Ok I am back after some very busy days. I am yet to do tasks for three days. Let me check what are they :
Day 13 - Search for an Affiliate Program that Fits Your Blog
As of now I am not intend to sell anything on my blog. This blog is about my opinion on various things in life in India and abroad. The opinions will be as varied as the world itself. So no particular product comes in my mind. However, displaying Google Adsense on my blog is a good option. Just by adding one piece of code, various ads relevant to my site will appear on this site. Whenever, anybody clicks on these ads, I get some cents which accumulated into dollar. In my opinion for most of the bloggers who want to monetize their blog, Google Adsense should be the first thing to join. Joining is free, getting approval is fast and adding the code is a breeze. I am using this program on two of my other sides also. Though I don’t earn huge some of money both of my sites have become self-sufficient and are generating their maintenance costs. I think even if you have a personal blog or any non-profit blog, you can make it self-sufficient by using Google Adsense on it. I have started Google Adsense on my blog and if you also want to join you can sign up here
So task completed for the day 13.
Day 14 - Analyze Your Blog’s Competition
Darren has pointed that the concept is to subscribe and read 10 blogs in your niche for a week then do a thorough analysis on them. Honestly I feel this is not an important task at least in my niche. When I decided to start this blog, my aim was to make it popular but not to outperform the popularity of any other blog. I know if I write good quality content, the blog will become popular. When I see blogs about India, I find that most of them have their original thoughts which attracts visitors to them. Why should I analyze what other people are writing and to let them influence my writing ? Yes, I’ll check these blogs to know what kind of technologies they are using, what kind of user friendly gazette they are having on their blog etc… And for this I don’t think I need to check the blogs of my competitors. I can do this by analyzing any successful blog. However, some of you may be in some very specific niche (as against my niche about India which is very broad). In that case, analyzing other blogs of your competition may be a good idea. As for me, I neither have time nor the need to do this. So task completed 
Day 15 : - Stickify Your Blog
What does that mean ? Here what Darren has written:
Today’s task in the 31 Day Project is to ’stickify your blog’.
This week’s video post is based upon a tip I mentioned in a recent podcast interview with Yaro and revolves around a technique that I’ve recently used to help convert one off and first time visitors to my blog into RSS subscribers.
It revolves around identifying key points where traffic is entering your blog and then optimizing those points for stickiness either by providing means for subscribing via RSS or email or by driving people deeper into your blog.
As of now TV is on and my family is watching their favorite soap. It’s not possible to ask them to reduce the volume. So I am not going to listen that podcast (which in my opinion is a sales pitch to join a blogging tutorial ). Darren is a clever guy. He is very cleverly directing us (the participants ) into buying a product he endorse. Well he can do this as he has that edge (status of an A-List Blogger).
This blogging challenge is steadily becoming too detailed and is taking most of my blogging time. For long I have not posted any post of India !.
Let’s be serious and take a serious view of what Darren want me to do. He wants me to Stickify my blog. In other words, it means I should do something to immediately grab the attention of my first time readers so that they subscribe to my RSS feed. I think it can be done even without listening Darre’s podcast. Here is what I’ll do.
Remember my post regarding most useful wordpress plugins. ? I’ll take help of two plug- ins to make it easy for my readers (including first time readers) to subscribe to my feed easily. I’ll use three plugins :
What would Seth Godin do & Subscribe Remind.
When I shall install these plugins, my blog will show Subscribe to RSS feed link in some very strategic positions. These positions will be :
(1) On the beginning of my every post (for first time readers). It’ll be displayed for three time.
(2) At the end of my every post. Every time for every reader.
By the time you’ll read this post, I will have activated two plugins. So you may see at the end of this post there is a reminder of subscribing to my RSS feed. Isn’t it a good way to remind my readers to subscribe to my RSS feeds ? Task completed
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
