Either You Succeed or Explain

And there goes November...

Yes,November is gone without a single post. Sad. Why, you ask?  well, as the name of my blog suggests, all I can do now is explain. 

So, first reason is, of course, time. Yes,  I'm busy. No surprise there.

Second, I was mostly engaged with marketing the new release. I usually get most of my blogging ideas while coding, so this meant a dry spell for me. 

Third, I did start writing several posts but gave up on them in the middle. Sometimes I attack subjects which require too much research and I simply don't have the time and energy to complete the research around it.

Finally, twitter. I often find myself just expressing my idea in 140 characters and letting it go, just like that. It is possible that blogging for non-professional bloggers is phasing out. On one hand, people are getting sucked more into the microblogging world. On the other hand, blogging becomes a more established profession as it replaces (or at least joins) the written press. I read articles from Lifehacker every week in my newspaper (The Marker) and TechCrunch is often quoted as a very credible source. Blogging for non-professional seems like a dying trend. 

Well, I still have plenty to say and I'm back into coding, so I hope to pick it up soon.

Follow me on Twitter

Yes, I finally caved and hopped on the bandwagon. If you are reading this blog, please join me at http://twitter.com/zvikico. I guarantee that I will not advertise the contents of my breakfast. 

I also have a twitter user for my company, nWire Software at http://twitter.com/nwire. It will be dedicated to more product specific stuff. I'm still not sure how to separate the two and what updated should be in each of them, so I guess I'll just start and see where it takes me.

I'm not ditching my blog. Far from it. I think they will work together nicely. 

See you on Twitter. 

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.