Self-promotion really works
Today I had a nice surprise while visiting I Have Senioritis:
In case it isn't obvious in the screenshot, my subscriber count at I Have Senioritis just jumped from 25 to 270 overnight. It might be a little early to start claiming success (it could use some help in the T-rati rankings), but 270 subscribers is still pretty good. Here are some things I did that proved successful:
- I started with a fresh theme. None of this ugly, overdone Kubrick or K2. I went with Fresh Bananas, and I modified it to suit my needs. * disclaimer: I heart Kubrick and K2. Just not very much.
- I use Flickr for my photos. I watermark all my photos with a nice tag that says "ihavesenioritis.com." I submit my photos to the Cornell photo group on Flickr. I'm not sure how much traffic that gets me, but it's something.
- I import all my entries into Facebook Notes. It's hard to get my friends to visit my websites, but I can get them to content in a community they already frequent. After all, I'm for readership in just about any form… blogging without readership is what I try to avoid.
- I share links to funny entries with friends via IMs and e-mails… because they can always use a good laugh.
- I sought out the community/niche I am blogging in, and found it in the form of the very young College Blogs Network. I joined in a heartbeat for the sake of talking to other bloggers like myself and sharing the benefits of networking.
All these things had positive effects on my slow increase in readership, on top of posting often and occasionally linking from here at christianmontoya.com. What accounted for the massive jump, however, was that I posted a link on Reddit.
I never used to think too much of Reddit before, but it's a good site. I like how people can post whatever they want, be it political, humorous, or whatever. They don't require specific categories and there isn't the kind of trolling you get on Digg and Slashdot. Also, making the front page of Reddit paid back in over 5,000 unique visits in one day from the Reddit homepage and other sites that linked my site after seeing it on Reddit. And, as you already saw, it gave me a huge jump in subscribers… a quick rise to the same numbers I get around here! Who can argue with that?
Can I just say that I feel really dirty about using an unmodified K2? I don't even have a real header going. It's awful. I've done some slight tweaks on the backend, but nothing that the end user really sees. And pages of the pagination, especially with UTW, are such that things 404 unnecessarily. It's awful!
I had plans in place to fix it properly–I have half-templates half-assembled for my implementation of 3-column k2–but FTP is 2/3rds broken here at school. That's no excuse in and of itself, but still. Dang.
WP mods fast but over the summer I found my use of Joomla! CMS to be easier to "magic" …especially when I expensed things I'd bought from rockettheme!
Oh well, it's shameful and awful, I suppose. I still have readers and subscribers.
Personally bad implementations of "asleep" bug me more than overused k2… but mostly-default kubrick is so unhip.
I know you can do some amazing stuff with K2, since it offers a whole lot more flexibility and features for theming than what Wordpress has by default… but it also takes a lot of work. If you are just looking to make a simple blog theme that's more unique than the standard K2, then you might want to go with a template that's not still in beta… or just make your own from scratch. That's what I did for this site and a couple others. There is a good chance I might switch to K2 for my next design of this site though, since I need a lot of flexibility for the things I plan to do, but we'll see. I'll probably start working on it Thursday night (I get a long break this weekend!).
I think the word I'm looking for here is "linkalicious." That's what mine should be once I re-do-finish the layout, to a certain extent. I feel vaguely compelled to use every built in plugin hook that lives within the loop.
I don't need K2 to do that, specifically, but I need something sophisticated enough, like k2, to achieve my full "vision." The trouble with visions, though, is their implementation.
-__-
What's awful is when I snoop around other k2 installs and I see people using bloated early pieces from earlier parts of the beta, like those old 45kb prototype scripts… it's down to 10 now, and bugs are ironed out, etc. I'm enjoying riding along as it travels to 1.0