How I Drastically Improved My Blog Stats with a Few Tweaks
By Christine OKelly | October 27, 2007
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I didn’t improve my blog stats – Jonathan of Smart Wealth Rich and Freelance Folder did!
When I started this blog 6 weeks ago, there were a few plugins that I wanted to add, but was having trouble doing so. Plugins are typically simple to install, but some just don’t work without a little extra behind the scenes work.
Instead of spending a bunch of time trying to figure out how to do this myself, I contracted Jonathan to do some tweaks for me and I could not be happier!
Jonathan is positively one of the most wonderful people I have ever worked with. He has wonderful ideas, has a keen understanding of blogging and social media, and truly takes pride in the work that he does.
- Most Popular Posts Plugin
- Top Commenters Plugin
- The Related Entries Plugin
- Nested Comments Plugin
- The DiggIt Plugin
- The RunPHP plugin: Allows you to put PHP code in posts
- The Run Exec Plugin: Allows you to put PHP code into the widget rather than only HTML
- A Contact form
- An Archives Page
- The Sociables plugin
- Subscribe to Comments plugin
- The “What Would Seth Godin Do” Plugin that offers a welcome message to new readers
- A lightbox plugin: To see this one in action, check out this post on Freelance Folder and click on one of the screenshots
- Added a “subscribe to my rss feed” section at the bottom of each post
- Worked with my MyBlogLog widget to make it flow better with the page
- Tweaked my Feedburner account to accept email subscribers
Wow!
I saw measurable results right away. More readers are clicking more article titles thanks to the most popular posts plugin and the related posts plugin. My subscribers also jumped from 144 to 316 in 6 days.
I did have an article featured on Dr. Mercola’s very wonderful website which generated 9,255 page views in one day, but I assume that Jonathan’s plugins that encourage subscribers had a great deal to do with doubling the subscription rate.
I also want to thank all of you who have subscribed during the 1 month and 11 days that this blog has been live. I am so thrilled to have readers and absolutely love reading comments from everyone.
So if you are looking to add some things to your blog that will improve your readership and pageviews, I would highly recommend Jonathan for this! You can contact him here. Not only will you meet a great person, but someone who is truly interested in helping you achieve the goals you have for your blog.
Topics: Blogging |
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Jon is indeed the Rockstar. Time/money well spent!
He is! Jonathan is absolutely wonderful and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree. And so are a blog rockstar too Mr. Dave Navarro with your 663 Diggs and 83 comments on your last post! Congrats on that!
You’re too kind… Can’t wait to see if Monday’s article is a winner too.
Thanks for the great list of plugins! I will install some of them on my blog.
Thanks for the roundup of plugins! It’s nice to see what other folks are using.
@ Pat and Travis - most of these were Jonathan’s recommendations so I agree - this is a list to remember! As David mentioned - Jonathan is a rockstar when it comes to knowing what works in terms of social networking on blogs.
wow, thanks sooo much Christine!
If you ever need anything else, you know where to find me hehe
Nice contact form!
Oh wait…
I came here as a result of Dr. Mercola’s email - and I also posted a link on the forums at www.stevepavlina.com which is a personal development website!
I love your blog BTW and you are truly helping me change my thinking. I believe your blog showed up in my life just at the right time!
Thanks!
Thanks Kathy - It’s great to meet you! I think Steve Pavlina is incredible and have his Million Dollar Experiment mantra proudly displayed on my desktop.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/million-dollar-experiment.htm
Thanks so much for the link! I wasn’t aware that he had a forum there - I’ll definitely be checking that out
I can’t believe I missed this post! Great stuff and great work by Jon. I might just contact him soon for some help.
This list of plugins is very useful as I’m going to do a major overhaul of my blog’s design again. I based it on YGo Loner theme originally, but that code was quite a mess and I don’t trust the design with WordPress 2.3.
One of the plugins that I also really like is the preview comments plugin. I’m going to use Live Comment Preview after the overhaul, I use a different one now.
One observation: There’s a “Subscribe to comments via email” above this commentbox and a “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below this comment box. You might want to tweak that as well
[…] other site news, I have added a few plugins, inspired by Self Made Chick. I added the Related Posts plugin, the Top Commenters plugin, and the Subscribe to Comments plugin. […]
Christine,
You read my mind with this post. I was gonna ask Jon for a list of recommended plugins, but you beat me to the punch.
Hi Lodewijkvdb, thanks a lot for letting me know about the subscribe to comments problem, I’ll fix this asap.
Feel free to contact me anytime, I’m always available for some blog customization
Dave, just ask!
One thing though, on FreelanceFolder I don’t use the sidebar widgets, it’s all hand-coded. I do use some plugins for things like polls and popular posts. Here’s a list of plugins I published on SWR a while ago, it’s a little outdated, but it may still be useful :http://smartwealthyrich.com/the-tools-i-use-to-boost-my-blogging-productivity/
Congratulations on the growth of your blog, that’s really amazing! I second the thought that Jon is a great guy.
Christine,
Another fantastic post…of course I believe you are forgetting something.
Outstanding content also helps, which is why your subscriber list continues to grow!
John
What a great list of plug-ins and great results from the tweaks. Somethings for me to think about for my own blog. - Ashley
I just want to be clear about this? You’ve been around a little under 3 months and you’ve already got 449 subscribers according to todays count? I am definitely doing something wrong.
If you have any other advice beyond adding widgets and plugins, I’d love to know. That’s just insane to me.
Dave ~
I know… it is pretty crazy…
I’m not sure exactly how this happened! Getting exposure on Stumble Upon has been a tremendous help for me - that’s where the majority of my traffic comes from! Jon gave me my first taste of the power of Stumble Upon when he stumbled one of my posts - wow. That really kicked things off (Thanks Jon!)
This definitely caused me to take interest in SU and other social networking sites. I’m not even really working the social media angle because of time constraints. Want to see one person who is really good at driving traffic? Jon is the man - I would recommend check out and subscribing to his blogs at http://www.freelancefolder.com and http://www.smartwealthyrich.com for lots of great advice.
I assume that the other thing is being active on other blogs with comments. This kind of happened by accident. Interacting with other bloggers through comments has helped me to meet a lot of people which have in turn linked to my blog from theirs.
I also got a link on a very influential health blog that sent over 10,000 visitors to my site (not sure how he found me). They weren’t really targeted readers, but it certainly helped with exposure.
So far, I’ve also gotten a lot of positive feedback about the fact that my blog posts are from my own personal experiences vs. general information. (Which you do as well - and that’s awesome!) I’ve tried to keep all posts honest and speaking only from my own experiences, and judging from the responses that I get through the contact form, I think this has helped a lot.
I wish I could say that I knew the secret - but I’m just as blown at having 449 subscribers in less than 3 months!
Hope this helps ~
[…] also jumped from 144 to 316 in 6 days. You can read more about exactly what he did in the post How I Drastically Improved My Blog Stats with a Few Tweaks […]