My readership has greatly improved since Q2. The month of December I had 14 views, the month of November was 91 and October was only 12 views, the entire month of February I had 218 page views. I think the biggest difference from before was that in quarter three I started putting my blog as a link on Facebook a couple times a week and after I made a new post so that more people could reach it. I also put labels at the end of my blog so that anyone searching those could possibly find my blog that way too.
My two most popular posts were my contribution post and my MTV 16 and pregnant post. I am not sure why the contribution post received so many views, but as for the MTV one I know that I advertised on Facebook for it and I told my friends to go read my blog. This worked really well because MTV is a very popular TV channel and many people my age would be interested in reading something that had to do with a TV show they would understand. The other posts that were after these two, were also posts that had to do with main stream ideas, like for instance American Idol, I noticed that the more I made my posts about something many people would know about, the more people I had that viewed that particular post.
My referring sites were mainly Facebook and Google. The only key word I had where someone found my blog was from the MTV 16 and pregnant. These referring sites taught me that many people are on Facebook all the time, and the best way to get more people to read your blog is if you advertise it on a website, like Facebook, that can be spread quickly and effortlessly.
Some questions I have would be why some posts weren’t as popular as I figured they would be. I had assumed that most people would know American Idol more than they would know about MTV’s 16 and pregnant. However this was not true. During the third quarter I also became a follower to more than just the other students in my class, and I only had one person follow me back. It showed me that some of the bigger blogs won’t necessarily follow you back just because you follow them. If I would assign myself a grade I would say that I would give myself an A. I kept up with the weekly deadlines of doing a post every week, and I also accomplished getting more readers for the third quarter than I had in the second quarter. Not only that but I tried to broaden my topics so as to attract more readers that way and I would say that I did succeed. More importantly is that I branched out to other blogs and started to follow them, and by reading other people’s blogs who had many followers, I was given ideas on how to improve my blog so as to gain more followers as well. Lastly, I read my fellow classmates blogs pretty religiously, I did not always comment on everyone’s blog, but at the very least I did read a majority of the blogs that they all wrote.
In doing this assignment with the blogs I learned that sometimes when you want to gain more readers, the topics you write about have to change. For instance some topics will be more popular than others, and at the very least if you choose not to pick relevant and popular topics, you must have a theme in order to keep people coming back to your blog. I feel that my writer persona did change when I was writing for other people. When I first started I blogged about whatever was in my head at the time or a topic that was important to me. During this quarter I had to adapt that idea and make it more relevant and important to readers than necessarily to myself. For future writing I will remember this so that if I want people to read it and the writing to not just be for me, that I need to write it differently. I need to make sure I consider the audience in my work instead of just making myself feel better afterwards.
