What blogging means to me...

And why my blog isn’t popular…

The Integral - http://blog.aditto.info © 2009 Aditya Marathe

Agenda

 About my blog - The Integral

 Blogging platforms
– Moving from Blogger to Wordpress
– Multi-platform blogging, comparison of various platforms
 What have I blogged about and what people generally read
on my blog
 Blog analytics
– Some numbers and trends of visitors on my blog
– Relevance of statistics to me
– Analytics tools
 What I must do to increase the visitors hit count

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Started blogging in my first year at
engineering…

 Registered on Blogger for a free blog (April 2005)

– http://adityamarathe.blogspot.com
 Fascinated by Calculus, the blog was named “The Integral”
– The place where Life is the curve integrated over various elements that we
see in and around us.
 Wrote mostly on life in hostel and college
 Migrated to wordpress.com during final year
 Registered domain for a website and a blog
– http://www.aditto.info
– http://blog.aditto.info

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 Blogging Platforms

Why did I move from Blogger to Wordpress?

 Wordpress had and still has more blogging tools

– Import feature from multiple sources
– Static pages apart from posts
– Password protection on posts
– “Cleaner” look, though Blogger has almost infinite customizable themes!
– Ad-sense was not a feature that could stop me from moving from Blogger
– At some point of time, I would like to move to externally hosted Wordpress
blog

 Wordpress is ‘cool’ for blogging

– Comments handling is far superior
• ‘Reply to’ comment email and end with !END straight from Inbox!
– Wordpress.com is always adding newer features

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 Blogging Platforms

Multi-platform blogging, does it make sense?

 Maintain personal blog on Wordpress

– http://blog.aditto.info

 Photo blog on Tumblr

– http://photos.aditto.info

 Micro blog on Twitter

– http://twitter.com/aditto

• Find a good paid host

• Install Wordpress
• Add some plug-ins
• Integrate everything

Which is an easier option? What factors influence the decision?

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 Blogging Platforms

Twitter and Wordpress are like the two

extremes of personal blogging

Feature Wordpress Tumblr Twitter

Platform Full feature blogging Limited blogging Micro blogging

capacity
Ease of use Not so difficult Fairly easy Very easy

Features Always growing Limited Minimal

Customizability Complete / Limited Complete Very limited

Domain mapping Paid Free N/A

Spam Good No spam You can spam!

management
What I use it for Articles, incidents, Photography Quick opinions /
and basically anything sharing links / get
substantially / worth quick news /
sharing killing time

Trust Wordpress / Tumblr to preserve my data more than any paid

host, and then I don’t need to pay to host 6
 Inside The Integral

So what have I blogged about in about 4 yrs?

 Travel
– South Korea [2007]
– East Sikkim [2008]
– United States [2008]
 Photography

 Childhood
– Memories
• Phantom Sweet Cigarettes

 People and Life

– Eccentricity
– Conversations
– Humours

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 Inside The Integral

Why do people land on my blog? And what do

they check out?

 Most commonly visited post (since 2008)

– #177 East Sikkim Trip - April 2008
– #156 Busan @ 300 kmph... KTX

 Most common search engine terms (since 2008)

– Bibimbap
– South Korean food
– Seoul
 Random search terms reaching my blog…
• cute girls
• specs frame
• birthmark in center of palm
• shock laga laga laga advertisement

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 Blog Analytics

Few basic statistics about The Integral

 Number of posts – 258

 Comments – 786
 Categories – 14
 Hits (since 2007) – 36,000
14%
India
2%
2% USA
3% South Korea
3%
49% Canada

Singapore

UK

Others
27%

But these are not the only trends I love to observe…

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 Blog Analytics

Does the number of hits matter to me?

 Average hits per day at The Integral: 60 (current)

– An ordinary blogger gets anything between 10-100 hits a day
– A very popular blogger gets 100-500 hits a day
– Marketing blogs can get anywhere from 1K to 1M hits a day!
– Theme based personal blogs end up getting 100-1000 hits a day

 Number of subscribers – Whats that?

 Blogger vs Wordpress when it comes to search results

– Google indexes Blogspot blogs instantaneously
– Wordpress.com users always suffer indexing issues

 But it’s ok! 

Yes it does matter, but I wont stop blogging even if nobody reads 
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 Blog Analytics

Spikes in the visitors trends?

Blogged something PERSONAL

Blogged something VERY INTERESTING

No blog, hyper active search!

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 Blog Analytics

77 % of visitors to my blog give it no more

than a glance…

Less than 5 secs   

From 5 secs to 30 secs   

From 30 secs to 5 mins   

From 5 mins to 20 mins   

From 20 mins to an hour   

Longer than an hour   

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 Blog Analytics

For a very famous personal blogger too, 57 %

visitors stay for less than 5 secs

Less than 5 secs   

From 5 secs to 30 secs   

From 30 secs to 5 mins   

From 5 mins to 20 mins   

From 20 mins to an hour   

Longer than an hour   

The key however is to increase the number of visitors who spend

more than 5 minutes on your blog! 13
 Blog Analytics

There are a lot of free tools to perform good

analysis of visitor statistics

Wordpress Stats

Google Analytics

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 Blog Popularity

To make my blog popular, I must… But I…

 Visit tons of other blogs, and comment!

 Write stuff that people want to read…

– Politics
– Entertainment (Movies, music)
– Humour
– Geeky technology!!
– Sex
some
 Register my blog on tons of social networking and
bookmarking sites
more less
 Write less of personal and more of general stuff

Isn’t that what a personal blog is meant to be? 15

 Creative Content Sharing

Creating content, and creatively sharing…

Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise
your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative
works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your
work.
http://wiki.creativecommons.org
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 Thank You!

The Integral: http://blog.aditto.info

Photo Blog: http://photos.aditto.info
Email: [email protected]

Aditya Marathe

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