As we enter the month of May which will see me turn 21 and lose what I consider my USP, it’s time for another monthly report which shows the ViperChill stats for April. While I have no goals for the stats here in any way, I find it interesting to track changes on a monthly basis and I hope you find it interesting too.

I did slack on the amount of posts written in April due to my hectic workload and a lot of things happening in my life that I couldn’t control, but that didn’t seem to slow down growth at all. Now let’s look at those traffic sources so you can all steal them (legally) from me, shall we?

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Though I’ve written about working as the social media manager for brands like Nissan, Land Rover and Hewlett Packard, I’ve never talked about many of my achievements in this space. For example, you might not know that I helped one newspaper go from a limited social media presence to helping them hit the Digg homepage over 40 times.

Or, how when I worked with Bacardi we drove so much traffic to their site that we took down their servers. Twice. I have plans to cover these stories in more detail in the next few months, but to start the coverage of Social Media here at ViperChill I wanted to bring in 9 other experts in the field to share their thoughts on leveraging social media as a whole.

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I hope that my old English teacher is reading this post. The one who openly told me in front of 28 other students that “writing is not for you.” Whilst I’ve said time and time again that I don’t think I’m a great writer, I do know that my writing has greatly improved in recent years and I’ve been able to use my words to earn me a lot of money.

What you say online is far more important than how you say it, of course, but being able to convey complex messages in a simple manner is not an easy task. To quote Blaise Pascal, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” In this post I want to share the steps that took me from someone who was verbally raped by my English teachers and hated writing to writing for thousands of people on a weekly basis.

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I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for Wordpress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.

Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your Wordpress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.

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This blog post is quite long so you probably shouldn’t read it. To the 50% of visitors who are still with me, I’ll say now that less than 1% of you will get to the end so you may as well leave now. The value here is in reading the whole post; not in skimming. Now that we’re left with just a few people, let me say first say “Hey” and secondly say “This blog post will go against 99% of the things you’ve ever read about blogging.”

I’m going to be controversial and I might even upset a few people. I’m not being controversial for the sake of controversy and I’ve been told I’m actually quite a nice guy. I’m simply telling the truth, and giving you the real state of the blogosphere for no other reason than it’s about time something like this was said.

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A few months ago something was bothering me quite a lot. One of my best friends, Diggy, was implementing all of the traffic methods I recommend to grow a blog and was seeing results, but not the kind of results he really deserved for his efforts.

He writes in the same niche as I did when I grew PluginID to 6,500 subscribers, so my traffic advice was both relevant and from experience. For a while I couldn’t work out why his site wasn’t growing as it should’ve been, but a few hours after sitting down and inspecting the blog, I had a large checklist of suggested improvements that have really taken Upgrade Reality to the next level.

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When I analysed the most tweeted blog posts ever, I found that Twitter users like posts that are around 1,100 words long. When I wrote the most important blogging analysis ever, I found that the average length of popular posts was 1,600 words. This was quite surprising to a lot of readers and is a figure far higher than most people are producing.

In the comments for one of these posts, someone gave me the idea of analysing different industries to see the average post length in each, so they could gauge how long their articles should be. I’m not a blogger who will guess numbers and just throw stats out there, so I decided to do an in-depth analysis. I picked 3 posts from 5 blogs in 8 different niches (confused yet?) and noted the word count for each.

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I’m a huge fan of personal development. For the last 19 months I blogged about very little else and like to think I made a mark on the industry – despite my age and “total nobody” status. I don’t really write about self improvement anymore but I still actively work on improving different aspects of my life.

Without books like The Power of Now, Psycho Cybernetics, and Tribes, I really don’t think I would be where I am today. In fact, I think that the majority of my success online is thanks to the life lessons I’ve pushed myself to learn and the knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few years.

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