post she has read in a long, long time?  

What do we do when we have to go off on an extended vacation, or are unable to post for an extended period? 

The Simple Dollar suggests that we should have posts on standby all the time. Preprogrammed to go online like clockwork, so as never to leave the readers hanging.   

Another great suggestion that I bookmarked just recently was JD’s guest post on Problogger on how his blog grew whilst he was on a 3 week vacation.   

c)   Traffic 

How to increase traffic is included in most of the posts listed as my foundation resources under knowledge gathering.  Not to mention the tons of advise and suggestions available at Problogger. 

As Yaro says, traffic is content + marketing. In his Blog Profit Blueprint, he says that it is through marketing, people find our good content. On marketing he gives a comprehensive list of communication channels (which are, as he says pathways and lures to bring people to our site).  

Again, I have to come up with a list of tasks based on all the guides and shall set about doing them in a methodical fashion.  

d) Technical Stuff 

Shudder! Shudder! 

I am technologically challenged, so this will be an area where I’ll have some fear. I thought I had it all figured out with “pings”, and now it looks like I have to get used to link aggregators, tags, social bookmarks etc. 

I have bought the book, WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and shall have to somehow wade my way through it. (The title is very reassuring.) 

And I just have to grit my teeth and step into the world of “slashes and backslashes”. I believe some people call it “html”. 

This post has gotten a little longer than I expected. Though we are advised not to worry about the length of our posts, I think we shall stop here for the day. 

And tomorrow we shall look at the concluding part of my MAG for 2008.