Back at the first of the year, I decided to put all of my volleyball posts in their own blog. Eventually I will put them on their own domain and hopefully I will be able to monetize the site. Their is a place to tip through PayPal, and any books or products I review will have an Amazon Affiliate link, but otherwise I want it to be ad free. Eventually I'll sell tee shirts or print material from the site. I haven't really talked about it a whole lot here, but I've been working on it throughout the year. I'm currently at 41 posts going back to January 14th of this year. Discounting that first post, which was essentially a "welcome to my blog" post, that's 40 posts over 327 days.
I don't really broadcast that I have the blog. There is a link to it on a couple odd forums I frequent, but they aren't related to volleyball, so it isn't going to drive a lot of traffic there. I have a Google+ page for it, and there is a posting there every time I post on the blog. I throw a couple hashtags on the Google+ posting. On average, I get about 6-10 page views every time I post. If I have posts close together, like within a day or two, there seems to be a better bump in traffic. Individual posts tend to get about 3-5 page views.
In the last week I acquired a new computer. I've been doing the typical breaking in and kicking the tires on the new operating system. As part of that, I looked at Tweet Deck. I'm behind the curve on Twitter. I just never got into it when it was hot and new, and I've only ever had the one account. Probably because of the desire to give Tweet Deck a good test drive, I decided to try a little Twitter experiment.
For the experiment I set up a Twitter account for the volleyball blog. On my main account, I took all of the Twitter users I follow that are volleyball related and put them in a public "Volleyball" list. Then I scheduled a few tweets from the volleyball account with a one sentence teaser for the blog post, a link to the post, and a couple contextually appropriate hashtags. That's about it.
So far, after about 5 hours from the first tweet, page views today are up by almost 20. The post I linked to in the tweet is up about 10. That's a significant increase on that first tweet. I'm pretty happy with that initial bump in traffic. I have three more tweets scheduled for the next two days. It will be interesting to see what happens with those.
Looking at notifications on the volleyball Twitter account I find some amusing things. There were two Twitter users who liked my tweet. One makes sense. It' is an account related to sports leagues. I'm assuming it has to do with youth soccer leagues and the like. I didn't really look into it, but it makes sense. The post in question was about coaching more than just volleyball specifically. The other one, and the third account that added my volleyball twitter account to a list entitled "coaching", makes less sense. The one that liked it is a "Relationship coach and author". The one that added it to a list is a "Business coach for holistic practitioners, health coaches, and spiritual entrepreneurs." I can only imagine they did a search for #coaching and just started liking and adding to a list what they found. I can't imagine how my post could actually relate to business, relationship, or health coaching. It just doesn't. It's about skill and ability as a player and whether or not that translates to being a good coach for that sport. Sure it will apply across different sports, but those other areas not so much. The way some people use Twitter just baffles and amuses me.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next couple days. The first few hours has been a positive in my mind. I'll have to look over my past posts and see what others I want to link to until I have a new post. I think the new post with accompanying Google+ and Twitter links will be needed to really see how things go on this experiment.
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