The Plan
Posted by aranya
The number one priority for Better Living Through Chemistry Version 2.0 is to attract a larger audience. Right now, I don’t have that many readers, and I blame that on my less than stellar self-promotion skills. Another challenge is that there are a seemingly inexhaustible list of places to get prescription drug information and news online. While this is good in the sense that I clearly picked a relevant topic for my blog, it also poses a problem because it means I need to find a way to make my site stand out above all the rest.
Most of the visitors to my site came from direct traffic, which means they were primarily friends and family. A much smaller percentage came from referring sites and search engines – I would like to change this dramatically.
I think one of the first things I need to do is start commenting regularly on blogs related to the topic of my site. This would help to get my name and site out to the people who are interested in reading about prescription drug news. I also think it would be extraordinarily helpful for me to join discussion forums related to my blog (I actually already joined the Drugs.com forum, but know of several others that would also be good). That way, I could respond to posts and include a link to my website, thereby drawing more readers in. In addition, more readers mean more feedback… and more feedback means more suggestions on how to improve my blog. I think my site would seriously benefit from some constructive criticism from the people who want to read it. Also, if I could get more people to comment on my posts, I would be sure to respond to those comments in an effort to try and engage in a back-and-forth discussion — another surefire way to attract more people to Better Living Through Chemistry.
In addition, I think one of the keys to making my site stand out above others is to write breaking news posts daily. With all the competition out there, the way to get noticed is to be on the pulse of the latest and most interesting prescription drug developments.
Based on the feedback that I got back from some of my readers, I think I need to find a way to make my site more focused and more interactive. There are several widgets that I would like to add to my blog to make it more technologically savvy, and well, just generally more interesting and visually engaging. They include:
- The Who Linked widget shows visitors which sites have recently linked to my site, and best of all, it works with all major blog platforms.
- The FEEDJIT shows my real time site traffic in my blog’s sidebar.
- The Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge I think this would be a great visual addition to my site. It displays images from my Flickr profile with a Flash photo stream. However, rather than use it to display personal pictures from my Flickr photo stream, I would like to use it to display some of the prescription drug photos from my posts.
- The Poll Daddy widget would allow me to create polls and show them on my website, which I think would be great since there are a lot of interesting opinion questions that could potentially be posed about prescription drug use.
- The Criteo AutoRoll widget displays links to blogs similar to min
Finally, several people mentioned that they weren’t sure if Better Living Through Chemistry is aimed at an examination of the negative aspects of prescription drug use in America, the positive aspects or both. I had originally intended to make it about both the good and the bad, but I guess that fact is not effectively conveyed in the blurb on my site banner. Subsequently, Version 2.0 of my blog would include a more clear-cut explanation of what my blog is about. I don’t want to focus on just the good, or just the bad, aspects of pharmaceutical culture in America because I think that it is a topic that encompasses a little bit of both. After all, I am a journalist, and even though this is a blog, I would ultimately like to remain fair, balanced and open.
