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14/06: Nucleus Blog or Wordpress Blog: Our Story

The blog has been running for around a month and I thought I'd give you a few facts and figures on progress and other blog statistics. Hopefully the less experienced bloggers will gain some insights. It is not easy to find people who will disclose the truth about their blogs in terms of performance, although most information can be found easily enough if you care to do a little digging. Taking your clothes off in public is not always advisable, but sometimes it's refreshing of not exactly pretty

Blog background

I deliberately set this blog up on something other than Wordpress - partly for the challenge of learning something new but also because I wanted a few comparisons, having become familiar with Wordpress already. I decided on Nucleus simply because my host offered it as a simple C-Panel installation. It looked OK, although of course it has nowhere near as many options and choices as WP, so I decided to test the water. So far I've enjoyed the challenge, although frustrations have arisen frequently, more because of my limited technical know how than through any fault of Nucleus CMS. Whatever way you look at it, the platform requires you to get your hands a bit dirtier than Wordpress.com (i.e the free hosted platform for WP) will ever ask you to. If you are new to blogging though Wordpress.org can seem pretty intimidating too, but with so many users help is never far away. Nucleus has some great people on their forums, but in terms of sheer numbers, Wordpress is way ahead in the race for bloggers hearts and minds. Nucleus is a bare bones or, if you prefer, streamlined blogging/CMS application, and users bulk it up with suitable plugins for their needs. Installation of these plugins can range from simple to very technical. If you are very new to blogging, or have limited knowledge of skins and templates and php, I would have to say that both Wordpress and Nucleus can be daunting, but, if you're like me and just want to try a different way of publishing, I think you would enjoy Nucleus.

I came with limited knowledge of hosting my own blog and having plenty of experience with the free version of Wordpress.com did not prepare me for the complexities of Wordpress.org and for a beginner, it is not simple. I'm no spring chicken and although I've been around computers and the internet for a long time I have fallen way behind with modern coding of things like CSS, PHP and XHTML. This is proving to be a major hurdle in trying to make a Wordpress based site. I'll keep you updated with my struggle from time to time, but before we get lost in techie stuff, let's move on with our subject matter for this post.

Blog Facts And Figures

First of all, when I last checked, Google page rank was sitting stolidly on zero. That's not much of a surprise because we're barely out of the wrapper and backlinks are scarce. These things will come with time and a bit of  work. Encouragingly, Alexa ranking has gone from 3.5m in the first week, to 1.1m after the first month. Compare this with a top blogger like JohnChow.com who's blog ranks an impressive 2535 and you realize there is much work to be done. Set achievable goals for your blogs, work hard, and keep revising them upward and you will be surprised how quickly you can climb the rankings game.

Traffic wise we are getting in the region of 250 - 400 unique visits per day which again, is small time, but it's on the up. Blogging around our chosen subject is always going to be tough - a search for the term "marketing blog" will  throw back 249m results on Google. So, putting things in perspective - new blog, big competition, I'm quite pleased about where I'm at.

Where Traffic Comes From

I have used various avenues of traffic building in kickstarting the blog and they are hardly secret or ground breaking. Started off with some traffic exchanges - not quality visits, but Alexa still takes notice, so, when starting from zero, they have  a role to play. Search engine  and directory submissions using IBP & Arelis - still the best free SEO software out there. If you don't have a copy download it now! Also highly recommended is SEO Elite, which can also be downloaded free, so there is no reason not to use both if you wish.

Article marketing, although most of those articles did not link directly to the blog. RSS feeds submissions using RSS Submit - which is available as a free download and is a great tool for covering a lot of feed directories quickly and painlessly. Social bookmarking - very effective way to start seeing traffic quickly - more on that in a moment. It sounds a lot of work and it is, but I wanted to see if not working with Wordpress would make things harder traffic wise. After the first month, Google is bringing 77% of search engine traffic, with Yahoo on about 21%. Others make up the rest for what it's worth. MSN still not figuring, although the bot is a regular visitor. (reminder to self - must add rss feed to MSN and Yahoo personal home pages to jump start their      indexing of a blog feed!) These things are all unremarkable - we still have no DMOZ listing and will probably have to wait a long time for that to happen. Until it does, traffic from other search engines is likely to be insignificant. 

One of the biggest traffic sources is Stumbleupon and of all the social bookmarking sites it contributes a lot of hits. We are seeing good    results from De.licio.us, Reddit, Simpy, NetVouz, Onlywire  Magnol.ia and others too. Web 2.0 is the blogger's friend.

I'm hoping that people who are new to the game will start to see that blogging is rarely an overnight affair. You will need to put in some effort to gain an audience - how hard that is will depend on a number of factors but if you keep your blog updated regularly and it has content that people want to read, your blog can soon become established.

Now, if you're dying to ask.....does it make you money? I'm sure it's obvious that the blog is monetized, and yes it's starting to earn its keep, but it's a long way from profitable and I don't foresee it bringing in significant returns any time soon. Honest enough for you? Be realistic about your own blogs and realize that you are unlikely to be giving up the day job overnight. There are a variety of ways that you can monetize your blog, some that you can implement right away and others that will have to wait until you have established yourself. Your blog's ability to generate revenue will be affected by countless factors including its subject matter and the level of competition it faces, as well as your willingness to develop it on a regular and ongoing basis.

I hope that this article has given a little more insight to newer bloggers and marketers. There are plenty of resources both here and all over the blogosphere that will help you to develop your own blogs and strategies. It is a fast paced world, but it's great to be a part of it!

We would welcome comments from anyone who has something to add to this discussion, be it advice or questions, have your say.

That's it for this post. I'm working on a complete redesign of our main site which looks set to take several weeks but the blog should still continue unabated.

TCH

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