A Blog on Making Your Blog Popular

The comment section of any blog can be a major resource in helping you increase your readership and web traffic, if you utilize it correctly. After reading on multiple blogs about tips on how to increase my sphere of influence, that general consensus was to comment, comment, and comment more on blogs: popular blogs, blogs like mine, and up and coming blogs. The more the better.

One question that quickly came to mind was “How do I find the right type of blogs to comment on?” Initially, I was having some trouble with this. The popular blogs and websites were easy enough to find. I diligently went to visit LifeHacker and some other well known sites/blogs and left some comments, but I was worried that I would get lost in the shuffle. Who would notice my single comment out of hundreds? How was I supposed to generate web traffic to my site? How was I supposed to get people interested in reading my blog? It was then that I came to the sudden realization that other people like me were trying to do the same thing!
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In the movie Field of Dreams, this approach may have worked wonders for Kevin Costner, but in the world of blogging, simply writing a good blog is not enough to attract web traffic!! You can’t just build it and lie back, hoping that people will magically find the URL to your site. In the last 24 hours, I have been reading some more about how to generate more web traffic, and the underlying theme is that you have to be proactive. You need to go out there to other blogs and comment, visit forums, provide good feeback, join social networking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Technatori, Del.icio.us, etc. As of now, I’m currently in a state of information overload from reading so much. But I’ll try to discuss some of my findings. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend, after looking at the web traffic results from Google Analytics, I noticed that the number of visitors to the bloggers of the blinkdagger community took quite the hit. During the week, we averaged maybe 20-30 hits a day. But during the weekend, we barely averaged 5 hits a day! So that got me thinking: how do we get more visitors to our site? What can we do, as bloggers, to get more visitors? How do we attract people beyond our friends? Obviously, it isn’t enough to be a great writer with great content.

And thus, I have decided that this site will be focused on the art of creating a successful blog, attracting traffic, and retaining readers. I will be posting on various techniques as I learn them, and hopefully, our blogs will become more successful, because it can’t get any worse than it already is! I figure that by dedicating my site to this topic, it will greatly benefit the main site as well as my other blogger pals who are suffering the same “desolated wasteland” symptom. Don’t be surprised to see a few post here and there that are not solely dedicated to this topic, as I do have other interest as well.

The first tip that I picked up from my web browsing on this topic was that commenting on other blogs can help you grow as a blog yourself. Commenting on other blogs can cause the author of those blogs to in turn visit your blog. By showing interest in their blog, it is likely that they will reciprocate.

It appears that Facebook and Microsoft have struck a bargain! After a long and arduous struggle and rampant rumors, Microsoft has been able to thwart Google and all other comers to obtain a stake in Facebook. Unfortunately, that stake is only 1.6%, which is estimated to be around 240 million. But even with a minor partnership, both sides look to benefit greatly. I can see the little partnership as the start of something big for Microsoft. Its not hard to imagine Microsoft parlaying this into something huge. With all the members that Facebook has, the potential for advertising is vast and lucrative. On another note, is it me, or does everything these days involve either Microsoft,Google, and Apple?

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After working at an engineering firm for the last three years, I have had the opportunity to observe firsthand what they call Female Engineer Syndrome, FES for short. Others may know it as Engineering Girl Syndrome.

What exactly is FES? Let’s assume a standard scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the lovely Jessica Alba) is used to determine attractiveness. Then, FES occurs when a female engineer looks like a 6, acts like a 10, but thinks she’s a 12 (is it possible to be any hotter than Ms. Alba?). How, you may ask, does this phenomenon occur? There are certainly some interesting theories on the matter, and I shall present my own personal theory below.


Using an economics framework, the root cause of FES can be determined using the theory of supply and demand. It is a well known fact that when goods are scarce, their demand increases, which drives up their value. If we apply this to FES, we can see that due to the paucity of women in the engineering industry, their demand is greatly enhanced beyond normal capacity. Read the rest of this entry »