Personal Blogging – Patterns

As someone with a strong focus on efficiency and a goal-oriented mindset, I’m used to analyzing the things I’m doing (or have done) in order to discern the patterns that will allow me to bend the rules of the game as much to my favor as humanly possible.

The simple fact of life is, after all, that everything has patterns that will help you in doing just that. Whether it’s best practices or easy-to-use loopholes to get around constricting and process-slowing limitations and situations at work. Or asking the right people for the right favors to increase your chances of positive answers. Whether it’s finding the best formulation for requests that might otherwise be denied or organizing your data in such a way that you can always find what you need the quickest – it pays to know your playing field and it helps to maximize your position in that field.

It’s what I’ve always been naturally inclined to do, and have since been taught to hone and improve by many a mentor. The best way of moving forward in life is knowing exactly which ways were the most successful in the past and making sure you always pick the optimal ‘race line’ (for the car-racing fanatics out there).

Now I’m one of those people who has the handicap of not actively separating sections of her life (eg. Work and private) so I’ve also been applying this approach when it comes to blogging. Because no matter how much I write this blog as a personal haven for all that is moi (in all the rebellious topic-selections that go against everything that generally ‘works’) – I would also like for it to be successful in the realm of followers and traffic. I am a vain little insecure twit after all, the virtual support and feather-sticking does a good thing for my daily life-motivation.

So what I’ve come to realize after thorough traffic analysis and constant feed-checking and follower-stalking in the past few months is the following few patterns:

– Mornings are glorious.
When it comes to posting, the posts that generate the most views and followers are those I post early in the day. Which surprises me, seeing as I’d expect people to do most of their blog-reading after work in the chillaxed evening hours. Wrong. Apparently people like to do these things while having their morning coffee. Or on their lunchbreak. Or waiting for their shift to start. Who knew.

– Poetry works.
And it’s not because I can claim any skill as a poet. I know this. Most of my attempts, when reading back, are still at the silly highschool basic-bitch rhyme-scheme level that I had in high school. But even though the poems are a bit iffy at best, they generate a whole lotta likes in whole little amount of time. I suspect it’s because of the easy read, the low amount of words and the quick connections (because they do tend to tap into recognisable feelings). No deep thinking required. A bit of rhyme and you’re good to go (explains the humongous boatload of poetry-only-blogs I come across with 10s of 1000s of followers.

– Weekends are for follows.
I’ve not yet figured out the rootcause to this phenomenon but my theory is that, like myself, a lot of bloggers find some time in their weekends to work on blog-maintenance, where the weekdays are just for posting. Aka – they loop through their feeds, follow for follow and find new and exciting blogs through tags, instead of working on their own content. Because while I’ll find a few followers dripping in during the week, in the weekends is when my notifications explode. I dunno how people bloghop these days (seeing as the last update removed the option to peruse via the reader) but it works. Weekends raise the tally.

Now all I gotta do is find the way to turn this knowledge into a surefire way to complete my masterplan through running a kick-ass blog: Conquer the world.
Should be easy. Right?

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<sub>PS. Wanna read more about the ins and outs and hows and whys of personal blogging round here? Click on, brave warrior, click on!
<sup>* Personal blogging – Risky Business
* Personal blogging – Dirty little secret
* Personal blogging – To be recognisable or to be unique?
* Personal blogging – Out for the count
* Personal blogging – Listless
* Personal blogging – The science of stars
* Personal blogging – The personal touch
* Personal blogging – The Voice
* Personal blogging – Patterns
* Personal blogging – Art of repetition
* Personal blogging – Choices</sup></sub>