As I write this I am surrounded by men in tights and I am not in Sherwood forest hanging out with Robin’s merry men but in a cafe with cyclists in lycra having their caffeine fix after they have had their rush of endorphins from their morning’s cycling.
I started this blog last year with very little expectation but with an element of trepidation and a few questions.
How many people would read it? Would they like what they read? If they came would they make any comments and if they did would they be negative or positive.
I built this blog on my own domain (good idea!!) but not self hosted (bad idea!!) at WordPress.com on a WordPress theme.. (the wordpress theme was a a good choice) and proceeded to write my first post. “The World is Hanging Up“.
As traffic grew and comments started coming and people started turning up I wanted to add features to the blog such as banners, plugins and widgets and other elements but due to the limitations of the platform and hosting on wordpress.com I was restricted and I felt I had one hand tied behind my back and I knew that it was costing me traffic to my blog by not optimizing my blog with this WordPress plugin.
One feature that I really knew was costing me page hits and views was a ReTweet button. Readers to my blog were placing comments on Twitter saying “add a retweet button so you make it easy for us to spread your content”.
So I have been working behind the scenes to launch the blog with
- Re-Design (Banner Caricature by John Haycraft)
- New Template (Frugal WordPress Theme which has a great easy to use powerful highly featured interface for making changes without having to know coding)
- Self Hosted (Host Monster which have provided me with great 24/7 service beyond my expectation)
The challenge was to ensure that when I transferred the blog that I didn’t lose the 10,000 plus inbound links to my blog that had built up over the last 15 months so that prople didn’t have dead links when they clicked on these links to go to my blog on other people’s blogs or websites.
So the transfer was completed 2 days ago and the ReTweet button is installed and though it is only 2 days it appears that compared to my last 2 months average traffic the Retweet button has increased traffic to my blog by 55% by making it easy for people to ReTweet my blog without cutting and pasting.
I know it is early days so I will be providing an update to these numbers after a longer term comparison to check to see what effect this one little button continues to add to my traffic.
So do you have a ReTweet button?
Tip: If you need help with Twitter — hire experts or freelancers on Fiverr.
