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I’m into the last 10-day leg of my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion.  I’m not as optimistic this time as I was last time, and my numbers have leveled off, at least in the short term. I picked up 34 subscribers in the first ten days, but from that point to today have added only nine more subscribers.   As of today we’re at 51 Subscribers.

I’m still pretty happy overall with the growth of the blog.  After all, it’s brand new, and just celebrated its one month birthday on April Fool’s Day.  All in all, an average of 202 visitors per day is good at this point.

By far the biggest contribution to the site’s traffic to date is StumbleUpon, so again, thanks go out to Bob Younce for first submitting me there.  Looks like he’s going to win the ad without too much trouble at all unless some superstar blogger visitor steps up.  Oh sorry, was that in bold?

This traffic has slowed to a trickle in recent days, partly because I don’t want to overdo stumbling myself. 

Here’s where most of the referrals are coming from:

http://www.stumbleupon.com 1,615
http://entrecard.com 157
http://www.google.com 90
http://realestatetomato.typepad.com 79
http://www.mybloglog.com 28
http://www.particlewave.com 26
http://blogsearch.google.com 21
http://activerain.com 21
http://articlespecialist.blogspot.com 16
http://www.problogger.net 14

About half of those Google referrals are from subsbcribers using the reader, the other half are from organic search and blog search.  Like StumbleUpon, Entrecard has also slowed to a trickle since I’m not over there mindlessly clicking around.  The problogger visits are just from a few comments — pretty amazing.

I’m content to let the numbers grow organically from here on, even though I could probably make a concerted effort to land another tasty guest blogging spot and perhaps pull the numbers in by the skin of my teeth.  To be honest, at this stage of the game I’m more interested in focusing in on some topics so I’ll know what I’ll do with those next fifty subscribers when I get them!

To all my current subscribers, thanks so much, and again, I’ll try to keep some worthwhile stuff coming!

A few years back I read a story about successful podcasters and one of the podcasts that got a great review was Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Grammar Tips. To tell the truth I’d forgotten all about this site until recently, when I happened to stumble upon it using, as you may have already guessed, StumbleUpon.

I don’t subscribe to podcasts, but fortunately Grammar Girl’s (aka Mignon Fogarty’s) work is also available in blog format. This blog has only been in my reader a short time, but already it’s one of the favorites, because it has good, simple grammar advice.

Time spent studying the rules of grammar, rhetoric, and style is time well spent. To be sure, most writers hit the mark on these rules a large portion of the time, but I’ve found that my writing improves enormously to the extent I spend a couple of hours per week on the nuts and bolts of the craft.

But when it comes to Grammar Girl, I’m not just motivated by self-inflicted self-improvement. On the contrary, Fogarty has a way of making the subject very engaging and an easy read.

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about writing? How did these design elements get here?

I like the second one better. It looks better if you click it to see it full size.

My wife likes the current look and feel better than that one, though. There’s something about the whole black and white that must be a guy thing.

Readers, what do you think?

If you’re interested in places where you can submit your articles, check out the guest post I wrote this week, Freelance Faceoff:  EZineArticles Versus Associated Content.   Thank you to Jesse Hines at Vigorous Writing for asking me to send that over and for his kind words about the article.

I’ve been doing an article for EZineArtices every few days.  I mention in the Vigorous Writing article, it’s working out quite well.  Here’s my EZineArticles Author Page.  Based on one of the mistakes I made, I can offer you the following tip so you can avoid doing the same thing.  If you’re going to publish an article somewhere else, be careful if you go back into the EZineArticles editor once your article has been saved and approved.  There’s an auto-save feature on the editor.  If you’re not careful, you can do what I did, which is accidentally mark an already-approved article as "changed" and thereby send it through the approval process again.

I made that mistake in the context of trying out another article submission site this week:  Article City.  ArticleCity.com looked really great at first glance, and there were many articles there that had been widely re-circulated.  I tried submitting an article there, however, and after a few days it seems pretty likely that nobody’s home.  It’s not so unusual that my submission hasn’t received a response yet, but at the same time the site hasn’t changed at all in the past few days.  The same article on "Measuring Lubricant Quality" has been on the top of page one during this time, so it doesn’t appear they’ve been approving anyone else’s new articles, either.

Related Articles:

Forthcoming Guest Post on Article Submissions

This has been a busy week.  I was very gratified to get Dave Smith to come by and take part in our new series, What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy, and Dave was a big enough draw that subscriptions went up quite a bit after his article.  I’ve started making inquiries of some exciting new authors.  If you have people you’d like to see, drop me a comment.

Over on Sacramento-Home.com, I had to play fix-the-code-that-Metrolist-broke after our local MLS changed its database structure.  I’ve been able to put together quite a few interesting web site features using a combination of MLS exports, a MySQL database, and some PHP programming.  The neat thing about such work is that you can offer your users some really custom content and search options, and I’ve found this goes over really well.  In spite of all the hype about blogging, home shoppers aren’t looking for a pundit — they’re looking for a house.  The down side is that every year or so you need to spend a day or two fixing code, but for the benefit, it’s certainly worth the time.

Everyone is hanging around on Twitter this week.  A few weeks ago everyone was hanging out on FaceBook.  As social networks go, you have to like Twitter, because once you’ve set up TwitterFeed to blab at your friends for you, you don’t actually have to spend any time blabbing at them yourself.  Well, there I go being a Luddite again.  If you want to try your hand at using Twitter to promote your blog, check out Chris Brogan’s guest post on ProBlogger.  That’s much better.  I’ll have to do resource post on Chris over at Inklit — he’s got some great stuff going on over there.

New Social Network alert.   Come play over at FriendFeed.

As an Internet writer, I love hearing about the death of print.  All your newspapers and magazines are going to fold any minute, and then everyone will be online all the time looking for rising young pundits like me.  Well, "pundits like me", anyway.  The main thing is that we won’t have to deal with those inconvenient literary agents and editors whose poor jobs Andrew Keen is so concerned about.   Then we can just hoist up our content and claim our AdSense Money.  I want my MTV.

My Favorite Death of Print Picture

Here is my favorite picture showing how print is dying, a chart of the stock for McClatchy Company over the last few years.  McClatchy is the company that owns several newspapers including my home town paper.

This chart shows print dying on schedule.  If you read what some of the McClatchy papers have to say about their troubled fortunes, however, they’re more likely to put most of the blame on the declining ad revenue caused by the troubled real estate market.

I think they’re just blowing smoke.  Print is dying, I tell you.  Didn’t they hear the rumor?

Other Numbers Tell A Different Tale

I don’t know if print is dying fast enough for my taste, however.  Every time I go to Borders, I find three two-sided shelves, fully loaded with print magazines.  You’d think they’d be down to two shelves or something if print were really in its death throes, but so far they’re still hanging on quite nicely.  There must be at least two dozen magazines dedicated to women’s abdomens alone.  Fortunately they only cover the top 1/10th of 1% of women’s abdomens, too, or they could fill up the entire store.

As if all these magazines weren’t problem enough for the death of print rumor, along comes the web site of the MPA, or Magazine Publishers of America.   This site publishes all sorts of magazine circulation statistics, for both single issue sales and subscriptions.  For example, here are the 2006 subscription figures for the top 100 ABC magazines.  Let’s see how fast print is dying.  The two top magazines are AARP magazines at about 22 million subscribers each.  Of course, AARP circulation has a captive audience of AARP members, so this number is artificially high.  Let’s check out the number three magazine, Reader’s Digest.  About 9.7 million people subscribe to that.   (I guess it really DOES pay to increase your word power). 

Now let’s see how the blogs are doing.  Technorati’s top blog as of today is Engadget, with no subscription numbers available.  Fair enough.  Tech Crunch, the number two blog, boasts some 734,000 subscribers.

As you can see, the number three ABC magazine has twelve times as many subscribers as the number two blog.  Of course, the real readership in each case is harder to measure.  How many of those Readers Digests are sitting in a dentist’s office somewhere?   We don’t know.  Based on my own subscriber and traffic numbers, I would expect TechCrunch’s daily visitor count to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million to 6 million, so Reader’s Digest still wins has a pretty handy lead based on circulation numbers alone.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion / spin for the comments.

I hope you enjoyed this essay content, and invite you to subscribe for more.  I need big subscription numbers for when I release my blog to Kindle.  Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Amazon.com the company that was selling us all Segue’s a few years back?  Whatever happened to those…