Let me start by saying that, while I do like speaking, I don’t consider myself to be a good writer. This is the reason that my posts are largely bullet points or PowerPoint posts and tend to be mostly of a technical nature. Fortunately, blogs in the technical arena gain readerships according to the market they target.
As my blogs are targeted in a small niche of ACT! users who want to improve their technical understanding of the product, I don’t chase the volume hits of more professional bloggers. To put this in perspective, I have been typically achieving about 2000 hits per month on this blog (about the same as I get on the main GL Computing web site.
I try to post at least a couple of times a month and my posts do have a fair degree of text contact, which the search engines love to index.
I do promote my posts via Social Media:
- Twitterfeed automatically sends a Tweet on Twitter very soon after an update
- New posts are automatically added to the News section in the LinkedIN ACT! Fanatics Group
- Networkblogs automatically posts them to the GL Computing Facebook page and to the streams of those who follow either the blog page or are fans of the GL page.
- I also find other similar blog posts and, where applicable, add a comment referencing my post
- Additionally, I use links to the posts when answering forum questions where I have covered the topic in a post.
Currently, about 50% of hits to the blog are from referring sites (mainly forums I post to and the social media links) and only 35% from search engines.
However, last week, I posted about Why I prefer Blackberry over iPhone for Businesses. This was picked up by a couple of journalists and professional bloggers like Neerav Bhatt on his blog: Introduction to RIM Blackberry Mobile Phones: Pros and Cons
Not only did this article receive a lot of nice comments, but it was highly re-tweeted and has so far received about 1000 hits in less than 2 weeks (500 in the first day).
This raises some questions that I’d like to pose to you:
-
What would you like to see me blog about?
While I intend to keep targeting the ACT! user base, should I keep the focus on product technical posts? Or would you like to see more posts on other topics that might be of interest, such as: mobile computing, social media, general CRM, general sales/marketing or general IT? -
Would it detract from the site if I added some Google Ads or sponsorships?
As I provide the content of this blog for free, do you think it would be a problem to go down this path? Previously, I had not considered the hit rate to be high enough to make this worth-while and also reasoned that the technical people who read the site wouldn’t be interested in this.
To add one more thing – While I don’t sell to end-users, if anyone wishes to utilise my services for any work related to ACT! or IT, you just need to have your reseller contact me to book some time. I can be available remotely for work at any time of the day as we support (via our resellers) in all time-zones.
Please let me know via a comment to this article, a comment in the ACT! Fanatics Group or privately via our Web Site Contact Page if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see articles on or if there’s anything I can assist you with.