In the last six months my blog has grown gaining many new readers and (I assume) some of my original 40-odd followers are no longer blogging. Indeed, initially enthusiastic, after three months I failed to blog for fourteen whole months! But I had a couple of early posts that proved popular with internet searches and thus my blog was not exactly dormant (even though I was).

So now a veteran of six whole months of blogging at least once a week – and since February two or three times a week – I can analyse my blog stats. One thing I notice when posting content from week to week is that rarely the older articles are selected to read. If they are it is because they are located by a search engine and not the WordPress Reader.

I’ve several posts that are regularly read via that route and if I’ve learned anything to share with other bloggers it is to keep your titles simple, for it is my belief that it is the simple titles that search engines locate. For example, if you are looking for information about man-midwives in the eighteenth century, your search term will be something like, ‘man-midwife 18th century’. My post, whenever I’ve tried it on other computers, usually is top three! Its title? The Man-Midwife in the 18th Century.

To promote interest in other content I began hyperlinking blogs in other posts although that doesn’t guarantee that they will be read but at least a series of posts can be viewed in order if required.

So when KaylaAnn wrote her Blogging Tip: Re-use Old Content (5th April 2018) I read with interest and even commented that my one and only attempt at re-blogging, when I had decided to recommit to the HistorianRuby blog, had given me three whole views!

Yesterday, without a post ready – work has been busy – I tried again.

My Blogging Experiment

I chose a post that I have great faith in, I like it, but I think the original title was not attractive (or clickable).

It was the second of a two-parter, the first being Digital v Physical Archives: a Personal Account, Part 1 and the second entitled Digital v Physical Archives: a Personal Account, Part 2. Whilst the first post is relatively popular and contains a lot about my family history research, the second covers what some may view as less exciting academic research and has a meagre sixteen views in total, even after hyperlinking it in other posts and sharing on Community Pool.

This time I edited it to remove any reference to the first-parter and retitled it Using Archives for Academic Research, reflecting its content of my adventures in archives whilst studying for my history degree. I added one or two sentences and re-sized the photos.

After 24 hours it has twenty-one views. Not fantastic, compared to some of my viewing stats, but my blog has had a fairly quiet couple of weeks, however, it has beaten the original view statistics that were achieved over a twenty-two month period! That to me, proves my experiment a success!

Epilogue

Six months after my blogging adventure restarted I have now bought my domain name, HistorianRuby is now a dot com!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you historianruby.com and you are welcome.