Struggling to Keep Up and Meeting Targets

Firstly a few words to those of you on Associated Content that I follow and that follow me. As you may have seen, I always try to read every article that is published by you and to comment on them, but a busy weekend trying to do my taxes and working on other chores has left me with a backlog of 400 articles to read, and it would take me a full week to go through all of these and to comment on them.

I know that many of you read and comment on my articles, so although I can't always have time to leave a comment on everything, I will do my best to read every article and to give you the page views that you deserve.

I work in a somewhat strange way, downloading emails into my Thunderbird email program at home, but at the same time leaving the messages on the mail server so that I can still access them when at work or on another computer.

When I get a chance during the day, I try to read the latest messages, and when I have read an article I then delete the notification email, so that i know it's been processed. This way, I don't get those messages at home as well.

At home, I often read the notifications for the oldest published articles and then delete them. When I delete them in my mail reader, it also deletes them on the mail server, and therefore they no longer appear in my webmail.

This is a fairly unique system that I have come up with, but it does allow me to try and get through the notifications without the oldest ones always being left behind.

Meeting Targets

So far this month I have met my goals of:

• Publishing my 100th article
• Reaching Clout 6
• Reaching an average of over 300 Page Views daily

However, realizing how well I was progressing in the last 2 weeks, I set myself new goals of 400 average page views a day and to reach Clout 7 by the end of the month. So far it doesn't look as if I am going to get there, even though my slideshows, which a lot of people seem to enjoy, and several articles that are getting consistent traffic, are keeping my daily views up. I don't think that I will reach either of these in the next week, but I can still try.

The two articles that are doing well are Chat Roulette The Latest Internet Phenomenon and Fun On Chat Roulette .

These two articles are consistently getting over 100 page views between them, and I hope to be able to capitalize on this further, if I can find the time for another few sessions on Chat Roulette and in particular to record a video of some sessions.

I think that most of us are looking for that often elusive article, the one that is going to suddenly become the talk of Digg, Twitter or Facebook, the one that gets into the Huffington News, and just takes us from one Clout level to the next and beyond in a day.

There are two types of article really, those that take off like a rocket, but then fade away, and those that just have consistent page views daily, which often over time can provide more page views than those which give a quick burst only. There is of course a third type of article, the one that everyone ignores and which makes you wonder why you bother. So far fortunately I haven't had too many of these, but I have had a few.

My slideshows, in particular of old buildings and countryside in England, have been proving popular. Since I enjoy taking pictures of churches, I am trying to work on ways to promote these, since they are turning out to be category 1 articles right now, with great page views at first, but then instant death! So wish me luck in trying to turn my short term articles into long term ones.

The one thing we all suffer from is priorities and managing our time of course.

You could spend all your time writing articles and publishing them, but if you don't spend the time promoting them, chances are that it's only your followers who will read them. You could also do the reverse, and spend most of your time trying to promote the articles that you already have (successfully or otherwise), while leaving precious little time to write new ones. Neither is good, and yet both are essential. I find that it really does pay to try and divide your time between the two tasks to try and get the best of both worlds.

Social Networking

I know that a number of other authors have accounts on sites like Squidoo, Stumbleupon, Twitter or LinkedIn. If you do and would like to link up with me on any of these sites, please let me know. It would be good to help share published articles outside of our friends on Associated Content.

Here is my wish that whatever goals you have set yourselves for this month, you achieve them and go beyond your own expectations.