This summer I have been really focusing on the growth of my celebrity/entertainment blogs on b5media. Seeing what I could do to build up the community of readers and provide them with more value.

I’ve done some backend tweaking of templates and plugins and whatnot, and on the writing side, I’ve focused on providing faster turnaround on news, more pictures, more polls, a contest or two, and more focused writing.

The type of focus I’ve gone towards has been in how I spin the content. Leaving more up to the readers, asking questions, provoking them to comment. And I’ve watched how people comment and turned that around into better and more focused writing.

As a rule, I’m fairly stand offish on these blogs. I don’t go in much to comment. Most of the comments are fairly "teen" based, going ga ga for the latest celeb sighting. And that’s totally fine by me. However, this summer I did make a point of watching the comments, and sometimes going in to direct them to other posts or things of that nature.

As time went on, the comments did grow in number. I cannot take all the credit for it - I am fully aware that this is summer vacation and my main readers are on holidays, spending their timing browsing my sites and others. I just kind of built on that and gave them reasons to stay on my sites.

This month in particular I went crazy on post volume. And I have as a result seen a daily growth in visitors. Many thousands more. I am sure the latest search indexing was in my favor and I’m getting all that. I am on page 1 or 2 for all main celebs I cover, sometimes quite high, and that is a bonus.

I’ve actually been really happy with the progress of my Gilmore Girls blog in particular this summer. It’s in reruns so that usually means a downturn. However, I had two big things going for me that I totally milked. First, the creators left. Second, one of the main stars broke up with her boyfriend and former co-star. Couple that with the uncertainty of how long the show will last, and it’s been a blast. I actually enjoy the blog so I do interact in the comments and they are usually "higher quality" comments too. Today I had my first surprise. For no reason I can gather, I had pages more of comments over yesterday. The highest comment count I’ve ever had.

I want to take the things I have learned from this industry and apply them to other blogs in other ways. I think it’s been a great experiment!

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