Here it is June 6th and I am keeping with tradition by publishing my blog's Progress Report almost a week late. Hey...at least I am being consistent! It has been one hell of a week so I apologize for being a little quiet. But its time to get back down to business. You must be wondering what the title of this post is all about. My Progress Report for the month of May is inspired by a book written by internet entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin, called The Dip.
In his book, Seth explains how every new project, job, or hobby (or in my case...blog) starts out fun and exciting. You work really hard and start to get great results. Then over time it gets much harder and much less fun. When results start to decline, you need to figure out if you are in a momentary "dip" that will simply get better if you keep pushing, or if you are in a cul-de-sac which is really just a metaphor for a slow and painful death.
My blog statistics for the month of April were quite gloomy. After three months of significant growth my blog saw a sharp decline in traffic and new visitors. I was pretty bummed because up to that point, my blog had been getting a lot of visitors and a terrific response from readers. The cause of the decline was obvious - life was crazy and I had just found out my wife and I are expecting our first baby. As I wrote back then, Life Got In the Way and my blog took a back seat. As May pushed on, I had to figure out if my blog was in a dip that I could pull out of, or was it doomed for failure because I hit a dead end?
I am happy to report that my blog has pulled out of the dip! I kept pushing and made an effort to focus on quality content and productive blogging activities. As the graph below shows, page views, visits, and unique visitors were back up at 4251, 2946, and 2298 respectively. Perhaps the number that I am most proud of though, is my feed subscribers. I have crossed that magical one hundred mark and I am now up to 110 feed subscribers. To be honest, I could care less about those other numbers. As long as my feed subscribers continue to increase, I will be a happy blogger.
Pulling Out of the Dip
So how exactly did I pull out of the dip? Knowing that I had a lot of ground to cover, I put together a plan. First, I sat down and committed myself to finally finishing the theme redesign that I had been working on for weeks. I am really happy with the new look of my blog and the response has been great - thank you. With my new sharp duds, I knew it was time for the big leagues. I brought out my A-Game and spent an entire day working on a guest post that I could shop around. I went straight to the top and was ecstatic when my first pitch was a home run. I want to thank Darren Rowse at ProBlogger for publishing my guest post, which coincidentally turned out to be a light hearted look at...you guessed it, the Dip! I followed the guest post up with a couple of solid posts on the importance of tagging your articles, being aware of shady advertisers (cough...TNX...cough), and pulling your blog out of a rut. I am happy to say that my hard work paid off. My blog is back on the rise. Of course, the Weekly Buzz is still going very strong.
What I Could Improve On
The one thing that I did not do well in May was make money. But you know what? I don't really care. That is not the priority for my blog right now. I am getting a little tired of the the Make Money Online niche and the last thing I want to do is to start sounding like yet another used car salesman. I like to write and I like to help people with their blog. That is the focus of Buzz My Blog and it will continue to be the focus of Buzz My Blog. I will make money, but I am going to do it the hard way...by slowly building a strong base faithful readers over time. I don't care how long it takes, but I firmly believe that the best way to make money online is to publish genuine content that keeps people coming back for more again and again. I hope I have been able to provide this for you.
I have a lot of good stuff planned for June so I hope you will stick around. My goal is to top 150 feed subscribers (so please subscribe here!), and after my mini-rant above, let's just keep the goal at that. Please let me know what you think of Buzz My Blog so far. What would you like to see more of? Less of? Anything different? I've really enjoyed getting to know a lot of you and I look forward to meeting many more.
I am a firm believer that hard work pays off. But it is now 6:30 pm on Friday evening and time to ditch that mentality for a little of this...
Have a great weekend everyone!
Jeff
