Friday, September 11, 2009

Optimizing Your Blog

In looking for high traffic blogs to comment on, I noticed that author Tim Ferris had one of the highest traffic blogs in personal finance. Oddly, his blog isn't primarily about personal finance, although I'm sure he occasionally posted on some financial topics. In checking out his blog, I found a video of him teaching how he optimizes his blog.

It's called "How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself"

My Takeaways
  • He blogs once or twice per week (not the 6 times a day that some say you should blog) on his Wordpress blog and analyzes everything he does (Google Analytics) to see what works and what doesn't.
  • He doesn't follow other people's twitters. He tweets only for specific purposes, spending 10 to 15 minutes on it every day or two.
  • He can spend from 20 minutes to 6 hours on a blog post, depending upon its nature.
  • He doesn't blog for income or to directly sell books. Rather, he blogs to access people and resources.
  • Blogging fits his life purpose: to love, be loved and never stop learning.
  • Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are the days that he gets most traffic to his blogs, so these are his optimum times to post. He may post on Friday night to have the post out on Saturday.
  • He finds interesting pics for his blog, free of charge, by going to the Flicker Commons area and searching the most interesting.
  • He reads all the blog comments, saving the most informative ones in an application like Evernote. Thus, he has a large backlog of information to blog at a later time.
Check it out if you want to get some practical hints on taking your blog to the next level.