It was hard to miss WordPress (via the home page) patting four of its bloggers on the back for getting the thumbs-up in The Times’ ‘Bloggers Who Count’ article.
Four out of 40 blogs named ain’t bad and now I’m wondering if our uni. group blog has the potential to capture the world’s, or even just a Melbourne suburb’s, attention.
There’s no real indication (aside from popularity in part) how The Times decided these blogs counted but it’s worth noting most of them were about fashion, food and celebrity gossip. Only one blog was about books – Maud Newton -and this blog has been around for seven years. Not really a fan of Maud’s writing style – it’s a bit clumsy and hard to follow on first read. Mind you, I could have a case of the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black because, when it comes down to time limits, my writing isn’t always clear. Kudos to Maud for the hard work and staying power though – it’s not easy for mere mortals to make their mark on the net.
I’m not interested in chasing accolades but I think a close examination of the blogs discussed in the article will be necessary in the very near future.
In the meantime, our website has been ‘live’ for nearly two weeks and everyone in the group has continued coming up with content for the site. I’ve been doing the events section, and in the last five days, also focussing on getting traffic to the site. I’ve spread the word to friends, family and professional contacts in order to get people on the site and provide feedback.
I’m also trying to harness the power of Facebook, Twitter and Brizzly to raise traffic and awareness. The results so far haven’t been overwhelming but that only means looking at our strategy and being patient. A bucketload of money thrown into it wouldn’t hurt but that’s not something our group has the ability to do. That said, if we want to commercialise the site, then an advertising strategy would be essential.
I’ve also set up a free web analysis widget on the site StatsCounter which has lots of stats available that aren’t supplied in WordPress blogs. It’s an alternative to Google Analytics, at least.
