Tomorrow at CGBB, I will begin a series about the changing climate of ethnicity in baseball. In the wake of globalization efforts, the decline of African-American participation, and the influx of international talent to the game, each part will focus on a different facet of the changing ethnic culture of baseball as we know it. We’ll explore some of the causes and the potential effects of the trends and even suggest some things to consider as we move forward into a new era of the game.

My computer is down, so I figure now is a good time to just review our stats, and what’s bring visitors here.

For the month of March:

We had 6,500 unique visitors, which works out to be an average of 209 unique visitors per day. For some reason, Thursday seemed to be our most popular day of the week.

72% of our visitors stayed from 0-30 seconds, while 8% stayed 30 seconds – 2 minutes. I’m curious how this will change for this month.

47% viewed us on FireFox and 34% on Internet Explorer.

Our biggest referrals are from BlogExplosion, StumbleUpon, Linkreferral, blogmad, and a few other traffic exchanges. MyBlogLog also brought us 147 visitors.
I’m spending about 15$ per month on adwords, and that brought in about 300 visitors.

Finally, our most searched keyphrases that brought visitors to us.

bayb and blogaboutyourblog those two are obvious. We also got searches for ebates, images of venom, leave a comment, vacations.net, free phone calls over the internet, and youths of today are leaders of tomorrow.

Many bloggers have started competitions to help interact with their readers, and reward those loyal. Not only that, but to get more readers!

Our friend Nick over at The Details, is running a “evil” photoshop contest featuring John Chow. If you don’t know who John Chow is (maybe if you live in a cave lol), you can read my review of John Chow Dot Com.

All you have to do in this contest is make John Chow look as evil as you can, and you could win 10$ from Nick. Not only that but you will get four one way links from Nick (assuming from his other blogs) as well as getting a free review of your site. He writes great reviews by the way!

You only have until next Sunday, so get editing!

Here is Blog about your Blog’s official entry:

Big Web Links Bid Directory is “a search engine friendly web directory”. What is different about this directory is they are basically rewarding websites that contribute the most. To be listed on their homepage you would have to ‘donate’ 152$. The directory is new, therefore they have no page rank. However they expect with all of the promotion they’ve received and paid for, that they should have a good page rank the next time there is a Google PR update.

Faced with time off work and a challenge to attract new readers on a traditionally slow day, MyBlogLog Sunday seemed like a good event to tackle. In week 3, judging by the comments at least, it still does!

The Content Blogger’s Sunday Challenge

For many content-based bloggers, Sunday is a bad day. Those folks working 6 days a week, have had enough of surfing the net, and it is a tall order to expect people to read the same stuff on their day off that they do at work. So numbers drop. Do you resign yourself to the lull, or do something about it?

The trouble is, for most bloggers with a job, Sunday is often the time to relax too, so who wants to take on a project for a special Sunday? Well, bloggers who don’t work 9 to 5, 6 days a week! That would be me. Sunday isn’t too precious. Putting 3 and 3 together, I went the MyBlogLog route and devised a plan which should benefit all concerned.

What is MyBlogLog Sunday?

Some quick background, MyBlogLog is a community for bloggers. We all have an icon and a widget. If you visit a site that is involved in the community, invariably your icon appears as a “latest vistior” in the widget in the sidebar.

For the past 3 Sundays at about 10.30am, it has been really interesting to visit the sites of the last 10 bloggers to appear on the face widget thing in The Pisstakers side bar. I spend quite a bit of time looking through and reading posts and most importantly, digest the About Me post (if there is one) on each blog. I then put together a post with a thumbnail and a few priceless words about each blog. Although I only write 3 lines, I think they give a fair reflection of the blogs in question.

Who benefits, if anyone?

The experience is beneficial for everyone involved, I think.

For the bloggers, they get a few deep links from The future PR8 Pisstakers!!!!! Hopefully a bit of feelgood. And if they win the prize (like Polliwog’s pond just did) for referring traffic to our site in the following week, they get some gummi bears and a review too. And I have posted all about the event on MyBlogLog, here, and on our site, which I am sure has added something to the exposure of the participants. And, you get the idea…

For me as a plain simple surferI can have the mindset that “you better get my attention fast”. And I get to discover some really hot blogs I would never find, normally.

For me as a reviewer, it is revealing too, to look more carefully at how these random blogs are put together. There are some amazingly clear and perfectly formed themes out there, as well as some real dogs, especially those mile long slow-loading widgetty word press blogs! There are some brilliant writers too, and some who spell badly enough that they should consider declaring in big letters that they aren’t native Englsh writers!

At the end of the day, it has been encouraging and there must surely be some connection between the life of MyBlogLog Sunday and a 30% rise in traffic – spread over the whole month.

I’d like to congratulate bobbarama for being chosen as our comment friday winner.

He has been an active commentor for the past few fridays, so I thought we’d give him a break. This doesn’t mean we don’t expect him next friday!

We were held to under 20 comments last friday, but that’s partly my fault as I didn’t get the post up in time. We are putting our son on a sleeping schedule, it’s not fun lol.

Thanks for all the comments, if you are running a comment friday on your blog, let me know.

I do it, Bob down the road does it and from time to time I’d expect you do it.

That’s right I’m talking about the long post.

It may be you’re just really enthusiastic about the topic you’re writing or the topic itself may deserve the length. The other week I wrote a particularly long post (a lot of my posts are quite long but this one more so than others). It was a subject that I’d been thinking about a fair bit and I wanted to get my thoughts out there.

A delightful lady commented on the post mentioning that she usually doesn’t read such long posts but managed to make it all the way through this one. The reason why was simply the article was interesting to her.

Your average reader may not be as willing to go down the long post path with you even if they are interested in the content. So how can you help your chances? The answer may be as simple as headings.

Why use headings in your longer posts?

A heading helps the casual reader by visually marking particular sections and ideas. It means that within a glance the reader can see what you are talking about and find their way around. Most importantly it breaks up long stretches of text that are miserable to read on the computer screen.

The thing is headings also help you the writer as it will contribute to you keeping to the topic being discussed and if you write your headings before instead of after they can give you a roadmap to get your ideas down.

Things to remember when writing your headings.

• You have to set them apart from the rest of the text. Do this by bolding them or perhaps using the html tags such as h2 h3 etc.
• Use the same format throughout the post otherwise it will just become disorganised looking.
• Don’t go nuts on the headings either – too many will look silly and contribute to an unreadible post.
• Make sure the headings are self-explanatory. I could have used the heading tips instead I wrote things to remember when writing your headings so anyone would know what this section is.

Looking back at my post.

In my original post I didn’t use headings to help readers and I wonder how many actual readers I turned off from the post. I did however have some graphics that did help break up the text but the next time I have something like that on my mind (and I think I may have another in me for sometime later in the week) I’m going to definitely use headings and see if there is any difference in the comments.

Try it out on your blog with your next lengthy post and let us know if you notice any difference in the writing or the response!