Looking Forward

My weekend was a turbulent one, complete with all the elements of a soap opera– health scare! money issues! soured relations! mental torture!

I had a few moments of clarity as the events unfold over the weekend:

1. I needed all the experiences, good and bad, to help shape the person I am today. This one is for tomorrow.
2. At least I still have my great sense of humour. And by great I mean weird! LOL!
3. Some situations are beyond my control, but as experience tells me, it will all make sense in the future. If not, it will serve as the much needed Drama! to my biography.
4. When you’re down the only other way to go is up. :)

Thank God I made it through. I’ve never been so glad to start a new week!

My Blog Traffic Generation Story
Techniques I Used to Generate and Increase Web Traffic

I started this blog, in the middle of January 2008 and currently have a readership of more than 3000 a month, a decent number for a blog that just turned 4 months last week. I thought, I’d share how I got here:

JANUARY - Setting A Goal

My goal was to have 3000 readers a month by 15th April 2008.

I had a very strong believe that it was an attainable goal. At that time, I didn’t look into actively promoting my website. I just I thought if my writing and drawings were good enough, my blog traffic would come naturally. I was a naive blogger! :P

FEBRUARY - Give Some Feedback (And Get Some Back)

In mid-Feb, Growing Happiness turned 1 month old with 3 visitors a day. It felt kinda lonely writing for myself but consoled myself with that fact that the blog is only a month old.

I had a shift in mindset at the end of month. I used to think no one would really care about what I had to say on their blogs but then I thought, “if I wanna hear people’s opinion on my blog, surely these people would want to know what I had to say too”.

I started commenting on other people’s blog regularly (about 5-10 blogs a day). I didn’t consciously pick blogs within my niche, just blogs that I was reading at any given time. If I had something to say that would add value to the blog I’m reading, I’d leave a comment.

MARCH - Social Networking

By the end of my second month of blogging, I had about 360 readers or about 12 readers a day. At this rate, my goal of 100 a day readership by the next month looked like an arduously uphill task. I decided to be more active in the blogging community in order to make my presence felt.

I joined NaBloPoMo, a community in support of daily blog posting. It was a good way to kick start a daily writing habit. Although I didn’t get a lot of web traffic from there, I did get quite a few visitors coming for my free HTML badges and the WordPress and Blogger tutorials that came with it.

I also became more active in StumbleUpon. I did a lot of stumbling, wrote reviews of sites I enjoyed and made a couple of friends.

APRIL - Traffic Surge

I joined BlogCatalog a social blog directory and was moderately active in the discussion forums. I made a number of good friends there and, despite my initial resistance, started to enjoy this community thing greatly! The friends I made from BlogCatalog are fantastic. They are probably my most loyal readers and active commentors. Thank you guys! :)

As regular comments started coming in, I became a confident blogger. People reacted to what I wrote and I enjoyed the interaction. My blog traffic improved to about 25 visitors a day in the first week of April. Despite this very modest number, I still held strongly to the believe that I could achieve a 100 a day average readership by my third month (ending 15th April).

On 14th April, the eve of Growing Happiness third month, I had… 18 visitors. It seemed nearly impossible that my traffic would increase to 3000 the next day. However, I chose to be a positive blogger.

On 15th April, my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I checked my stats — I got nearly 7500 unique visitors through StumbleUpon overnight for my post “The Best Cure for Hiccups“!. That was about a 400 times increase in visitors to my blog within a single day! However, the traffic died down quickly. Within four days, it went from thousands to about 30 visitors, proving the volatile, unpredictable and non-committal nature of web traffic driven from social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Technorati.

A week later the same post got featured on Tipnut which saw my blog traffic jump to the hundreds range. But my winning streak didn’t end there. The week after that, the “how to stop hiccup” article got featured in LifeHacker, seeing my blog traffic jump to the thousands again.

MAY - Planning for Future Expansion

While I enjoyed BlogCatalog, it took a huge chunk of my time. I decide to limit my participation there to a few times a week to concentrate on writing articles for my blog (and of course, work!)

I joined Doodle Week because doodling is something I enjoy greatly. It was a really fun exercise and I even made a couple of new friends from there.

I also submitted two articles to Blog Carnival, and the post Specify Your Ideal Job Today was selected to be featured on the carnival How To Make Money Doing What You Love at Inspired Moneymaker.

I am on the look out for other ways to expanding my readership so here are some other blog traffic generation methods I may experiment with in the coming months:

Posting Frequency

Damien Riley of Postcard from the Funny Farm (and a friend from BlogCatalog!) suggested, against convention, that posting frequently can result in increased traffic to your blogs.

At the moment, I post about 3 times a week. One of these weeks, when I’m not too busy, I might try posting a few times a day and let you guys know the result. :)

Twitter

Ades of Adesblog mentioned in his post “Twitter is increasingly becoming one of the top sources of web traffic to many people’s blogs”

Since I will be embarking on an exciting project that would require me to be away from the computer for long periods of time, I’m very keen to explore other ways to keep my readers updated and Twitter seems to be the answer.

Conclusion

What conclusions about blog traffic generation can I draw from my blogging experience so far?

It takes work - Promote yourself and accept that you need the community.
Being part of a community or network such as BlogCatalog is a great way to make new friends and expand your readership. I’m thankful to have so many friends from the web!

Always be grateful.
Only 3 readers? Those 3 readers are your best friends and cheerleaders. There are millions of blogs out there and they choose to read YOUR blog! That’s a great honour!

A post that addresses a need or attempts to solve a common problem appeals to the masses. The popularity of my “how to stop hiccups” post was due to its timeless, universal appeal — everyone has hiccups now and then and would like to know the easiest, fastest way to stop it. The more timeless, useful posts you have, the more blog traffic you will get. Which is why so many professional bloggers promote the writing of “pillar posts” (See “What are Pillar Articles?” below for explanation).

You need to have patience.
Unless you have a large marketing budget or count a blogging celebrity as your drinking buddy, you have to start from scratch. And it takes time to build something from scratch.

Never underestimate the importance of having goals and the power of positive thinking.
As my experience outlined here show, it is important to have clear goals and remain positive. You’d never know what can happen overnight!

All the best!

What are Pillar Articles?

Pillar articles are not your average blog post. They are comprehensive posts which offer great value to readers and are timeless in nature. The posts are usually longer with well-researched and original content.

Resources
Pillar Posts Definition and Tips on Adesblog
Characteristics of Pillar Articles on Daily Blog Tips

Things To Be Thankful For
That Winning Feeling

Things that made me smile in spite of my painful migraine headache:

The joy on my mother’s face when David Cook was announced the American Idol winner

The joy on my mother’s face when Manchester United were crowned winners of the UEFA Champions League

Finding a sachet of instant coffee at the bottom of the snack drawer

The smell of magazines with uncoated pages

My geriatric cat giving me the “I love you so much” gaze :)

A group of teenage girls was sitting next to me as I was eating lunch at a fast-food restaurant on Wednesday. They were talking about their schools assignments, boys, mobile phones and er, boys.

20 minutes later, the group left and a gang of 3 teenage boys took their place. The topic of the boys’ conversation moved from girls to mobile phones to Friendster accounts and then back to girls. Ah…the priorities of youth! I’m glad I’m no longer a teen — such a stressful and confusing period!

I remarked to B a few days ago that I’m in a comfortable position in my life where I’m glad for the lessons of the past and look forward to the fruits of the future. Guess that’s one more thing to be thankful for! :)

What are you grateful for today?

A Right to Live
Survivors of Cyclone Nargis

Today’s front page of The Straits Times paints a contrasting picture between how the countries’ authorities handle Asia’s recent tragedies (Cyclone Nargis that devastated Myanmar(Burma) and the 7.9-magnitude quake that struck Sichuan province in China).

On the left half of the front page:
China: Day 6
HOPE
“Beijing says ‘yes’ to more foreign relief team”

On the right:
Myanmar: Day 15
DESPAIR
“Aid groups frustrated by Yangon’s rejections”

In cyclone-hit Myanmar, children who are sleeping on the streets without adult protection are at risk of not only diseases but also sexual abuse, warned Ms Veronique Taveau, a Unicef spokeswoman. The agency estimates that 1 million children are in need of “urgent assistance”. [Read more….]

The Heat is On, It’s On the Street
Good Things in a Hot Situation

It’s been scorching hot the past few weeks on this sunny island. Three weeks ago, I was waiting for a bus in the middle of the afternoon sun. By the time the bus arrived (some 30 minutes later!), my skin had been burnt to a golden brown crisp. I suffered a terrible headache which didn’t go away until the next day (I suffered two daylong headaches this week alone just by walking 10 minutes in the sun). [Read more….]

3 Cheers for Happiness!

Growing Happiness is 3 months old today! What an enjoyable ride it has been. I wanna thank every single one of you who’ve joined in the journey!

I’d love to get to know you, my dear readers better (time to delurk!). Tell me about yourself (and if you have a blog). Thank you in advance! :)

Ants in My Pants

I was out all day today.

In the morning, while waiting for a cab at a very crowded area, I felt a tingling sensation running up my legs. After awhile I realised I had my feet just an inch away from a mound of large, red ants and, predictably, a few had crawled up my feet! I started stamping about like a mad person in the middle of the crowd. Amazingly, I managed to shake every last one of the angry looking ants without getting a single bite! I did however, squash one particularly big one to its death. I’m so sorry ant, it was a reflex reaction.

The rest of the day went by quite uneventfully until the time I had to go home. I was happily hippity-hoppity-hopping way down a long stairway when I decided to skip a few steps. This proved to be a good move as I would have plunged my feet straight into a colony of big-headed ants otherwise. What are the odds of my narrowly missing stepping on an ants’ nest twice in a day!? Counting my blessings, I continued walking down the flight of stairs with trepidation.

A few minutes later, I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green when I thought I felt something crawling on my feet again. Obviously after two encounters with different groups of ants, I was extra sensitive today but what I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that I had my feet, once again dotted with ants — this time fast-moving orange (red? yellow? crazy?) ants. And once again I had to do my crazy dance to get rid of all of them. After moving away a safe distance, I noticed that I was standing just a mere inch away from a very bustling ant highway, 3 inches wide. An inch away! Again! The third time today! Thankfully, I didn’t get bitten at all! Phew!

Too much ant drama for one day.

Losing It for a Minute

At 630pm yesterday I realised I had not spoken to my black cat, Spooky Angel, the whole day. She’s a very talkative cat who can answer most of life’s important questions, sometimes, with great wisdom, wit and intelligence, so it was unusual that a day would pass without us engaging in serious conversation.

She was sleeping beside me when I was reading a publication at 8 in the morning. Being the affectionate lap cat that she is, she’d wanted to sit well, on my lap, but I wasn’t in the mood to entertain the fuzz ball as I had to concentrate on an article, so I nudged her away.

A few minutes would pass and I’d fallen asleep sitting. When I woke up, I found the little Angel asleep, beside my right thigh. Aaaaw… I felt a little guilty for not letting her take a nap on my lap, especially when I was more asleep than doing anything else, but then she woke up and looked at me with the look — yeah-you-know-you-want-me look– anticipating that I’d take her and place her on her rightful human cushion. I thwarted her happiness by pushing her off the couch! Ha ha ha! So evil of me!

Anyway, it was 630pm and I’d not seen her since then so I called her name. There was no answer. I looked around the house. Under the couch, in the kitchen, in the bathrooms, under the beds, on top of cupboards, everywhere. She was nowhere to be found. And then it hit me that she might have slipped out when I went out at about 10am.

I went to search for her outside, bracing for the worst - she might have been ran over by a car, eaten by a pack of wild dogs or was taken by someone - someone better, someone who wouldn’t mind her sitting on his/her lap all day. Strangely, only the last thought made me wanna cry.

I got very worried because she’s a black kitty and it would be very difficult to find her in the dark . And then all that I felt was guilt. Guilt. Guilt. GUILT. Am I being punished for being mean to her? Will she forever remember me as the evil witch that pushed her off the couch?! Do I have to live with this guilt forever?!!!

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It took me all of two minutes to find her. She was asleep at my neighbour’s steps. When I called her name, she just opened one eye, and looked slightly annoyed, like “Wha? Don’t be disturbing my sleep, woman”.

She was very calm when I carried her back home. I smothered her in kisses and showered her with words of love but when I tried to put her on my lap, she sneered at me and went off to eat instead. Oh well… Thank God I found her. I’ll never deprive a cat of my lap again.

Related links
I can has cheezburger
Cute Overload

Related posts
Power Control
Happiness Is…
Tablet Do’s and Don’ts
Pencil Thief and A Little Faith

Thanks for the Entertainment

Cats (my own and in general)
The Office (both the British and American versions)
Oprah
Project Runway
Heroes (I hope season 3 is good)
America’s Next Top Model (heh…)
Tonight Show with Jay Leno
THE INTERNETS

Have a good Friday and enjoy the weekend!

Thank-Goodness- It’s-Food Day

I’m grateful for…

…being able to find pleasure and enjoyment in simple meals. I’m equally happy with a tuna sandwich as I am with a salmon sashimi; with a cup of instant coffee as I am with a double shot of Guatemala Antigua Arabica.

…having a McDonald’s within walking distance from my house. I know it’s not the best nor healthiest choice when it comes to food, when you’re but hungry at 11 pm, a situation I regularly find myself in, it’s heaven-sent.

…knowing when to stop eating. As a teen, I’d gorge myself silly with junk food. Nowadays I stop after four donuts and a large fry. Heh.

…loving my fruit and vegetables. I could just eat salads for weeks. I think my body has an in-built ying-yang system. I’d eat extremely unhealthy, artery-clogging McMeals for days and then I’d crave for a rabbit buffet.

…being able to smell my food. I lost my sense of smell once. You would think that one would eat less when this happens but no! You have to eat a lot more to make up for feeling unsated with your tasteless food.

Have a great weekend everyone!