I’ve been working hard making use of Social Media sites in an attempt to promote my blogging efforts, but I must say the advice I’ve received from so many quarters insisting that it’s a great idea to add your new blog content to a bunch of Social Media sites has proved to be quite a grind. A downright drag, really. Playing around with Social Media for fun once in a while is amusing, trying to keep up with all of it and make sure you continue to update your content on each page and make sure to add fun headlines and thank people who liked it and reciprocate all the friend requests that come along? It really does start to feel like an actual job after a little while. The idea of having a blog and trying to promote it is something that I thought would be lots of fun, but at least this particular aspect of it has turned into much more of a chore than I really ever thought it would be.
Fighting for Page Views
I have been relatively pleased with the amount of traffic I’ve been receiving for a newbie blog, but it absolutely feels like like I’m having to do a lot of work just to keep things on an even keel. FIghting for each and every page view, as it were. I hadn’t realized just how difficult it is to maintain even a small but steady flow of traffic to a blog, although given the amount of content out there and how many bloggers are trying to do exactly the same thing, I guess it’s not all that surprising.
On the few days I’ve put up some new content but done nothing to promote it, the results have been disappointing to say the least. Over on upbeatrhythms, for example, I’ve had several days when I got no visitors at all! Clearly that’s a bummer when you work hard to come up with some new content to share.
One Blog off to a Good Start
On the other hand, I do feel as though I’m still getting my feet wet, and I’ve not really gotten into the flow of putting up some really valuable and useful content and spent the requisite amount of time talking it up, so if I can keep at it I’m sure things will pick up.
Here on Mindbla I’ve been pleased to see a steady stream of visitors, and the third site which is my funny pictures blog has been doing gangbusters for such a new space, I had over a thousand visitors on a few occasions which is fun to see and makes me feel as though I’m at least heading in the right direction.
Part of the ease of that project is the fact that it’s much easier to upload a picture or two per day with a small blurb or comment. I’ve found it quite easy to stick to a schedule and then send out a few tweets and put up the links on Delicious or Digg or wherever, the pace and rhythm of it works well. It’s not so easy when you want to do some writing and come up with interesting topics or, in the case of the music site, to pave the way for some bigger projects such as a video tutorial series that I really want to get done but it takes a lot of time and effort behind the scenes before I’m even ready to publish anything. I did manage to get that video series off the ground last week, so now I’ve just got to keep at it. But it’s a lot more work and preparation than a pictures blog, that’s for sure, and that’s even before factoring in all the Social Media promoting I should be doing for the site!
*sigh* – now where did I put that password for StumbleUpon again?
