folks,
i know the rough numbers of daily hits on this blog. i challenge you guys to double it in the next one month, (by end april), by inviting more and more of your friends to read it regularly. if you do so, then we'll put in place the kinds of improvements we were planning.-- including trying out a content management system.
in other words, i request YOU to demonstrate you have a stake in this blog. we'll have to spend on various things to put up a better product here -- and that costs money, eg. for a server, software, bandwidth, some admin. we will need to generate more money from this blog. one way of doing this would be to plaster more ads here and ask you to click on them. another would be to put in a paypal mechanism so you can make small (or large) contributions.
but none of this is worth it unless it is reaching a very large number of people on a regular basis. i need your help to do this.
and i will put up a poll to help us find out what types of topics interest you. we can modify posting rates accordingly.
so i request you to help us increase the traffic on this blog. there are so many of you who are followers, each of you can easily sign up 2-3 other followers; and there must be a number of you who are silent lurkers. you should tell your friends to lurk, or post their opinions (of course, this is a moderated blog, and certain comments may not see the light of day).
26 comments:
Rajeev,how about adding a link in Daily Pioneer, South Asia forum of Atimes where I have seen quite a few people who follow/refer this blog. One look at the chat in rediff shows there are a lot of "sleeper" followers probably unaware of this blog. Is there anyway to bring in that patriotic audience here...Sri
I'll try my best to bring 9 people.
I noticed how some people increase daily hits - they post comments on other popular blogs - and most of the readers of those popular blogs follow the commenter's link to his or her blog.
Allowing a lot of discussions on the blog is the most effective way of increasing hits.
Also, ensure that RSS feeds of your blog are available on other blogs - that way, it will make it a true 'social network' and increase hits. If you allow RSS feeds of other blogs, they may reciprocate.
I wasn't aware of Swapan Dasgupta's blog till yesterday:
http://swapan55.blogspot.com/
Good one. I've already advertised it in my blog ( bhavananda.blog.co.in ). There are lots of suggestions, but lets first see how people respond. Count on my (intellectual :-) support!
One suggestion, please enable anonymous comment posting in your blog or name/url type identifier. There are many who don't like to use google identity to comment, etc.
I voted for 1. Religion-Culture 2. Politics 3. Science/Tech/Energy/Space 4. Other - MILITARY Issues - obviously Indian military esp. Special Forces/Equipping forces and the BLUE WATER NAVY....
I agree with one of the comments of allowing for more comments even if adversarial, that will really stimulate participation, make it more fun and increase hits. Also a lot of times comments contain a lot more information.
I have one advice for you gurus here..
I'm a regular visitor to Bharat-Rakshak and it seems that many of the articles you post here are eerily similar to the ones posted there. I'm almost.. well asking right now if any one of you are posters there too?
Hence.. much of the content is boring for me.. can there be an effort to bring more than what is posted there??
THANKS!!!!
thanks guys. i want to point out that the idea behind this exercise is to get more regular readers, but the blog members are probably better off just posting stuff here rather than marketing it. so i am soliciting your help in marketing it.
1. sri: perhaps you could yourself provide links to this blog as you suggested, in comments elsewhere.
2. mallikarjun, bhavananda, kanhoji: thanks!
3. maald and several others: i don't think allowing anonymous comments is useful here. we did allow them, and they were quite obnoxious. people lose all sense of proportion and of self-control if they are anonymous. so the moderators will have to spend a lot of their time deleting crappy comments. but i will remove the 'capcha' thing which is a nuisance.
4. karmasura: i dont often read bharat-rakshak although i think they are good. other posters here might be on BR. i post stuff that people mail to me, which might also be on bharat-rakshak.
NY,
No need for anonymous comments. Let Google login be required but stop moderating for 3 months and see the results. Ofcourse someone needs to be there to remove abusive messages (but not adversial ones). If there is a way to delegate that work, I am sure you will find enough volunteers. If you are thinking of scaling up, you ought to find a way to delegate such work anyway.
in effect maald this is what we have now. only the abusive posts are deleted.
Rajeev,
I am not too sure, why you are thinking of something like this..
I think your blog is one of the most popular ones with desis across the world..
As they say u may love or hate (agree/disagree) with Nizhal Yoddha but may not ignore him..!!!!
I think you have a loyal following that many bloggers would die for...
People who come to this blog, generally stay around (or "lurk" as u call it) without any cajoling..
The current format, is simple, democratic (for most parts) and one gets to read a lot of very useful links from many posters (especially San!)
And even if you want to invest in some better content management systems.. dont u think u r exisitng traffic would justify it...
Plastering ads on a blog .. is not really cool ..thats what all those stupid sites too.. I would not expect Rajeev to think of something like it to offset the cost...
anyway 2 cents from a guy who has been reading your articles and blogs for the last 8 years :-)!!
Your blog is one of the best out there.. Please keep it that way Rajeev..
Thanks
Rajeev,
How about a section on ELM(English Language Media/Mafia) Watch?
This can be a good place to document pious inanities, hyprocisy and duplicity of these self proclaimed 'secular walas'
M.Patil
Hi,
I came across this blog today and it is very interesting to me - have written many things that you have talked about too.
Lets keep in touch.
Cheers
BuA
One suggestion would be to have label list so as to easily view articles from one particular category. That is missing right now.
I'm a self claimed Content Management / PHP / MySQL / Web 2.0 ninja. In case you need any help going on your own, I could do my modest bit if necessary.
(Off topic)
Hi all,
Not sure if you have seen this, but thought I'd share this with you.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
Simply mind boggling...
Also, you might be interested in viewing the website of the NRI genious
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/pranav_mistry.html
http://www.pranavmistry.com/
thanks for the kind endorsement, harish. the question is a tradeoff: how much effort and time do we put in vs. how much by way of readership. i am using the hitcount as a proxy for readership, of course.
the objective here is to make it a self-sustaining source of information, so the costs have to be covered -- nobody is going to subsidize a web magazine for any length of time. and alas, ads are inevitable. see how many newspapers are dying now, and their web versions are ad-supported.
there are several small web magazines around, and the question is whether this can be turned into an influential nationalist web magazine. if it cannot be, then we'll keep the status quo. this is my test marketing approach to figuring out the tradeoffs.
m. patil, good idea to have a media watch section.
p6, thanks for the offer to help. may take you up on it. if you can suggest a good content management system please do so.
Drupal is IMHO the best free open source PHP / MySQL CMS there is. Large community support, very active development and lots of plugins readily available.
Rajeev , it is about time that this forum takes the next big step. It always has been a good source of nationalist news and information.
Couple of things I would like to see:
1. Change look and feel to more newspaper like website: I've always loved nytimes.com over any other newspaper.
2. Just like NYtimes.com, well thought out and well spaced ads on the site can generate steady revenue.
3. Do some more research on SEO. Showing up on front page of Google search result should be the goal. Links from other similar blogs would help.
I'll gave more suggestions as and when I think of them.
I'm doing my bit. Hitting the site twice over everyday. Hope that helps. :)
sage, you realize that the nytimes.com has a pretty large staff behind it working full time. so they look good. bootstrap efforts cannot afford the time or the money, so we have to be realistic.
p6, thanks, i looked at data on drupal and some of the sites using it look very good, especially some of the newspaper/magazine sites. but i don't get a good feel for how much effort it is to set up drupal or any other content management system and to run it.
sage, i'm afraid that's not the point. increasing hitcounts by you hitting it twice is of no value. i am interested in more readers and i am only using hitcount as a proxy for number of users. hopefully the number of hits and the number of unique users is closely correlated. so you should convince 10 of your friends to read this blog regularly.
Rajeev.
Drupal is a completely painless installation (2 mins?), relatively painless for upgrades, and completely pain-free for maintenance.
Wordpress / Joomla will sport better interfaces, look and feel, perhaps better ease of maintenance(?), but donot compare to Drupal in terms of architecture, abundance of third party code and vision for the future.
Hi Rajeev,
regarding your comment:
"...i am only using hitcount as a proxy for number of users. hopefully the number of hits and the number of unique users is closely correlated."
Are you not using Google analytics to count them exactly? It separately counts the hits, users and "absolutely unique visitors". May be you are already using it, its just not clear from your post.
I'm spreading the message to use your site regularly. As for all the previous comments for this post, I certainly think you have a large following and we like the way things are. But, internet is the future of media and it pays to be ahead in the race. We have an advantage because "right-thinkers" already dominate the political space in the net, thanks to perennial hatred of the leftwing loonies for any kinda development (including computers and net) . I believe its time for you (and possibly with other like minded bloggers) to really set up a unique one-stop-site for all the right-of-center-news so that we don't have to read 10 newspapers daily to dig up items written in page 7, column 3 ...
@ Yoddha
As maald suggested above, allowing a lot of discussions on the blog is the most effective way of increasing hits.
Karmasura, yeah, I post stuff in Bharat-Rakshak, as "Sanjay M"
(don't ask me how they put an "M" in there)
All patriotic folks need to become bloggers with each of their immediate community - friends and relatives - participating in this awareness campaign. All bloggers can run a small post/strip with 'BLOG OF THE DAY/WEEK/MONTH' with few words about the same. I will start one with Rajeev's. My 2c.
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