Starting Over Is Hard!

I had forgotten how hard it was building a blog following from the ground up. Either I had very few repeat readers over at A Field of Paper Flowers, or nobody’s following my nice little “visit me over here” link. I started out with a decent beginning of people who did just that, but traffic has fallen off to almost nothing. I’ve only had 3 actual visitors today that weren’t search engine spiders. Patience. I know. It takes time to rebuild.

There’s a lot to do.

I need to personally email or comment to everyone’s blog who had me in their blogroll and get my links updated. I absolutely underestimated the amount of traffic I got just on the WordPress.com dashboard and tag surfing over there.

I need to actually build up friends lists on all those social sites I joined. It’s not like people are going to seek ME out if they don’t know I exist!

I’m learning that tags have a lot to do with search engine optimization. Wouldn’t you know that I’ve never actually done anything with tags? I used categories instead. So that’s a switch. I found the Simple Tags plugin, which has a fabulous autotag feature that will go back and tag old posts, which was a godsend as I had about 800 posts that needed tags. It’s also got a nifty click tag feature to make adding tags easier in the future. So that’s something.

There’s also some kind of upgrade for wordpress.com blogs that allows you to do some kind of domain forwarding type deal. That apparently allows the search engines to get all your old stuff reindexed or something. And my pal Christine from CYH Associates taught me how to set up domain forwarding for my other domains (https://kaitnolan.com, etc). There was an issue getting the main http://murderandmagnolias.com to forward to the blog, but Christine fixed the code on that too. She’s chock full of awesome like that. So that’s set up.

I was trying to think about the other things I did when I first got started. I participated in the Friday Snippets meme where I met a lot of great people. But I don’t really have time to do that again, and there was a really heavy fantasy slant, which really isn’t my bag. I spent some time looking over other weekly memes I might participate in. I’ve decided to pick up Fess Up Fridays and use that to replace my Daily Progress Reports (which really aren’t all that interesting to anybody other than me). I thought about the Thursday Thirteen, but it doesn’t seem to be very writing-related, and that’s the crowd I’m trying to attract.

There are other blog listing sites that I can check out. I’ll work on those this weekend.

And of course participation on other blogs. I’ve been doing a little of that today, commenting on interesting posts. But I’ve been having issues with OpenID for my blog. I downloaded the OpenID Provider for WordPress MU plugin, which should allow me to use this blog as an OpenID, but when I tried, it didn’t work. I don’t have the brain power for troubleshooting that tonight.

What with all of this, the really lousy day I had at work, going out to dinner, and catching up on DVR, I didn’t get a word written today. We’ll chalk it up to productive procrastination.

Note from Kait: So I realized I had 2 different OpenID plugins installed. One is for regular hosted WordPress. The other is for WordPress MU, which I now know is for folks who are running multiple blogs. The light has dawned.

2 thoughts on “Starting Over Is Hard!

  1. I think I know how you feel, I just started over again myself, after moving domain! I’m a little suprised I am listed in google already!

    Regarding SEO, have you installed the all in one SEO pack for wordpress? It helps optimise pages.

    Good luck, Mark.

Leave a Reply to Kait Nolan Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.