Promoting my blog

I created a blogger account last year and messed around with it a bit, I posted a couple of articles but nothing anyone would be interested in, mostly for myself and my fellow www.fragtard.net gamers.

In January I decided to try a polyphasic sleep experiment that I'd read about and I wanted to blog about it but I knew that my blogger account wasn't going to cut it so I created a new blog using Wordpress and put it under one of my existing little-used domain names, www.solegoal.com

The experiment went very well, I became fully polyphasic and my blog got a lot of traffic from people who were interested in following my progress and/or trying the experiment for themselves. I posted a link to my blog on www.wikipedia.org on the polyphasic sleep page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep and I got a tremendous amount of hits. Recently I went back after a couple months of not viewing the page just to see if my link was still there. I was surprised to see it had been edited with a much better description then I had given it and it had been promoted to the first link under a heading called: Polyphasic Sleep Testers - Success Stories

This has brought me a lot of traffic and I've made some friends along the way, a couple of whom link to me. Now however, I've transitioned to this sleep pattern but there's really nothing else for me to say on the subject except for the occasional update I may give or posting an article that agrees with or disagrees with the health risks of my experiment. In other words, I've kind of run out of things to talk about on the subject. Recently I've tried to transition a bit into doing some personal development articles, I've written a lot of stuff and keep my blog updated with at least one article a day for awhile now but it's just not nearly as popular as my sleep articles were and after peaking with 218 unique users 6 days ago, I hit a low yesterday of 70. I know I shouldn't be complaining, some people would kill for just 70 people to read their blog each day, but because of bad site design and ad placement, I haven't made hardly any money and the site costs aren't covering themselves.

3 weeks ago I stumbled across a scam that was happening on MySpace so I blogged about it and posted it on www.digg.com however the digg users didn't vote for it. However I was surprised to find that almost every day after that, my top or second highest traffic is coming from search engines with the keywords MySpace Scam. This and the link on wikipedia.org are keeping me read but my own articles on the topics I enjoy and hope that people would find helpful and come back to read go largely ignored and by that I mean almost altogether.

Now I'm just a blog struggling to find a loyal audience. I can continue to blog about me and write personal development articles I hope people will find helpful (which I think is the right thing to do) but at the same time it might just kill my traffic. It's kind of a double edged sword but I intend to do what I enjoy and makes me feel good and hopefully along the way, someone will find value in what I do and continue to come back to read more.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Comments, adivce or stern talking too's? I enjoy sharing and appreciate feedback, I find it the best way to grow and do better at whatever it is I'm doing, so have at it!

[temi]

I personally think you should just concentrate blogging on the topic you personally enjoy, even if you do not get thousands of people reading your blog at present, the handful that reads the personal development stuff may have a life changing experience after reading you blog which will be well worth it (in my opinion).

I just wanted to add this graph from alexa to show you how my blog is doing. I know that alexa is inaccurate, but it's the best gauge I have right now to show how busy it has been lately.

Thanks Temi, I really appreciate that, I think you're definetly right. It's hard to know sometimes but I don't want to just follow the crowd, I think it'll pay off in the long run just doing what I love.