Blue Tits on the Fat Balls

You might well wonder what this is all about, but actually it's the subject of an email that my wife sent to me while I was at work one day last week, telling me that the Blue Tits that frequent our garden were actually feeding on the fat balls that we have hanging from tree branches.

I thought of this article on the way to work this morning, because of comments left on the slide show that I published last night, which was appropriately called Blue Tits.

Soon after we moved into our house last October, we put up our bird feeders, and hung three balls of suet fat with seeds from the tree branches, and to our surprise, not a single bird seems to have been near them all winter, spring or summer, until last week. So all excited, Debbie sends me an email with a cryptic title, and that is what started the train of thought this morning.

More than one person suggested that I might just get a lot of traffic to my article on Blue Tits, and I spent the last couple of hours all hopeful, however the daily reports dampened my hopes somewhat, since I only got 48 page views for the slide show. Still, very often with my articles, it's the second or third day that has more page views than the first, so I can still hope the article will "fly".

Headlines can sometimes make an article work, and visitors will "flock" to it purely because of the catchy headline. At other times though, my attempts at trying to be creative and write an article that has a catchy headline, have just fallen flat.

With only a week to go now until the end of August, and my efforts to write articles that might generate traffic failing miserably, I am hoping that I can come up with some good ideas that will boost my ranking, and not let my daily page views for the month be even worse than in July.

I do have a short series of articles on Food that are in the pipeline, and since some of these have been submitted for Up Front Payments they might not get published before the end of the month unfortunately, but with Food being an ever popular subject, maybe this will help to get me out of the mire.

I do a daily calculation that is based on my daily page views, and part of this calculates the date on which I will reach the next level on Associated Content, in my case Clout 9. Early in the month, it looked like I might reach my target on 25th December, which I thought was rather cool. Then with a couple of more successful articles the date moved closer to the beginning of December, which pleased me no end, as getting to Clout 9 seems to be taking forever and a day. Unfortunately with lower traffic to my articles in the last week especially, that date is headed towards the middle of January 2011 - eek! It just makes me think to myself - "I must try harder".

So this week in desperation and frustration, I am trying to ramp up my article production, in part also spurred on by Angie Mohr's challenge to write 100 articles in a week. Well there is no way that I could manage that even if I didn't have a full time job, but if I can manage a consistent 3 articles a day and publish 20 articles a week, ad to write these on what might be more popular topics as well, I might just whip that target date for Clout 9 down a big old notch.

Things are supposed to pick up in September, according to past evidence, but with the purchase of Associated Content by Yahoo, who knows what effect that might have. With luck it will be a good effect, and everyone will be smiling very soon.

And before I leave you, if you are interested in learning more about Blue Tits, there is a great page on them from the Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds.