What was the best and the worst thing that happened to you in your blogging this week?
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I was reading the blog of fellow Aussie blogger Mia Freedman this week and saw her weekly post ‘Best and Worst of the week‘ in which she asks her readers to share the best and worst things that happened to them during the week (as well as sharing hers).
I thought it was a cool idea and thought I’d give it a go here at ProBlogger – but with one difference. While Mia’s readers write their best and worst things from all areas of their lives I thought it’d be more helpful to everyone if we kept it to the topic of the best and worst things that happened to us as they relate to our online activities/blogging/social media.
I’ll share mine below and look forward to reading yours. Hopefully though this we’ll all learn a thing or two from one another about what works and what doesn’t work in building blogs.
So tell us your best and worst. I’m particularly interested in hearing what you learned through the best and worst of your week.
My Best – Forum Traffic
the best thing to happen to me this week was some big days of traffic on my photography site, particularly the photography forum area of it. Friday in particular was a great day with visitor numbers 3-4 times normal levels. The reason? Actually there were a few:
1. Friday is newsletter day – Friday is normally a good day (usually about double the traffic of other days) because it is the day I send out my weekly email newsletters to readers. The newsletter not only contains the latest posts from the blog section of the site but also hot threads in the forum. But that was only part of it….
2. Twitter – this past week I decided to expand what I was doing with the DPS Twitter account and not only promote new posts on the blog but highlight key threads in the forum. The result has been really promising with a definite bump in traffic from it (I’d say it’s accounted for an extra 10-20% in traffic depending on the day).
3. SEO – just over a week ago I installed VBSEO – a plugin for VBulletin (the platform I run the forum on) that optimizes the forum for search engines. By default and out of the box VBulletin is pretty horrible for SEO so this plugin is one I’ve wanted to install for a while. The results were very quick – within 3 days we’d seen search traffic up by between 25-40% (it varied a little from day to day).
What I learned? I guess there were a few fairly obvious lessons. Twitter and newsletters can be great for driving traffic, VB sucks for SEO by default etc.
The other thing that I relearned is about forums – while the DPS forum gets a lot less visits per day it drives a lot more page views per visit. For example in June the forum area of the site had only an eighth of the visitor numbers that the blog area had – but had about 60% of the page views. ie: Driving one person to visit a blog does not equal the same as driving one person to visit a forum.
My Worst – Comment Spam
This goes back beyond the last week but as a result in an incredible rise in comment spam I’ve switched comments off here at ProBlogger on any post older than 90 days old. I know this inconveniences some but it was the result of massive increase in comment spam getting through the filters/plugins that I was using. The filters were catching many thousands a day but hundreds and hundreds were getting though and it was taking quite a few hours a week to go through them all manually.
As most of these comments were hitting old posts and because 99% of the genuine comments here on ProBlogger were on new posts I took the decision to switch off comments on old posts. I’m hoping that this is a temporary measure and have the tech team at b5media working on some solutions.
So there you have it – my best and worst of the week.
What Were the Best and Worst Blogging Experiences You Had This Week?
What have been the best and worst things that have happened on your blogs or online experience in the past week? What have you learned? What will you do again? What will you do differently?
Best? – My Traffic is on the increase
Worst? – My Submissions to DIGG.com are unread!
Well, till now there is no really a worst yet, but the best is that suddenly I have traffic coming in to my blog and comment.
I think that I have done something correctly that has got me the traffic to my blog.
best: after weeks of trying, i finally got google’s pagetracker tracking working so i can track where my rss subscribers are coming from
worst: the post i was most passionate about, put the most time into, and thought would get a great response has only gotten 1 comment in 5 days
The best part of my week came when I got a blogging account set up with the Huffington Post. My hope is to get my blogging voice out there more, although I still plan on maintaining my own blog. Looks like I will be writing up a storm to keep things going.
Best – had several coffee companies offer to send me coffee to review on my blog. Very excited that they’re coming to me now to do reviews.
Worst – Traffic seems to have leveled out and optins slowed to a crawl last week.
Best: I enrolled in the program you endorsed, called “Become a Blogger” and paid for the entire year.I’m writing a blog for a Women’s Bible Study and the author of the popular book “Me, Myself and Lies” visited MY blog and posted her compliments.
Worst: I created a Westhost one click install account and I’m still confused about using the program. It’s time to hire an expert on that one.
My worst blogging experience this week? Shutting down six blogs and closing out our newly formed network because our co-administrator decided we were being “too successful” and had reached our peak…after three weeks. Included in that could be spending hours coming up with a great technical and visual theme for six blogs that were shut down and are set to be sold.
My best blogging experience? Learning a few wordpress tricks, setting up a new blog, and getting a fresh start. Also the amazing support of other bloggers who have become great friends.
This was a dramatic week for me, haha. Then again, all weeks are dramatic for teenagers.
Best:Purchased “Build a Better Blog” eBook. After reading “Problogger” 37% of my sales now come from my blog.
Worst: Kids are home for summer vacation and the only time I can blog is at 4:00 AM or from10:00PM-1:00AM. Need S…L…E…E…P! Okay, coffee works great too.
At the risk of coming off a little flippant here, probably best/worst in past week is encapsulated in partic. comment that was submitted to our blog … clearly spam, but intriguing spam to say the least.
http://www.twitpic.com/9usaj
(sigh)
First, let me just say to Mike that I’m jealous. Send me coffee and we’ll be friends for life…
Best: Being able to post that my daughter got to go to the Michael Jackson Memorial – and that I didn’t have to brave the crowds to take her.
Worst: “car car car car car” – ’nuff said? Good Lord.
Worst experience – having a low traffic day on the day I launch my eBook ( http://www.observingcasually.com/key-relationship/ )
Best experience – adding a great writer to the staff of The Casual Observer ( http://www.observingcasually.com/new-writer/ )
Best for me: I had tweaked something in my blog on my own using thesis hooks. I used to beg, threaten, sweet-talk my techy friends to do technical stuff for me, but this I summoned enough guts to strike it on my own. And I did well – I came out of the hood of my blog alive after all. Yeeha.
Worst for me: My gmail inbox is scaring me out of my wits. So many unattended stuff. Same with Google reader. Perhaps I should go back to Leo Babauta to snare that blogging zen again.
Best, seeing that someone sited my blog just because she liked the post. Worst, not having time to finish a post I’m very interested in getting done.
Best
– Hit a new high for subscribers.
– Got out some new articles after not being able to for quite a while.
– Very good results with a contest I’m currently running
Worst
– I’ve become a magnet for comment spam. I wish Akismet could set spam rules. If the URL in the comment is the same as the URL field, it is almost always spam.
This week, I realised that Bing really likes my blog. I started to get a lot of traffic from it lately.
The best is that while I was on vacation my blog made me a few hundred bucks, which effectively paid for one night stay. The worst this week is that my comments have fallen off by about 25%.
Hi Darren! Why not use hosted comments. Is that an option? DISQUS made everything much easier for me and I got more comments
Best in this week – Learnt many things about twitter also some awesome idea on offline marketting.
Shajib
http://www.ebooksdock.co.cc/
Best: Starting to really get some traffic now. Not much, but Google knows my name now.
I’m thinking about disqus myself. So far I have had good experiences using it on other sites.
The best thing that happened with my blog is that someone posted an amazing video of Stephen Colbert out of character on YouTube – it was a fantastic find and we have gotten tons of comments about it when we reposted it as a feature on our blog.
The worst is that this is a ‘Colbert Report’ vacation week, which means that our visitor count was really low, even with a link to a story featured on ColbertNation.com which is normally a very high traffic driver. Dark weeks are never fun.
The Best: Two much bigger blogs asking my to contribute for them… I am just a small momblog and really not in their league!!!
The Worst: Knowing that I don’t actually have time to write more posts a week and how would I ever fit it in… I managed one and had to drop the other…
So 50 % greatness!!!!
My best and worst thing this week was one and the same — an Anonymous commenter with a bogus link wrote on a recent post, “Your writing is atrocious. Quit while you’re behind.”
It hurt a bit (is it true?) but I tidied up the post, and it does flow better.
Thanks, Anonymous. I owe you one.
Let’s see… my best and worst experiences with my blog this week? Here we go.
Best – I made a post on my blog called “11 ways to make money online” which is a VERY cliche title in my opinion. However, I decided to do it. It turns out that this became my most popular post. I don’t get huge amounts of traffic yet but this one obviously go out there more than normal. I woke up one days and saw over that it had been tweet quite a few times and there were some trackbacks…. which really excited me as a beginner. SO, I immediately moved into monetizing that post. For each of the 11 ways (if I could) I made linked suggestions so the reader could follow the example. The links were affiliate links. :) I’ve already made money.
Worst – I stopped posting on a forum FULL of my potential readers and my traffic plummeted. This community accounts for more than half of my traffic. Never again…
Great post.
My best experiences:
I planned to start a contest at my site http://www.tips4blogging.co.cc
my google link popularity has increased
my alexa rank also improved
My Worst experiences:
I did not receive expected traffic from link referral.
My best experience blogging this week would have to be my Twitter recommendation. Although this is one of those things that occurred off of my blog, it helped to bring me recognition which is always good for traffic.
Another twitter user mentioned my profile in a FollowFriday tweet and I didn’t even know that happened until last night. So, that was cool.
The worst experience blogging this week is not being able to change the colors of links on my other blog and feeling ignored by the support staff that handles troubleshooting for the theme/blog template that I use on that particular blog.
My Best Experience had been the Good Amount of traffic I got from StumbleUpon for a post about Most Popular Antivirus Softwares of 2009.
And the Worst was … I had lost some feed readers.
Best? I decided to start my own photoblog this week to go along with my flickr account and website that I am trying to set up.
Worst? That entails all the work of having never started a blog and trying to get one off the ground :P Mostly technical issues, I’m pretty good with CSS and HTML but I had never seen PHP so I need to learn this now! I’m still a newbie and reading about every post in this blog. I don’t plan on making money from mine though.
Worst: I have a commenter that is trolling through my posts and leaving silly comments – problem is he is not really saying anything bad but he is just adding to tickle his own fancy and to be difficult.
Best: I wrote on some really quirky topics this week that I got a lot of fun out of – that’s what blogging is all about!
The best…getting a guest post right here on Problogger! Thanks Darren. Which resulting in more traffic to my site. Would I do it again? Anytime!
The Worst…not really a blogging thing this week but I am creating a new product and it is already to go. But I keep changing my mind on the sales price and this has stalled me launching. Too low and I’m giving it away or too high and no-one buys. I just have to make that decision and go with it…
Andrew
ye I receive mail from Dareen, This is best for me the Problogger, My hero, my fan Oh Gosh, What the experience
Blogging Tips, SEO and Money Making Tips by http://teratips.com
Worst: this week I found an artifact on my blog that shows up in IE but not Firefox. IT drove me crazy for multiple hours
Best: Finding and fixing the bug was a moment of victory. Also I reached a halfway point to one of my goals on the blog.
What a fabulous idea for a thread – I’m going to be using this too!
My best – going away on holiday and having a weeks worth of posts stacked up that all posted themselves while I was sunning myself. I love how technology can serve us!
Worst – getting a crappy comment from someone which had a dig at one of our readers. But, on reflection, it’s our first one ever, so that’s pretty good going!
What happened good this week is that I came up with a nice variety of topics for my baby boomer consumer audience: tattoos, food safety, addictive food, and beware of free offers for home alarm systems.
The bad news is that I didn’t have much time to work on marketing.
This is a great topic idea. I’ll be blogging about what was your best and worst consumer experience of the week.
Rita
I blog at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide at http://boomersurvive-thriveguide.typepad.com.
I also blogged about how to cut your own hair.
Rita
My first comment on here after many weeks of viewing the site, so Hi! (That could be classed as a “Best” couldn’t it?!).
The “Best and Worst” weekly post is also a very good idea.. I wonder how many other people will adopt it? I certainly am!
As for me,
Best:
Created my first lot of content for a new tech-based blog (tech news, reviews, tips, etc) and saw my first bit of traffic on there.
Worst:
People not signing up to the mailing list or RSS feed for updates, which has led me to change a few things after reading this site and others.
So really, the best has far outweighed the worst.. as I’m hoping more content and time will solve the worst!
I continued seeing strong growth and my RSS subscribers pushed over 100 for the first time. My site is less than 1 month old so I feel like that is great!
My worst is that I ran into a bug with the WordPress rss and Feedburner interface. It took me a little while to create a workaround and then today’s feedburner email contained all ten recent posts instead of just today’s. Oops. Live and learn!
Well, worst: one of my sites (which has several blogs) had its traffic go down. I realized that started when I began a posting a bit less on the blogs. Actually the traffic peaked and started to go down on the exact date that I got my first of two kittens. And I know they have been REALLY distracting for me!
The upside of this is I did learn from it and it shows that the daily posting I had been doing on that site’s blogs was making a difference.
The best – I actually found a plugin which has helped me handle the comment spam robots. My email is no longer flooded with moderation notices for bogus comments. Occasionally a spam comment still gets through, but much much less. And occasionally a legitimate comment is still spammed – but that’s rare as well. I would say that the number moderation emails for bogus comments is down to less than 5% of what it was.
The name of the plugin is NoSpamNX.
Worst: Some spam bots got through AKismet and other spam filters I have set up and now i gotta keep an eye on what’s happening next week after I cleaned’em up this time.
Best: The internal SEO finetuning paid of, and traffic increased 43% from last week (not all from search engines thou, but good portion of it anyway) + My recent self-interview -post got tweeted around quite a bit, which was a pleasant surprise.
I had two best moments this week. One photography blogger took me up on some advice a few weeks back and it really helped her and so she wrote about me and the advice I gave her and I saw an increase in traffic from her blog. Another moment came when another blogger asked me to write a guest post on her blog while she is on vacation. Being able to help others is always a good thing.
The worst moment came when a reader commented that there was nowhere on my blog to aubscribe with a RSS feeder. It was quickly fixed but still an Oops moment!
Best: The day I posted my first picture on my blog my traffic doubled, which was terrific because it’s showing the potential traffic down the road.
Worst: Realizing that adsense sucks and I have to find a new way to earn or I will eventually have to blog less :(
Hard to believe that Akismet was letting hundreds of spam comments through. I thought it worked better than that.
Best: Two or three days with over 1,000 hits (that’s small to some, but not to me).
Worst: Still trying to decide whether or not to drop Entrecard–tough decision for me.
Worse: I had to deal with a flaming content thief.
Best: My Alexa ranking gets lower and lower in number somehow, lower is better..
My best and worst are related to the same thing…
Best: I moved my blog over to a new hosting provider – the transfer went smoothly and I’m delighted with the more stable and quicker load times
Worst: After moving everything over I found that strange nonsense characters appeared in all my posts.
I eventually worked out that they were caused because I draft my posts in Word, copy them to Notepad to remove Word’s formatting and then re-copy them to WordPress.
Unfortunately copying to Notepad doesn’t remove all the formatting – in particular apostrophes and dashes continue to cause problems. This is also the case when I copy Notepad stuff to CoffeeCup (my web builder), by the way.
So I’ve spent the last few days going through every post on my blog and removing the nonsense characters manually. :(
Lesson: either write posts in WordPress or use the ‘Paste as Plain Text’ button.
Benefit: I’ve been able to tidy up the posts on my blog, including removing some old ones that were just taking up space.
Cheers,
Martin.
Best:
I had someone ask to guest post in my blog. I now have 4 guest posters lined up. I’ve also been asked to be a guest poster recently. :)
I’m getting ready soon to move from blogspot to WordPress.
I’m considering ways to monetize my blogs. Or shall I say, I’m viewing blogging as a business now.
I’m coming up with new ideas for blogs (I’d like to start a couple new ones).
I’m going to finish up Darren’s 31 DBBB course (even if it’s on my own and takes a little while)!
I’m considering taking another blogging course.
I’ve been introduced to some great folks on twitter, and am networking more, and finding real friendships.
I’ve had a lot of growth from being involved in Twitter.
I’ve had commenters on my blog, even though I haven’t been able to update, due to illness in my family.
negative:
I haven’t had time to update my blog this week, due to the fact that I was temp. hospitalized. Also other family illnesses were in play. But I will do it!
krissy knox :)
follow me on twitter :)
http://twitter.com/iamkrissy :)
Best: My traffic doubled on a couple of days this week and my readers seem to be leaving more comments.
Worst: Getting writers block because my house is a mess and I have so many ideas that my brain is becoming a mess.
Best – Some people in need of freelance design work saw my blog, loved the design I did and contacted me for work.
Worst – My partner resigned, and my blog has been down all day today. Ughh.
Best: Being approached to create an e-book for the upcoming Chelsea FC season, based on my blog posts
but’s that’s not the best thing! I was hit by a golden ray of light and stumbled upon an idea in my niche that had not been explored. Stay tuned…
Worst: Realising I’d have to say goodbye to my little blog if I was to go through with the BIG idea. But then I realised I could integrate them!
BEST:
– Increased traffic thanks to the latest quality posts at my “DJ Blog”.
– Met really hot & smart girl thanks again to my “DJ Blog’. :)
WORST:
– Forecastfox add-on for Firefox screwed me with the Saturday’s weather forecast, and ruined the planned picnic. :(( :)
Best – Selling my blog for a decent amount of money!
Worst – Realizing that I have to start over.