Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

For new readers, a main goal of this Blog is to show you, step-by-step, how to build a successful blogging business from scratch. I report several metrics every 1-2 weeks so you can see how the site is progressing.

As you can see below, things are still improving, but the rate at which they are improving has slowed down a bit.

What I’ve Done Right

If you read very many blogs, you’ve heard this before. There’s one key above all others that’s critical to building a strong blog readership. Write pillar content, and traffic will follow! The How the Great Blogs Began series was the most popular set of articles yet, and I expect the follow-on articles to do just as well.

What I’ve Done Wrong

I made one huge mistake in the last two weeks. My mistake isn’t entirely evident from the statistics shown below, but it is obvious in the more detailed Google Analytics traffic logs I review daily. The How the Great Blogs Began series drew in quite a bit of traffic. Unfortunately, other obligations kept me from posting follow-up articles in a timely manner. As a result, I lost a lot of the momentum gained from that initial series of posts. All is not lost—and a valuable lesson was learned. If at all possible, you should always have several articles pre-written so that when life happens, you can keep posting fresh content.

If you know that you’re not going to be able to post for several days, you should use the WordPress timestamp feature to set up your pre-written articles to post to your blog at predetermined times.

What I’ll Do Next

I have two priorities for this week:

1. Complete 2-3 follow-on articles to the How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts along the lines of my Digging Your Way to Sustainable Buzz article.
2. Create some buzz of my own. I haven’t decided for sure exactly how, but it’s time in this blog’s life to use some creative marketing techniques to gain traffic and increase backlinks!

My goal for next week: Break into the Technorati Top 200,000.

Summary for week ending August 18^th, 2007:

Alexa Traffic Rank: 344,042
Technorati Rank: 245,854
Yahoo Inlinks: 1,089
One Week Incoming Traffic Referred from Search Engines: 52
Google PageRank: 0
(As of August 18^th, several of the Google PageRank prediction tools are predicting that Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger will soon have a PageRank of 4. Let’s hope they’re right!)