A day of writing and promotion

I have mentioned before the importance of not just writing regularly, but promoting the things you write too. I wont go over old ground by explaining the reasons for that again but I thought it might be a good idea to write about the things I do when writing and promoting my stuff to give people an idea. This is just the way I work, everyone will do things differently but I thought it might be nice for people who maybe don't know where to start.

I also want to point out that I have been off all day today so have probably spent at least twice my normal amount of time online but this is typical for me when I am off.

I actually put the laptop on first thing this morning to deal with all my emails and look at some stuff for mum so after lunch which is when I usually start working all the other stuff was already done and I was able to get straight to work.

I had a few notification emails that I had noticed earlier from hub pages and some other places so I dealt with them first. There were a few comments to reply to and a few comments on my answers to other people's questions, some of which required a response but most of which didn't. I considered writing a hub, but I have neither the time or the energy for those daft capsule thingys so I decided against it. I looked at my earnings report and realised that I actually get a half decent rate per thousand views and again considered putting more effort in there and again dismissed the idea.

I then came on here and replied to comments, read a few posts and commented on a few. This led to me going off on a tangent and investigating another paid to write site that a member had mentioned. I am pretty sure that its the members own site as there are only three articles on there two of which are by the person who wrote about it here. I left a comment on the post here and spent a silly amount of time researching the site to see if I could find out anything about it. You see its become a mission of mine to stop people getting ripped off by sites that don't pay or are otherwise dodgy.

I then went to twitter and posted a few tweets about random things. This keeps twitter happy because if you post nothing but links they see you as a spammer and you can get kicked off twitter altogether. I then dealt with my notifications, replied to mentions and thanked people for the retweets before looking for some things to retweet myself. Retweeting people encourages them to retweet you and helps both of you get more views.

I then went to justunfollow.com which is a great tool that I have written about before. It allows me to see any new followers or people who have unfollowed me and either follow them back or unfollow them as I choose. Its great to have all that info and the ability to deal with it all in one place. You can also use it to find more people to follow, but that wasn't something I did today. I had quite a few new followers, some of whom I followed back and some of whom I didn't and I had a few unfollowers, but I hadn't been following any of them anyway so nothing needed to be done there.

My focus then turned to my blog. I hadn't written anything there for a few days so I wrote a post and added the link to my socialoomph queue which autotweets posts for me at preset times. I also spent a bit of time looking at my adsense and analytics reports and decided to change one of my ad formats to a slightly bigger, but hopefully better preforming ad. It will take at least a few days before I notice a difference in my reports but I am hoping the difference will be a positive one.

While I was on socialoomph I randomised my queued auto tweets. the program does this at the click of a button and I like to do it every so often so twitter doesn't think I am posting the exact same stuff over and over again, which technically I am I guess but I throw some other stuff in there too. I had a quick look at my statistics there, but I don't really give them much weight as they are always far higher than the corresponding statistics on the sites the links actually point to - I think they might be counting invalid views in with the valid ones.

One of the first things I check on my blog is where my views are coming from, there is no point in doing promotion work if you don't know that what you are doing is working. As I expected most of my views are still coming from the links I post on twitter, but I am starting to get more direct views from google searches which is great news. Stumbleupon is helping a little too but I cant add any more links there for my blog anyway as it only allows you to 'stumble' a certain amount of pages from the same domain. I don't know what the magic number is, I am only recently returning to stumbleupon but when I used it before I had literally hundreds of helium.com articles stumbled and no one ever stopped me from doing that, maybe its a new thing? I put that on my to do list - I need to get familiar with the newer stumbleupon and what rules have and haven't changed.

I then came back here and done some more reading, tweeted a few posts I found interesting and tried to think of something interesting to write about. I came up with nothing so decided it was time for coffee.

When I came back from coffee I returned to twitter to see if I had any replies or anything to my earlier tweets. There was nothing really interesting going on there so I read a few things people had linked to and retweeted the ones that were interesting.

I then did some searching for blogs that blog about writing online. As I mentioned in my last post, throwing in an appropriate comment mentioning this site may help get some views. I admit I got a little bored of reading the same thing over and over again. All these blogs promising huge earnings on sites that don't even exist anymore, it began to annoy me so I gave up after the first few. That got me thinking about writing about writing myself, but I quickly dismissed that thought once I realised I don't have all that much to say on the subject.

I decided to stop by Bubblews which is something I have not done for a long time. I had a total of six notifications of my connections posting new stuff, most of my connections have quite rightly stopped writing there. I really need to copy and delete all my stuff there, but every time I think about doing it I just cant be bothered. I might just delete everything without copying it, theres nothing interesting there anyway that I can remember.

I then came back here, replied to comments and stated writing this post, which has taken a ridiculous amount of time as my phone has rang twice. I have a joint of beef in my slow cooker - the first time I have tried to cook a joint of meat in there so hopefully now that I have finished this post its time for dinner.

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