How Guest Posting is Like a Personal Loan (Problogger)
Why I Discontinued My Blog’s Pop-Over Email Sign-Up Form
Around the week of March 28, I integrated an aWeber pop-over email sign-up form on my blog, with no delay (i.e., it popped up immediately, not a few seconds after a visitor arrived.) My verified sign-ups (the subscribers who clicked the opt-in link in the follow-up email from aWeber) increased by about 350%. However, my bounce rate increased by about 3 percentage points since I integrated the pop-over form. This makes sense; many web users absolutely detest pop-up forms and will immediately leave a site rather than just click the close button on the form. So, did having the form result in a net gain or loss?
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Moderating Blog Comments: A Time Suck or a Vital Task for the Health of Your Website?
Sasstrology gets a lot of comments on its blog posts, particular the popular ones in its archives. Frequently, the conversations have little to do with the original blog posts anymore. Rather, conversations have taken a life of their own.
Yet everyday I sift through up to 17 pages (in the WordPress dashboard sense of the word pages) of comments daily to skim for spam, abuse and mentions of my name (usually @jeffrey or mr. kishner).
I am grateful that the blog community is so active, at the very least because a blog post with over 2000 comments provides social proof. (‘If these posts elicit so many comments, they must be good!”) Yet I find it odd that I spend a chunk of my day moderating the output of way less than 1% of my readership. That is, if Sasstrology regulars just stopped commenting, I do not think it would have a discernible effect on traffic.
Or would it?
There is something as important as traffic. Namely, community. After all, it is an active community that gives a blog life. If you think of any website as a living entity, the amount of activity on it provides a measure of how vital it is.
For example, if a reader has benefitted from the blog, it is oftentimes thanks to her interactions with other readers, not from what a professional astrologer has written in a blog post. Readers help each other out with their relationship struggles much more frequently than I offer any useful input. Sometimes I think all I’ve done is created the space where readers can support each other, and that blog posts are just placeholders where that can happen with regards to a specific topic.
And that results in a more engaged readership, including readers who tell their friends about the blog.
Is Web Publishing an Art?
Yesterday I watched an inspiring TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. In essence, she was talking about the need for artists to conceive of their creative genius as coming from outside themselves, as their daimon (Greek) or genius (Roman). Our inspiration comes from the gods, not from our small selves. When we succeed in creating a powerful work of art, it is because we were a receptive channel for its expression, not that we ourselves are geniuses. As Gilbert puts it, it is not the case that you are a genius, it is that you have a genius.
Recently, I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’m not being especially creative other than when I’m dancing (and trust me, my dance is no performance.) I spend most of my time editing and polishing others’ blog posts for publication, as well as working on business development and social media marketing. I write exceptionally little for the blog, except when I have something to announce or when I respond to a reader’s comment or bug report.
I used to be more more artistic in the traditional sense. In my teens and early twenties, I drew and composed. I wrote a lot in my thirties (Sasstrology is my third astrology blog, and I haven’t only blogged about astrology). And now in my fortieth year, I seem to be more concerned about making a living. Or rather, trying to blend art and commerce, to earn money doing what I feel is my calling (i.e., publishing).
I guess I’m struggling with the concept of publishing as an art. Certainly, I feel I have a vision, an aesthetic, that permeates Sasstrology. I highly value quality writing, accessible astrology, community-building. But is having an “a ha” moment about how to better sell an ebook a creative act? My sleepless nights are more about business ideas, not about how I’m going to poetically describe the tension between Jupiter and Saturn.
Maybe it comes down to passion. If my muse is communicating to me about growing the blog’s traffic or building content partnerships, that’s still the muse talking to me. It’s more about process than content, right?
Too Much All at Once: The Excitement and Stress of Growing a Blog
Astrology works in funny ways. All of my big plans for Sasstrology are happening at once. I’m not sure if it’s the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which isn’t aspecting any of my planets but is sextiling my MC at 29 Taurus, if a separating aspect counts) or the ingress of transiting Mars into my first house.
Here’s a list of what I’ve been doing:
- I integrated daily love horoscopes into the blog. I paid a contractor in Pakistan to create a PHP tool to make it easy for me to import them into WordPress and eliminate the need to spend time in the WordPress dashboard clicking on checkboxes and pulling down menus.
- I’m doing the finishing touches on a major upgrade to the blog that will include an updated blog architecture and a forum, so that I can leave Ning. I am learning quite a lot about “hooks” in Genesis as well as the importance of testing the compatibility of themes and plugins in a development environment, as I don’t want to “break” my blog.
- I am working with a partner to automate the processing of astrology reports so that I don’t have to manually churn out all the requests for free and paid reports using my Mac software.
I am excited because, with these changes, traffic could conceivably increase by 50%. Yet because everything is happening at once, I am feeling overwhelmed. I am trying to pace myself. Certain tasks have to be done by a specific day no matter what, while others can happen when I have free time and feel inspired. However, when I am in the midst of a technical problem, I do feel obsessive about it, and I would rather solve it now than put it on the backburner. Fortunately, the folks at various WordPress and BuddyPress forums have been especially helpful, as I have no training in web development.
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