200 Posts and 90,000 views

I just happened to look, and my last post on the new Scientology Volunteer Ministers Courses was my 200th post on this WordPress blog, and took me over the 90,000 page view mark as of mid-day today.

Well, that’s not so bad, I guess, from something that occupies about 30 mins of my time each week.  Shows you how powerful a tool these great blogging engines like WordPress are.

Though I am no Seth Godin or Debbie Weil, having a blog that you work away at every so often can teach you more valuable lessons on blog writing & blog management than simply reading one of the aforementioned authors’ brilliant missives.

For example:

Write At Least Every Other Day:

I have found repeatedly that you can keep your blog’s statistics buoyant by simply writing an article every other day.  Let your blog stay stagnant for a week or so, and you’ll come back to find a totally vacant blog that nobody visits.  Write every other day, and you’ll find even your crusty old articles getting a ton of traffic all of the sudden.   Various people have their theories on how RSS pinging and the velocity of new inbound links can then up your rankings on this and that, but when it comes down to empirical observation — just writing an interesting post of some sort on some subject, on a regular basis, makes for good & continual traffic.

When you think it or see it, blog it:

This is something I’ve been ever-glad to tools like Flock and Microsoft Live Writer for, is it makes “impulse blogging” much easier to do. Example:  I was debugging a friend’s 3DS Max computer and found major problems in getting 3D Studio Max to work on Windows Vista.   So, I wrote like a single-paragraph blog post on it.  Must have been timely, as that one post on getting 3DS Max to work on Vista ended up getting around 30,000 page views right after posting, due to showing up #1 when people Google for “3ds Max Vista”.   Other posts have met with similar interesting side-effects, including random listings on the front-page of LinuxWorld or being #1 on a particularly good set of Sphere back-links — none of which I could have predicted before doing the blog post.

After one of my last doozies, I wrote a little post on driving traffic to a site with Web 2.0 tools, something that could definitely stand an update.

Interested, though, in some feedback on what others have found effective in making a blog productive for you!