The BetsyG-Spot

Well, here I am—blogging again. Not surprisingly, I did not receive another gift in the way of a reader response as I did last week from Madam G . However, I am really thrilled that I got an awesome reader story in response to my Weird Things That Happen post, Unbelievable, which was a chill-inducing, freaky story. I love when weird things happen, and love hearing about them. And I am so grateful for whatever readers I have and for the stories they share with me.

One of the reasons I am not surprised I am not getting many reader responses is that I simply don’t have the readership yet. Figure for every 100 people who read one of my stories, maybe 1 or 2 will be brave enough to send something in. Maybe. I sure don’t have 100 regular readers. My readership is doing exactly what I expected it to do; the first week was good, the second week there was a big decline—as probably 90% of the people who liked it the first week promptly forgot about it—and by week three (this week) probably 50% of the people who read it the second week forgot about it.

Most of the people who have heard about this site are either my friends or friends of friends. I would venture to say that very few of those people are regular readers of blogs, so it’s not on their schedule to remember to read Betsy’s blog. (I know this, because I’m not a regular reader of blogs either; I get the mentality.) So my next obvious step is to work on publicizing the site with readers of blogs. I knew that getting readership was going to take some time and take some work, and that’s where my efforts are focused now.

To that end, yesterday I got myself into a handful of blog directories. Fourth of July weekend is probably not the best time to get new readers, and today’s readership was, not surprisingly, abysmal. In any case, I’ll keep going on that, look into maybe spending a little money on Adwords (which I think makes me a Google advertiser), and start studying some of the tagging schemes that might help me come up in blog searches.

Another approach will be to get the writers looking at this page by publicizing that I take submissions/pitches. A quick stop on that journey will be to write something up for Miranda’s blog, Creative Construction, which is a site geared to creative moms.

The other thing I’m thinking about is the ads. I have made almost $5. And $3 of that was commission on a gift certificate that I bought. I don’t have enough readers to get the action on the ads, so again it comes back to readership.

On the other hand, I have made some positive tweaks to the ads, even if no one’s buying. I put together a couple of Amazon carousel ads (such as the one on Unbelievable), and I think they are very attractive and fitting for the page. Then Greg made a mockup to show how good the page would look if I put the ad in the middle of the text. He was absolutely right, but that meant I’d have to think about HTML for a minute, and I didn’t want to switch circuits in my brain. But right is right, so I moved the ad up, figured out how to get the text to wrap around it and how to get a little padding around the ad so the text didn’t butt up against it. It wasn’t a big deal (had to make a new “object” class and define its aesthetics in the CSS, i.e., float left, and some margin properties), but I did have to look up the object tag and refresh my memory on the whole class thing. Clearly, my brain would prefer that I forget whatever I figured out before the launch, and I don’t blame it.

My action plans are:

1. Increase readership.
2. Tweak existing ads.
3. Look into new ad programs, such as LinkShare.

That’s where I am today. Looking forward to the July 4th weekend. I have a case of wine (you heard me) that I’d like to make a dent in, so I’m having a few people over Saturday night, and I guess Sunday will be a lost day, as even one glass of wine gives me a hangover after the 30-pound weight loss. (OMG, did I really lose 30 pounds without having a baby first? More on that in future Wheel of Fortune posts.)

Happy 4th. Happy Birthday, America. I love you, but you’ve gotten a little paunchy. Let’s hope next year, in someone else’s care (anyone else’s), you’ll start to get back into shape. It’s been a rough time, but it’s almost over. Hold on.