Blazing Minds

Back with more Blogger Interviews, as mentioned before each week I will be interviewing a fellow blogger who has kindly answered my blogging questions, so let’s get on with it…

Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?
A: Well, my name is Eve, I am 27 years old and live in Florida, USA. Married to a great guy and we have a 15 month old daughter. I have been blogging for about 6 years, only recently I changed directions, getting rid of my long time blog and starting a new one with a whole new purpose. My previous blog was successful, great traffic, income, page rank, the works, but it became a burden, it was no longer a place to share myself, it had become my ‘job’ and although the extra income was great, I no longer looked forward to blogging and you could tell towards the end. So I deleted it. My plan was to stop blogging completely, but as a long time blogger I just didn’t know what else to do with myself so here I am.

Q: Hi Eve, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: My blog, Letters to Breathe, was born out of a need to express myself freely, and wanting to allow others to do the same. The name was born out of a mommy blogger group I am part of, the MomDot forums, I shared my ideas and with the help of a few ladies we brainstormed names together. I love “Letters to Breathe” because it not only says the point of the site (letters) but the “to Breathe” symbolizes that when you get these things off your chest you will be able to breathe again.

The blog is a place for people to be able to read and submit letters anonymously. These letters are commonly called “unsent letters”, they allow you to say what you want to someone and not have to deal with the repercussions. They could be letters to a friend that betrayed you, to a ex-husband, to someone you care about but can’t tell them. The letters are all over the spectrum, sad, loving, happy, one of my favorites so far was a letter written to a father that had committed suicide years ago, that one was hard to read, but beautiful. One of the posts I made explains the concept in more detail if you are interested.

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: Yes, definitely. The first few weeks of starting a blog are filled with customizing, adding and changing plugins, building links, and adding content. That in itself consumes a lot of time. Even once you get the blog going it takes time to build and maintain relationships in social media and with other bloggers. Taking time to analyze traffic sources to be sure you are not investing time into a source that brings no traffic or low-quality traffic is another time consumer. I also try to evaluate the overall design and functionality of the blog at east once a month, doing maintenance like cleaning up the sidebars, checking for new improved plugins that offer better functionality, etc.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: This is a great question, I have been checking daily to she what is working and I have been really surprised with some of the results. Traffic sources that failed on my last blog are flourishing on this one. My main traffic right now comes from Stumble-Upon, EntreCard, and Google Adwords (I had a $50 credit so I decided to play with it) I also get a good bit of traffic from the various forums I am actively a member of, and a few from twitter and facebook.

The suprise came in the form of bounce rates, for example, my experience with entreCard on my last blog was great traffic, but a bounce rate of over 90%, so those were ‘low quality’ visits. Now I am seeing not only great traffic but amazingly a bounce rate of only 1%, and an average of 2.16 pages per visit. Somehow I am converting ‘droppers’ into readers. Same goes with stumbleUpon, that source is known for it’s high bounce rates, people just glance it over and go on to the next page, but I am seeing a bounce rate of only 20% total, same average page views per visit as well.

I don’t know what I am doing right, but it is working whatever it is. I just hope I can keep it up. As a whole the blog has a bounce rate of only 6.62% and average pages viewed per visit is at 3.33 for this month. By the way, I use Google Analytics as my stats program.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: I do, right now I am only using a few, but plan on expanding once I get established with those. I use twitter of course, I am @letters2breathe on there, and I am still working on building a following as it is a new account. I also use entrecard and stumbleUpon as mentioned above. I recently signed up at blogEngage as LettersToBreathe but I haven’t quite figured out how to best use that one. Of course the others like BlogCataloge and BlogLog are useful as well.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: Stick with it, a blog takes time and work to get to a point where you will be satisfied. If your goal is to make money then you have to be dedicated and not expect overnight results. It took me over a year to make substantial income with my old blog. Most bloggers end up getting discouraged and quitting before they reach that point. Don’t use bad marketing etiquette, like posting unhelpful comments or threads in forums just to get your link there, be helpful and on topic to the post and people will be more willing to click on the link to see what else you have to say.

Thanks for the interview, and I hope to see you all over at the blog submitting your own letters soon! Feedback is always welcome, if you see something I should change or add to the blog I want to hear it!

Thanks Eve for taking the time to be interviewed.

If you are interested in an interview on Blazing Minds then please use the Contact Me button at the top of the Blazing Minds blog..

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4. Latest Blogger Interview with Mike Crimmins from Daily Shot of Coffee
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 8:02 am and is filed under Blogger Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.