'31 days to be a better blogger'
Well, I have made it to day 31 although I do still have some challenges to go back and complete. My learning curve has been incredibly steep. Below are some of the biggest lessons learnt:
- blogging is about contacting, collaborating and commenting
- google analytics will tell you how many people are visiting, where they are from, what they are looking at and how long they look at it amongs other things. In fact I have learnt so much here that I have put google analytics onto our website . What I also know is that my intended audience, literacy subject leaders in Devon, are not visiting the blog. This means that we will promote it at our next subject leader meetings and then I will be able to track the impact that has and whether people come back again
- technorati will let me know about the links to my blog and rank me (very low). This has been useful as I have had a couple that I didn’t know about
- good blogging is about having content that people are interested in
- that posts may become popular some time after you have written them. I had one about digital fiction which has steadily grown in popularity probably because there is a link to it from a much more popular blog
- that I don’t have any free time any more
I must say a big thank you to the rest of the group that are doing the 31 days challenge. They are writing some great posts. I subscribe to them all and will keep on reading them and commenting on them. I will also come back top the challenges that I have missed out and complete them when the time is right.
February 15th, 2009
My days are stretching at the moment as I take longer and longer to complete tasks and in some cases go back and update previous tasks. However, I think I can now divide my tasks for the blog into three distinct activities;
Development - this is about writing posts that are interesting and that others want to read, finding your style and responding to others be they on your blog or reaching out to other bloggers. This would include blogging about other sites/blogs and making a reader famous.
Housework – these are the rather boring activities that are best completed at regular intervals otherwise they become enormous. They are things like checking for broken links, going back and adding links to forward posts and for me looking at Google analytics to see what is happening and whether I can link it to anything that I have done. What I have discovered is that somethings are slow burners. I posted about digital texts some time ago but recently someone tweeted about it and the number of hits to that page has increased.
Promotion - I hate this title but can’t think of anything else to describe it. I have been contributing to nings, twitter and other blogs and where appropriate linking to my blog but only every now and then. Is it that British rather reserved part of me coming out? Probably. I just keep thinking who on earth would be interested in what I am saying.
We are due to meet literacy subject leaders and will promote the blog with them. I don’t mind doing this as this was the audience that I originally blogged for. Google analytics shows me that not many are visiting. I need to talk to them about why this is and what we can do about it. Should be an interesting discussion.
Image by Laughing squid.
February 4th, 2009
These past few days can be categorised as know your blog, and know the blogs in your niche. This has meant becoming familiar with Technorati and Google blog search.
Technorati is fascinating. You put a URL into it and it will tell you the number of people linking to it (known as reactions)and who they are. It will also allow you to add your blog to the list to get the same information on it. This meant that I could look at blogs that were similar to mine and find out what their key tag words are and who is linking to them. it is then worthwhile looking at those blogs. Google blog search allows you to set up alerts in Google Reader of blogs that use key words you have identified. Through this I have identified a couple of blogs that are similar to mine and linked up with them.
I have also set up Google Analytics on the blog Literacy Resources to see who is visiting and where from. I don’t have many visitors so the data is not overwhelming but I can imagine that it could become so.
From looking at the style of blogs in the same niche, there are several things coming through. (I am looking at the Masters here). Most of them have a regular feature such as Chalk Talk from Angela Maiers and from Jenny Luca , School’s Out – Friday. These people post every day, and are also frequent tweeters. I can’t manage such frequent posts but could manage a regular post every month. I had thought of videos that are useful in the literacy classroom. They also both have a friendly, informal style and I think I have too formal a style and too many How to … posts which just become a series of instructions with little personal input. So, a slight style rethink and a little more inspiration!
Image An Old Mirror by Storm Crypt licensed under the Creative Commons Licence
January 24th, 2009
Day 10 already and there is so much I am finding that I need to keep going back and doing some of the tasks again as I think of a better way or don’t get it right first time. The time consuming task was changing the categories on the
resources blog as I had too many. I have narrowed them down to about five now but had to go back and recategorise each post. It is fortunate that I am new to blogging. This has made me realise that I really will have to be disciplined to go back and link old posts to new posts.
Still a focus on commenting and joining in with the challenges of finding forums to join and new blogs to comment on. I have joined several forums but the one that is really buzzing at the moment is the Images4Education group as we undertake a six week course in using images. If you are interested, do go along and join in.
Image: Tens all round by Kentigern under the Creative Commons License
January 19th, 2009
So much learning and not always directly related to the tasks! Today’s challenge was to link backwards to older posts which makes sense. I quite often click on these when reading other blogs so I don’t know why I didn’t think to do this on my own blog. I had also never thought about linking forwards from past blogs to new ones. Although I can see this is a task which I think I will do, it will probably be the one I don’t get round to. However, I think it would make for a more complete experience for visitors. I suspect this is an activity I will need to set time aside for every so often.
I have also realised that I don’t yet have a ’style’ of writing that I am comfortable with. At the moment I think that I need more story in my posts. They seem to be a bit click here, look at this, watch this. I have asked those in the challenge to let me know how they write posts to see if there are any tips or strategies that I could try out.
To go to the blog that I am trying to improve go to www.literacyresourcesandideas.edublogs.org
Picture by RedMar licensed under the Creative Commons LIcence
January 14th, 2009
I am currently undertaking two more formalised pieces of learning.
- European Pedagogical ICT Licence
- 31 Days to improve your blogging as blogged by Sue Waters
and therefore over the course of the next few months many of my posts will be reflections on my learning and some of the challenges I am meeting.
So Day 1 of the being a better blogger challenges me to email a commenter. The difficulty is that I don’t have many commenters! I have had a few but they are mostly companies wanting to link to the content. I did email one of them but I don’t think that this will increase the traffic to my blog or encourage the company to come back again. However, I do agree with the principle of the idea and will do so as soon as I get a commenter.
January 11th, 2009
