I thought of this blog post while looking my traffic stats in Google Analytics and in WordPress’ blog stats. Actually I was looking in the “traffic sources” summary from Analytics.

Let’s take it from the start though. Bloggers need audience -readers- in order to keep writing and blogging. Bloggers need feedback, motivation and everything that a normal man needs. Bloggers are not something more nor less than just another person next door. But how a new blogger will gain a sufficient audience and keep going? There are plenty of ways which are presented and explained in tons of other articles. Backlinking, commenting, e-mailing other bloggers etc. Well, I am writing this post to show you my own way of “success”.

Actually I have a little more than 2000 visits from mid-August, but I want to present the way I got here which is totally different from others and focuses on the blog’s posts content, not socializing (it has to do with socializing too, but not in that great amount as other ways).

So, everyone knows the king is the content. But not all follow this advice. First of all, I am not a stats-junkie (I used to be). I prefer a small community of readers which interacts and discusses etc rather than a big amount of visitors who don’t interact with each other, don’t discuss etc. Anyway, I am writing a techblog, right? I have two possibilities for my posts. To recycle tech news (as many people do) and write often or to think more about my posts, find interesting topics or interesting things to review etc, which means not so many posts and not so often. Because I never got many visitors from search engines and wanted to increase this traffic source, I thought of the very important factor SEO. My point was that, if I would recycle tech news I wouldn’t get visitors from Google and Yahoo because big blogs would catch their attention, not me -what’s the point anyway of writing about something that top-bloggers have also wrote and discussed, would not get any attention and said the same things.

So I risked it and chose the second way. I focused to get interesting topics (maybe I didn’t accomplish it yet though) and get some good SEO (like good tags -more about my “tag-system” below). When I am referring to SEO, I didn’t hire any experts, I just maked it to appear in the first results of lots of queries just by writing unique posts and not re-blog. But the results of this method weren’t so fast. In the start I got almost 5 visits from search queries a week. I was a bit disappointed but I didn’t not give up nor changed my blogging style. In the last weeks though, I see a dramatic improvement of my search engine traffic sources. Now, I have more than 110 unique search queries which gave me more than 200 visits. Just to know it, I have a 24.19% traffic percentage from direct traffic, 41.06% from referrers and 34.75% from search engine which was increased for more than 20% in the last weeks as my method proved kind of correct.

I wrote above about my tag-system. I don’t tag every single word from the post or too many of them in order to achieve this better SEO thing but I tagged with the real “keywords”. For example my top-visited post about Greek hackers and their CERN defacement, which has 124 visits (as of Saturday Nov. 1), I tagged it with only “CERN“, “Defacement“, “Greek Security Team“, “Hacking“. Less words, but real keywords. Another post about a Ubuntu panels tweak I thought, with 75 visits I tagged it with only “Desktop“, “Gnome“, “Gtk“, “Ubuntu“, “Linux“. You can find all of my tags under the Archives page to get a better understanding.

The second part is socializing. I was lucky with this apect, because I had and still have of course, people I met via Twitter etc, mainly greek tech bloggers, so my socializing steps with the new blog (this one) were a lot easier. The way I promoted my blog and posts was very simple. I tweeted about interesting posts I wrote and I dugg two times my own posts (which did not get any serious attention). I never used my Facebook status, though, for example to promote any of my posts.

Concluding, my point is that while beeing unique, not to re-blog, and spend some time on finding other topics to write about, I achieved to get more traffic, more audience, more visits and more RSS readers (12 in Feedburner feed, 16 in WordPress feed, a total of 28 readers -thanks dudes!). I was not with the mass and I think it proved useful and correct.

As inspiration to this blogging (and tag) style and philosophy, I have Paul Stamatiou my favorite blogger and I want to thank him publicly. Thanks Paul!