I may have mentioned in recent retirement blogs a slight concern I’ve got about the Google ranking of this same blog. I know some of you have told me not to be so silly and that Google rankings are of no importance. And of course you’re right I’m merely making yet another rod for my own back, as the saying goes. And yet…
I still keep checking and, like much else in my retirement life, the results are quite illogical. There was a time not so long ago when not only was I on page one of Google I was actually in first place that is if you googled retirement blog although strangely not retirement blogs with an ‘s’. Anyway those days are long gone.
These days I’m on page 2 and according to my data I’m not getting many referrals from plain old ‘search engines’. Which I suppose are from people who just simply google the term. I still get referrals from a website entitled ‘satisfyingretirement.blogspot.com’ but, Bob Lowry, the guy who ran this blog has closed it down so I assume referrals to my blog will continue to decrease.
It’s frustrating because changing the fortunes of my blog for the better feels quite beyond my control and, as regular readers know, I don’t like those bits of retirement life that are beyond my control. Sooo, in an effort to regain some control, I’ve decided on two actions.
Both fairly costly for the man who doesn’t make any money from his retirement blog. After all, it’s hardly a business, but nor would I want it to be. The free actions I took in the past to increase my readership – publishing a retro blog and a podcast, making, in some weeks, 4 blogs, haven’t really helped. Or so it appears.
So I’ve decided to spend some money. I’m going to post a blog about our finances shortly, when I can pluck up the courage to report the figures. Because, when I wrote them down in my diary, they frightened the life out of me. Not enough to stop spending but scary none the less.
I already paid out £200 for a Guardian course on running your own blog but that wasn’t really about improving one’s readership figures but it was a cash outlay nonetheless. But now let me just say that, in terms of this retirement blog and readership, I’m going to pay my tech guy £200 (reduced from £500 he tells me) to improve my ranking by such things as caching, HTML optimisation, pre-resolve DNS etc. These mean as much to me as Monty Python’s ‘cross beam’s gone out of skew on treddle’, but if he says it will help then so be it.
The other action I do understand. I’ve done it before. This is to place an advert in The Oldie magazine this Christmas. This is analogue as opposed to digital. It, the advert, looks nice as you can see above, but as to whether it helps my readership I really have no idea. I did have a comment once from a guy who said he’d started reading my blog after seeing this advert in The Oldie. Whether that’s a good return for the £150, again I have no idea. But at least in this case I understand what’s happening.
Of course there is a flaw in this dual strategy. As I frequently used to say to teachers when we were constructing a behaviour change plan, we need to change just one thing at a time otherwise we won’t know which one (if any) have brought about the change. Duh. And yet here I am changing two things at once. Double duh.
Anyway this is what I intend to do. Of course there is a both simpler and cheaper option and this is simply to stop worrying about my readership data and just take pleasure in writing and publishing or sharing my writing efforts with the world out there. How hard can that be? Well apparently very hard verging on impossible when it comes to yours truly. I always was a bit competitive in my working days and I seem to have carried this personality trait with me into retirement. Oh goody.