Tips for a Successful (Movie) Blog VI: Reader’s Request
Our Tips for a Successful (Movie) Blog is back! In part 6, we simply would like you to ask questions in the comments about anything related to improving your blog. We will do our best to answer those questions as they come and hopefully, other bloggers will pitch in as well!
To get things started, Joel Burman had several questions at the end of our 31DBBB project:
- “I for instance would love to know more about pingbacks when refreshing posts and how to use trackbacks as optimal as possible?”
Trackbacks are a nice little gadget on WordPress blogs that is used to notify another blog that you posted a link referencing one of their post. There is some confusion as to what trackbacks are but essentially, they are a form of automated commenting. It’s essentially an automated way of saying “Hey, I wrote something on my blog related to your post” with a link back to your post. Although useful, trackbacks aren’t much to get excited about so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to those.
- WordPress.org plugins
A few plugins I can recommend are:
- XML-Sitemap: Automatically creates a sitemap of your site regularly for better search engine indexing
- Contact form 7: self explanatory.
- Delete-Revision which deletes all the post revisions that WordPress automatically saves when you write a post (they accumulate after a little while).
- YARPP: Automatically generates related posts (we don’t use this plugin anymore)
- WP-Polls: Basic poll system that is used on AM
- Tabber widget: I know some of you like the Tabs in our sidebar. This might do the trick for you (we haven’t tried it).
- WP-table reloaded: To make tables.
- WP-smush.it: Automatically optimize your images by reducing its size.
- Warning: Too many plugins can slow down your site. Delete unused ones.
- “Does most movie blogs stay around a certain number of visitor etc…?”
In short, no. A successful blog should be trending up most of the time in terms of visitors until it reaches its “mature” stage. Now, you are probably going to ask what “mature” stage is. A site like Google or ESPN.com have reached their mature stage, meaning they have pretty much reached a level of popularity where it become much much harder to gain even more visitors. If you were to look at their traffic, you would probably see that it is stagnant or declining slightly over time.
Each blog and website has its own “mature” stage depending on its quality and niche. Naturally, a blog will hit various plateau from time to time but, of course, the goal is always to increase traffic and there is no reason why traffic should not steadily increase as there is more and more content on your blog and more and more people become aware of it.
AM Weekly Traffic since start
In AM’s case, traffic has increased steadily on a month-to-month basis and we are hitting all-time highs nearly every months, August being our most visited and most commented month ever. I fully expect our traffic to keep moving higher as weeks and months go by as we are still in the concept development stage. Now if you have stagnated for quite some time or are even declining, you need to ask yourself what is going on and reassess what you are doing. I can assure you that any blog with only a few dozen or hundreds hits a day hasn’t reached its full potential but it is up to its owner to take a look at what they are doing and shake things up.
- “I would like to know more about controlling the related posts section in the end of the post”
The related post section is easily addressed via plugin if you have a self-hosted WordPress. If you don’t, there is nothing you can do.
![Watch: Creepy Trailer for Slasher Pic ‘Maniac’ [NSFW]](http://www.anomalousmaterial.com/movies/wp-content/themes/yamidoo_pro/scripts/timthumb.php?src=http://www.anomalousmaterial.com/movies/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/elijah-wood-maniac-tb.jpg&w=50&h=50&zc=1)
27 Comments
I think you hit right on the money. If you check out this page:
http://japancinema.net/advertise/
You’ll see the graphs of continually increasing traffic. Hopefully everyone out there is experiences AM & I’s success. This is what you want to see from your blog. Great advice!
Those are some grat numbers great work! Would love to har what you made different when those curves went really steep upwards. Networking through other blogs?
Great post Castor! So great if you getting back on this. I’ll look into these things and think of other things aswell as I still consider myself quite a novice.
Thanks again!
Hey you have been given a blog award!
http://www.joelburman.com/2010/09/i-received-a-blog-award/
Thanks Joel!
This seems like the right place to ask this. You know your Recent/Comments/Popular/Tabs widget…is that part of your design or a downloadable widget? This sort of thing would definitely come in handy on my site.
It comes with my theme but as mentioned above, it can be reproduced using a plugin called “tabber widget” which allows you make tabs of several widgets into one single widget slot.
Cheers Castor, I might try it out. I’ll report back if I use it and it works.
I just tried to use this widget and it made my entire sidebar go blank. It is a shame, Castor, your theme ready widget looks awesome I wish I could apply a similar tab widget to my website but as of now, there are no doable options.
Just a heads up to anyone else hoping to use this particular widget, you might run into the same problems.
Sorry to hear that
Maybe search the plugins for “tabber” or “tabs”, I remember seeing a few other similar options. Let me give it a try.
Actually, it seems to work for me. Make sure you grab the right one called “Tabber-widget”. It looks surprisingly good too!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tabber-widget/installation/
I thought it was working fine but discovered this morning that my comments section was acting up. After messing with a few things I took out the tabber widget and it was that widget that was causing the problem. It’s probably fixable but as yet I haven’t worked it out.
I have now installed a contact form and YARPP! I love YARPP! Really dont understand why you guys dont use it anymore? Is it because you running to many other widgets?
We have stopped using it because it doesn’t always display the best related post. We use another plugin where you manually add related posts. You can see it at the bottom of each post.
I understand. I’ll go with YARPP for a while and see. I think it might be exactly what I have been looking for.
This is great information Castor.
Unrelated but does anyone else use Disqus? I like the aesthetic value it adds, but I think it may detract from commenting.
I have had disqus on for a while and have some split feelings about it. I like how it tracks on comments I do but I can also really easy find comments that other posters on my site has done.
The cons are that the widget is really slow on updating stats and that not many blogs feature it at the moment. I am not sure wheter to keep it or not right now.
I actually ditched disqus for intense debate, but I am not that keen for that one either.
Personally, I think Disqus is a significant upgrade over the Blogger interface but if you are on WordPress, there is no advantage in using Disqus. I don’t think it detracts from commenting though since you don’t have to log in anymore to comment although they should make that point clearer.
…I agree with Castor – Disqus is great for WordPress users commenting on blogger blogs but I prefer the simplicity of WordPress commenting.
Castor: I notice you are using Feedburner. I installed that on my first blog when still using blogger.com but I never really understood it good. Is it really that common with readers using RSS readers nowadays?
And are there any other benefits SEO wise or in other aspects?
Feedburner is useful because it allows you to somewhat manage your RSS Feed and following, which is better than the alternative (ie. having no control whatsoever, and not even knowing how people are subscribed). You can track approximately how many people are subscribed, and make some technical change to how your feed works. More importantly, it allows people to subscribe by email, allowing your blog to reach into subscribers’ emails if they sign up.
Sounds good, but still are there a lot of users following through e-mail subscriptions these days? I am gonna try feedburner again but I remember it being really hard to setup (probably me being incompetent).
It’s something you would need to drive hard to get people to sign up
Thats my point its kind of old-fashioned.
I am on feedburner now and I like the options it gives you with different settings and customization.
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