Welcome to August.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to walk back down memory lane to what was happening on this blog a year ago today.
August 2005 was a special month at ProBlogger as I launched my first month long series with these words:
“Starting Monday I’m going to turn up the ‘Blog Tips’ volume to 11 and am going to attempt to vomit onto you everything I know about how to make your blog better.”
The month was a pretty amazing experience. I wrote my little heart out and also received a lot of submissions from readers to be included in the project.
Over the course of the month I covered a lot of ground including:
- When is it Time to Go Pro as a Blogger?
- There’s a Hole in my Blog – Holistic Blogging
- Getting inside Your Blog Reader’s Mind
- Converting One off Visitors to Your Blog into Regular Readers
- Strategic Blogging (a mini series – collated into one post)
- Declaring War on Blogger Apathy (another mini series collated into one post)
- Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers (another series)
- Email Newsletter Tips for Bloggers
- 10 Tips for Using Affiliate Programs on your Blog
All in all I wrote 47 tips over the month and readers submitted 169 tips. You can see the complete collection of links to all 216 tips at:
31 Days to Building a Better Blog
I thought I’d post a link back to this project for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it was so much work and I often look back at it and feel sad that it just languishes away in archives.
Secondly, I’m proud of it. While the series almost killed me I had a very satisfied feeling by the end as I looked back at what we’d done together. It must be one of the most comprehensive collections of blog tips and tutorials on the web.
Thirdly, since last August the readership of ProBlogger has doubled and I know that many of you were not around when the series took place. Most of what was written last August is still relevant for bloggers today – hopefully in linking back to it readers will find a few undiscovered gems.
Enjoy
“Thirdly, since last August the readership of ProBlogger has doubled and I know that many of you were not around when the series took place. Most of what was written last August is still relevant for bloggers today – hopefully in linking back to it readers will find a few undiscovered gems.”
Exactly. I am one of them. Thanks a lot for this Darren. I will surely read them and I know that many of us will do so. I am happy that within one year, your traffic has doubled.
In the time since that series (to which I made a tiny contribution), I destroyed my old blog, started three others, destroyed them, then re-created my old blog, moving everything from Movable Type to WordPress in the process.
It’s amazing how much changes in a year. :-)
“Firstly, it was so much work and I often look back at it and feel sad that it just languishes away in archives.”
Not languishing at all Darren…how do I know?
I still get plenty of traffic from the post of mine that you linked to…and as an added bonus it’s the highest PR page on my site! Not hard to figure out why…. : )
Like Razib, I wasn’t around last August. Thanks for setting the dials back on the time machine – there’s some great stuff in there! I can hardly wait to be saying, “look how much has changed in a year” next year…
I wasn’t around last year, but stumbling onto this site and the “31 days to…” link in the left nav on this site is what really got me bold enough to give blogging a try. I’ve since re-read through the series completely at least once and manage to find something new every time I browse back through it, as if I’m watching a movie a 2nd time and catch a bunch of the little things I missed the first time around.
The series is definitely worth mentioning repeatedly in the future.
When you were writing this series, I was still sitting in a dank cave thinking “Why would anyone ever read, let alone write, a blog!” And like Retrospector, it was the 31 days that got me rolling. I’d NEVER watch a movie twice, but I’ll read and reread the 31 days.
I still get hits from Problogger from the articles I contributed to that series – I mean every single day, ever since you first did it a year ago.. never stopped.
Cool tips. One thing though, always save at least one copy of all your blog posts. My server recently went pop and it really hammered home to me the true value of my data and what would have happened had I not had a two week old backup!
Even if your blog is posted on a hosted server, can you really rely on them to never lost your data? I wouldn’t. These things DO and WILL happen.
Just a thought.
Give you an idea of how good the ideas are , I only realised a minute ago I was reading last years and left my Comment there , so now thats a search.
I wrote about events today and left them last year, now that is technology going fast
Mal
I think you should reformat the series as a PDF file, single download.
But it was an excellent series!