Followers

Seven Years: A Blog Appraisal

~ beetleypete ~ 54 Comments

I tipped over my seven years as a blogger at the end of July, and I am looking forward to the eighth year in 2020.

I thought to have a look at the current ‘All Time’ stats provided by WordPress in the ‘Insights’ feature.

Total views as of today.
277,610

Total visitors so far.
82,270

Follower totals.
WP 4,561
Email 37
Social media 218

Total 4,816

Posts Published.
2,710

Most popular day.
Monday

Biggest views on one day.
Sept 2nd, 2019

Most popular category.
Blogging

Most popular tag.
Guest Post

It’s important not to become obsessed with blog statistics, but I always find them interesting.

If you have just started out, take some encouragement from these figures.
And remember, my blog is small!

Some more Blogging Positives

~ beetleypete ~ 41 Comments

After a long fiction serial, and lots of historical photo-posts, I thought I would get back to saying more nice things about Blogging.

The new bloggers continue to appear to ‘get it’. I have had some nice communication with brand new bloggers who have recently followed my blog, and they seem to have caught on very quickly about ‘Likes’, ‘Comments’, and replying to other bloggers too. This is very pleasing to me, and encouraging as well.

Some people are still using that ‘X invites you to follow his/her blog’ thing, provided by WordPress. My advice to you new bloggers, don’t use that. We are unlikely to accept your invitation, as most of us are already following far too many blogs, or happily rooted in our existing communities.

Many of you new bloggers are posting some great stuff too. In the last few days, I have seen some lovely photos, read a couple of excellent poems, and enjoyed the travel reports of a blogger in South America. That’s great!
It means that new bloggers are rapidly realising that blogging is not Facebook, and we don’t really need to see a photo of the fast food you had for lunch, or your mouth adorned in ten different colours of lipstick.

As we approach the autumn of 2019, I still believe that this has been the most positive year for new bloggers in a very long time. I hope that all those new bloggers keep going, and do not allow themselves to be discouraged by an initial lack of followers, or numbers of views much lower than they might have expected. It’s a long process, but you will get there in the end. You just have to keep working at it.

After blogging for over seven years now, and taking time to become part of a wonderful community of true blogging friends, I have never felt so positive about blogging as I do today. My own list of followers is growing healthily, and my daily views exceeded 500 on one day, for the first time ever. But this post is not about me, it is about all of you who have decided to take the plunge into blogging, during 2019.

Don’t worry. You are doing well, very well. And you are (mostly) doing it just right too. Well done to you all, and welcome to the wonderful (and addictive) world of blogging.

My thanks to all of you who have followed this blog, and my congratulations for ‘getting it’ too. If I have not acknowledged your follow, it is probably because you have not connected your blog site to your gravatar. How to do this can be found here. https://wptavern.com/connect-wordpress-sites-to-your-gravatar-profile

Or because you were trying to sell me something!

Best wishes to all bloggers, old and new. 🙂

Pete.

An Untended Blog

~ beetleypete ~ 69 Comments

People who enjoy their gardens might well tell you that untended plants are doomed to die. Some can be left to their own devices, and will come back miraculously every year. But most of those that really adorn a garden need regular attention, and a little love too.

Much the same applies to your blog. Put up a few random articles, ignore the likes and comments, and you will soon discover that it will not flourish. Don’t bother to reply to people, fail to read their blogs, and don’t invest in being part of the community, and you can be sure to see your blog wither away on the screen, until you might just as well delete it.

If you want to get the most out of blogging, you have to regularly add relevant content to attract readers and followers. Then you have to engage with them, show them that you value their involvement and input. Ignore this advice, and you will soon be posting everything for just one reader. You.

If that is what you intended, that’s fine. It is not compulsory to bother with anyone else. Just blog for yourself if you want to. But is that really why you started? Didn’t you want to connect with people, maybe some like minded bloggers from all around the world? To express your thoughts or opinions, promote your writing, tell strangers what you were feeling, or where you had been? If so, you really do have to tend that blog, just as a dedicated gardener will care for their cherished rose beds.

Many of you will know that I have another blog. Some of you even follow it, and I thank you for that.
https://redflagflying.wordpress.com/

This was always intended to be an ‘occasional’ blog. Something different, and a change from what I write about here on beetleypete. I deliberately only post now and again, as the mood takes me, or an issue makes me angry or interested enough to comment. It is very much an ‘untended’ blog. Only 153 posts in six years, and just 237 followers listed. Most days, it is lucky to receive four views. The average daily viewing figure is just one. (1!)
During July, it had no views at all on ten days of that month, and archive posts older than one year are almost never explored, read, or commented on.

That’s fine with me. I have my main blog, and this other one is just a ‘toy’ at best, and rarely played with. But it stands as a good example of an ‘untended’ blog.

So if you want to get the best out of blogging, and to find it rewarding, fulfilling, and most of all, enjoyable, learn from the gardeners.

Blogging Frustrations

~ beetleypete ~ 68 Comments

Since starting this blog in 2012, I have spent a lot of time trying to help other bloggers. After struggling a lot myself, and getting advice from blogging friends, I tried to pay that forward, by posting advice and suggestions about how new bloggers could possibly get a more rewarding experience from blogging.

Some of this advice has taken the form of gripes about the way some bloggers go about the process of blogging, and how an increasing number of bloggers treat it like the more instant social media platforms, like Facebook or Instagram. But I was always trying to help, I assure you.

The two biggest irritations have been mentioned by me more than once, and one of those was a subject of a ‘reminder’ blog post very recently.

‘Please follow my blog’, or ‘Please read my new post’ are not valid comments to leave on the site of another blogger. If you have read something they have written, then you should comment on that subject, not just ask to be read in return, or followed back because you have liked a post, or followed a blogger. I cannot even remember how many times I have complained about this previously, yet just this past week it has happened no less than a dozen times on my blog.

So to anyone thinking of doing this in the future, I have this warning.
If you do this on one of my posts as from tomorrow, I will not only refuse to ‘Approve’ that comment, I will mark it as ‘Spam’.
That’s how much I am fed up with people who constantly do this.

My most recent advice was about how to connect your site to your Gravatar image. On the same day I posted that, I had no less than six new followers who had failed to do this. So I could not find their own blog. Since then, I have counted more than three new followers every day who have not bothered to attach any link to their name or Gravatar image, so cannot be ‘found’. I know that these are not ‘Email only followers’, as WordPress kindly lets me know if someone is only following by email. Annoyingly, some of those bloggers had even ‘liked’ my post advising them to do this link, but had patently not bothered to read it.

My recent post about positive blogging spoke highly of the great community we have in WordPress, especially the committed new bloggers who have arrived in 2019. But there is still the ‘follow me back gang’, and the ‘no link followers’. It doesn’t seem to matter how much advice is put out there, they choose to ignore it.

After all this time, I do start to wonder why I bother.

Reblogged Stories

~ beetleypete ~ 16 Comments

I am very pleased that so many readers are enjoying the stories that I have been reblogging recently.

For those of you considering doing something similar, my up to date Stats might prove to be of interest.

I know that only a small percentage of WordPress bloggers view their Stats on a regular basis. Based on that, this may or may not be informative, but it is a good example of how Stats can affect what you decide to do on your blog.

When I reblog a post, in this case fictional stories from some years ago, the Stats inform me very accurately about who reads what. Over the past couple of weeks, the reblog has received more than 60% of the views. But those seeing this, and liking it, rarely go on to read the full original story. Around 32% actually read the story, whether or not they comment, or like either version.

This is not a complaint, merely an observation. So just over one third of readers and followers actually click the link to read the whole original story.

I don’t know about you, but I find that very interesting indeed.

100 A Day

~ beetleypete ~ 44 Comments

No, this isn’t about cigarette consumption.

Recent weeks have seen me delving into the stats once again.

Despite the potential world-wide appeal of my blog, at least in places where English is spoken, visitors from America account for at least 100 more daily views than from anywhere else. Some days, that figure exceeds 150. On many occasions, it also exceeds the total from all the other countries combined.

Once again I have to conclude that I owe a debt of gratitude to my American followers and readers.

As always, you have my sincere thanks.

Reblogging

~ beetleypete ~ 39 Comments

Everyone cannot fail to have noticed that I have recently been reblogging lots of old posts from 2012 and 2013. At that time, I had less than 100 followers, and I now have over 4,000.

With that in mind, I thought it was long overdue to look back into my archives, and find some posts that had almost no likes or comments, and to introduce them to a new and larger readership. Many of them are about films, and I make no excuses for that, as I love films and cinema of course. But I will find some that deal with different subjects.

It also saves me sitting too long at the computer at the moment, with a painful bad back.

If anyone finds this too dull or boring, then please let me know in the comments.