Ok, I’m relatively new to this blogging thing.

I’ve been going for about 6 weeks or so now, and I have started to learn a bit. I thought I would share with you what some of those discoveries have been.

So here they are:

13 discoveries including 1 Nigerian Scammer.

In no particular order…

1. Blogging is fun. It’s a great way to communicate with the world. It’s great to go on the hunt for interesting things to talk about. It’s great to come into contact with so many different people. It’s a fantastic way to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your industry. And last, but not least, it’s amazing to see how your content is shared amongst others.
2. It took 6 weeks to receive, via email, my first Nigerian Scam letter. If you’re interested in BOMBARDING THE CREEP with junk mail in return, his email address is:  salisu.omar011@yahoo.com (he/she/it claims to be a male) and quite stupidly asked me to keep his/her email a secret. Well, sod off. I’m publishing you.
3. Setting up your blog with a xml sitemap is a total no-brainer. In my blog the sitemap rebuilds itself each time I create a new post. Google then re-caches my blog within an hour or so of new posts being published. It’s fantastic. I think it’s directly contributing to ranking in search.
4. I’m converted to WordPress. I’m using the Thesis Theme and it is a simple, clean interface which makes blogging a dream. Having worked with numerous other content management systems, wordpress is (by a long, long way) the simplest, most intuitive one I’ve struck. And it’s quick. Some of the systems I’ve used are so slow to upload or refresh it’s like watching the bloody grass grow.
5. I got help putting my blog together from a coder called Mike in Canada. He did an amazing job and is a real gun and fun to work with too.
6. Google Analytics and Awstats cannot be correlated. Ever. The differences between them have ranged been between 30-100% for supposedly the same unique traffic. Sometimes Awstats record twice the unique visitors as Google Analytics while other times the differences fall to about 30%. Awstats is always, without fail, recording a higher unique visitor count. Both agree, though, that the best traffic days are Tuesday to Friday (in Australia) which converts to Monday to Thursday in the US (where most of my traffic comes from). By Friday (US) people must have run out of time or interest to read my blog.
7. According to Google Analytics, search engines are sending more than half my traffic (55%). It’s mostly Google, then Bing. Since the blog is only a few weeks old, it’s telling me that it’s already ranking well – at least well enough to be found using search. Not bad considering I was at position zero a couple of months back.  Drilling into the keywords shows me that people are finding my blog for a variety of keywords and phrases – so it’s all looking good. Actually, I lie. It’s better than good, it’s very exciting.
8. Also according to Google Analytics, 23% of my traffic comes from referring websites. Stumbleupon, facebook and twitter are all sending traffic my way. I see a bit of traffic from Delicious and Reddit too (although I’ve only just integrated Reddit so it’s probably a bit early to really tell).
9. I’m loving the social media interface. I can create a post and submit it to different places and it’s super simple to do. I’ve been amazed how the news travels. People re-tweet behind the scenes and suddenly you get a whole bunch of people coming to visit your blog. It wasn’t until I did a Google search on my domain name that I stumbled across activity behind the scenes on topsy and tweetmeme amongst others.
10. Social media (and blogging too) is very time-consuming to do properly. First of all, you need to find and/or write good content. Then you need to engage with the people that engage with you. So I predict that larger companies will assign dedicated staff to this task if they decide that they are going to take blogging seriously. It might be out of reach of smaller businesses with less resources – unless they get someone else to do it for them… Hey! there may be a business opportunity in that.
11. I’ve been experimenting with content. This was a hot tip from Pierre Bellanger CEO of Skyrock who told me to keep experimenting when it came to social media. He was absolutely right. It’s still hard to predict what will work in terms of levels of interest from people. Some of the funny stuff, like 7 extremely unfortunate domain names seems to be a bit of a hit on Twitter – but then so was the much more serious Advertising: The Boat Sinks. The funny stuff doesn’t seem to work on bookmarking sites so well. Headlines are pretty much essential in getting content to fly anywhere.
12. Apart from creeps with Nigerian scam emails, I’m getting ruthless with other spammers too. I label them spam – and perch at the end of my bed each night, pleading to the heavens that they will cast a veil of black Karma over them. If you spammers are listening: I’m not interested in whatever sex pills or porn sites you’re trying to flog. I moderate your stupid link-stuffed comments that add no value – and I have no intention of sharing your junk with anyone on my blog. So there.
13. On the subject of spam, I might add that I delete “car repossession” and “Jude Law” type pingbacks that contain dogdy URLs that spammers somehow think people might click out of curiosity to see who they are.

So there they are. 13 things I’ve discovered in 6 weeks (or so) of blogging. Would I recommend blogging? Absolutely. If you have the time, I’ve found it to be heaps of fun and great for search engines too.

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