Either You Succeed or Explain

Added a ranking system to my blog

I added a cool feature to my blog which enables my readers to rate the posts. The feature is provided by a startup called Outbrain. After you read each post, you are kindly requested to rate it using a 1-5 star rating system. The goal is:

• Allow me to focus my posts on topics which my readers find more relevant.
• Allow you to give something back by marking the more interesting posts for future readers.

There's also one more interesting goal, but that's something we will hopefully see in the future: find more content according to your preferences. As a reader, by highlighting the relevant posts I can tell the system what are my interests and the system can suggest more posts in relevant topics which were marked as interesting.

Outbrain is still in Beta and there are many features in the works. If you're reading this through RSS or e-mail, you will not see the Outbrain ranking system. You're more than welcome to click on the post link, go to the full post in my blog and rank it there. I'll appreciate it.

Finally, if you have any feedback on the ranking or any comment, please drop me a line, either by mail or as a comment to this post.

Summarizing 3 months of blogging

Time flies and it has been 3 months since I started my blog. Here are some random thoughts about it:

• I enjoy it. I like to take a break from everything else and focus on writing a post. I often find myself thinking about good topics for posts or just working on something and saying to myself: "I should blog about it".
• It is time consuming. I did my best to write at least one article per week. It usually takes about 2-3 hours. Some took much more.
• I focused on generating my own original content. Quoting posts from other blogs seems a bit like plagiarism, even when you quote the source. Something feels wrong. Nevertheless, I plan to start doing it in my blog - I read a lot of other blogs and I'm always sifting through tons of posts. Taking the jewels and highlighting them on my blog can provide real value to my readers.
• It sounds funny to say "my readers", but I did get over 3000 visitors during that time, which is an average of over 30 people per day. I have about the same amount of subscribers (you don't count them as visitors, they usually get it by RSS or email). That's not a lot, but that's a start.
• I found that the best way to promote my blog is posting the links on other sites like discussion groups and bulleting boards.
• I tried to reach out to fellow bloggers with little success. I still fantasize  about having a feature on a post I wrote in one of my favorite blogs which have massive publication. I'm constantly thinking about how...

That's it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :-)

How I managed to generate 500 "quality" page views for my blog

I'm still new to blogging. I started my blog about a month ago with a rate of about 2 posts per week. I waited until I had some substance before promoting my blog. The post about Xoreax was my turning point, I felt it was good enough to sell.

My main "marketing" method was writing short posts in relevant forums. I wrote 4 posts about it. It generated over 500 page views in the 3 days to come, and I know that most page views were from people who are industry colleagues. I even got some requests for more information on what I do.

I also tried sending "cold mails" to some fellow bloggers I like reading. Most of them ignored it, so it didn't generate much traffic, but I did get this really nice post in one of my favorite blogs: MyMicroISV.

Bottom line - writing the original post took me time. Generating 500 page views was easy.

Finally got to name my Blog

It took me a while since I'm really bad with names (I'm still not sure about the name of my new product/company). I heard this phrase from a good friend and translated it from Hebrew, hoping I would capture the original meaning.

It's quite simple. Success needs no explaining and no introduction. It's just cold facts you can't argue with. Starting from the simplest things (like "successfully" taking out the trash) to the more complex things (like sales figures). It's a very easy test to apply. When you tell somebody about what you do, if you find yourself explaining, it probably means there's something to explain, which means you didn't succeed. It's that simple. Once you do realize you're unsuccessful, you should be on your way to solve the problem. It's common to think that admitting you have a problem is a big part of the solution. There you go.