I was mooching around the Home Document Manager wordpress back end today when a thought struck me – I hadn’t seen any core or plugin updates for a while. After a bit of investigation, I noticed that 2 plugins had enabled themselves (or had been enabled by some other actor); namely “Disable Wordpress plugin updates” and “Disable Wordpress core updates”. I have never used these plugins so was understandably perplexed by their presence.
After disabling them, all maner of plugin and core updates appeared. I’m not sure if this represents anything sinister, but it’s certainly odd. Anyone else noticed this behaviour?
Like a lot of micro ISV‘ers, copywriting is not my strong point, but, I stumbled across an interesting way to boost traffic to the Home Document Manager blog. When I issue an update, which can be as frequently as once a week, I found I was making a series of posts with repetetive, uninspired titles – “Update Released,” “Minor Update Released” etc. Then, for one of my updates, I wrote a small piece explaining some of the issues with TWAIN. The post was entitled “Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet,” an obvious reference to Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West.”
Suddenly, instead of a dull and uninteresting nuggat about an update, this small, boring post, became the most popular post on the blog. The main traffic sources were people searching for the quote, so it wasn’t highly targetted traffic, but since these kinds of posts would seldom attract traffic anyway, untargetted traffic has to trump no traffic. It can’t hurt my Google standings either, since the post makes a reference to Kipling, as well as the TWAIN specification. The double entendre is an interesting way to get a free traffic boost. Take this post for example, I wonder if it will start ranking for the “Tales of The Unexpected” TV series??
The second unexpected traffic source came from a review I wrote about my new shredder. This too became the hottest post on the blog, and is still pulling in 3 times more traffic than any other post or page. This is different because it is, of course, pretty highly targetted traffic. I’ve gone on to publish a review of one of the Scansnap scanners to see if I can replicate the earlier success. I guess this goes back to one of the first principles of micro ISV blogging – blog about things your customers are interested in.
When adding a new post, Zemanta comes to life and gives a little bit
of added value to your post. While you are typing, Zemanta is busy
looking for related articles and images, and allows you to incorporate
them with a single click.
The images come from Wikipedia, Flickr
and other stock photo providers. The articles come from a list of top
media sources, and the links it suggest I think are entirely from
Wikipedia.
A couple of criticisms and suggestions:
The images have so far not impressed me.
The “suggested articles” would be better pulled from sources on your Google Reader list. It doesn’t feel very ‘bloggy’ to be giving outbound links to sources I don’t read.
But all in all, seems quite nice, so I’m going to run with it for a post or two and see how I go.
