TheRomanticWay

The blog is cool. Very very cool because blogging is personal. The blog has brought such a freedom of expression in writing that the website didn’t quite allow. We found that the website lends itself to informational articles, recipes and poetry while the blog lends itself to dynamic sharing of information as well as experience and perception with more emotion and romance. We’ll continue to add great romantic content to the site pages of course, but the blog allows us to live and share our lives more in the moment. We can write what’s on our hearts and interact with our readers in a way that the website can’t do. Now that we have a month of blogging under our belt, here’s where we’re going with it.

While hundreds are reading The Romantic Way every day now, we’d like to increase that to thousands. A good way to do that is to treat the search engines well by consistently adding great content through the blog and the website. Even better is to interact with our readers and the writers and readers of other great blogs. This creates community on the internet — exactly the romantic dynamic that we’ve found over the last year with the website and what we’ll see grow even more through the blog. You’re a part of that romantic community made possible through the incredible magic of blogging.

They’re very powerful conversation enablers; they help people express care and concern and dissent in non-threatening ways; they help avoid mutual-admiration-society selection bias; they build trust amongst teams; they exposes heresies and cancers; they prevent me (and people like me) from believing in our own propaganda. Cass R. Sunstein

Blogging Toward Romance

Nothing happens unless you set goals. My old friend Randy always told me, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Or as someone else said, “If you shoot for nothing, you’ll probably hit it.” In short, it’s best to plan. At least you’ll achieve part of your goals. Here’s what we hope to do in the next month. It’s kind of a public experiment. If we do what we say, will we show results in a month? Can the internet respond that quickly? I don’t know, but we’re going to give it a go and find out.

First, we need a benchmark. We’ll use visitors stats for the first five months of 2007:
May 2007: 4223
Apr 2007: 3375
Mar 2007: 4048
Feb 2007: 4542
Jan 2007: 2914

As you can see, February was a high month. Any guesses? Right. Valentines Day. Romantic sites get a lot of visitors looking for Valentines Day ideas. We still show a steady climb in spite of the Valentines Day peak. If the trend continues, we’ll probably naturally beat February without doing anything at all. We want better, though. I’d like to add more than just a few hundred in a month. I’d like to add a couple thousand. Here’s what we’ll do during the month of June to see if we get results.

• Post a minimum of three times per week to the blog;
• Add a minimum of three pages of content per week to the articles or recipes portion of the website;
• Write at least an article a week for article banks;
• Exchange links with another website at least once per week;
• Post on forums or backlink to other great blogs every week;
• Position ads and high-quality offerings on every page of the site and blog;
• Add site to quality directories every week.

So, at the beginning of July, we’ll look again at our visitors stats for June and see what kind of results we’ve got. If we’re getting results and building The Romantic Way community, we’ll know that we’re reaching more people and working well. Also, those of you who wish to start your own website or blog, can for yourselves if what we’re doing here really works or not. So will we.

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