Blog Tips

Selfhosting a blog is like building your own house

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.

When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space yourself. Of the popular blog softwares, WordPress.org and Movable Type allow you to use your own server. Others, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad don’t give you that option, and will run your blog on their servers.

Intuitively, organisations, and the more “independent minded” bloggers would be inclined to choose for selfhosting, but the choice often is made uninformed. Let me share some of my personal experiences.

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Waiting for the plane last week, I got bored and flipped through a used newspaper I found laying on one of the seats.

Between news about inflation, strikes, H1N1 reports and sad stock markets I found the only thing in the whole paper that made me smile: this Dilbert.

Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.

As you know, you can find backlinks via the Google backlink checker, Google Blog search, and the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing. However these require you to check online regularly. And if you have a few hundred backlinks, it is difficult to pick out the most recent ones.

There is a way to get an automated Email notification when new backlinks become active, using Google Alerts. And it is for free. The only thing you need is a Gmail account, the log-in credentials Google uses for all its services.

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You created your blog, and write posts, write posts, write posts… Gradually, your audience grows. You get comments, get other bloggers linking to you,… Your blog has a lift-off. But how much of a lift-off? Are you flying in orbit, or are you barely clearing the tree tops? How do you measure your blog’s performance. How do you keep track of it?

Success is in the eye of the beholder

What means “success” to you? Are you writing for a selective public? Then reaching those handful would mean accomplishment for you. Are your goals accomplished having created a small working community around your project blog? Good for you. Or are you already happy just to have a medium where you can post stuff, and can refer to if you get questions about your organisation? Ride on!

But.. if you are a main stream blogger, you will need more than that. You will want more than just a handful of visitors per day. You will want more than one comment per week. What tools are around to keep track of how well you are doing?

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When you buy a piece of land, you have only a limited space to build the house of your dreams. When you design a blog, you have only a limited space to convey information. We call it “the blog real estate”.

The most precious real estate is the top of your homepage, the part a visitor sees when arriving at your blog. It is crucial you think about what information you want to display in that limited space.

Why? A typical occasional visitor will make up his/her mind to stay on your blog, in less than one minute. Between 20 and 57 seconds to be exact (see this post). He/she should, at the glance of an eye understand what your blog is all about, how to navigate through it, and what its key features are. Within less than a minute, we have to convince our adhoc visitor our blog is worth spending more time on.

In addition to ’seducing the adhoc visitor’, the prime real estate area of your blog is also the main working area. It is the safe harbour from which each visitor will start the voyage through your blog. It is also the safe harbour the visitor will return to after a trip through one or more posts. For instance: few visitors will look for the “home” link or main navigation features at the bottom of the page, will they? Nope, they will go back to your prime real estate: the top of your blog.

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