The Knitting Fiend

 
 
When I was a girl
I loved my Raggedy Ann.
What a sense of style!
 
 

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Pattern from Berrocco.

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Based on this pattern, it looks like Nora Gaughan wants hand knit fashion to return to 90s era drab - punk - poverty look. It’s somewhat updated though: this outfit is dark brown. During the 90s, we would have knit it in black.

I would advice knitters: If you like these sorts of all stockinette hand knits, you should consider buying a knitting machine. You could whip something similar out in a day.

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Answers to questions. . .

On discussing non-knitting at a knitting blog

Luna asked whether it’s ok to discuss tracking blog traffic at a knitting blog. The answers is, “Sure it is!” I’ve done it before.

Many of your visitors are bloggers and enjoy the occasional blog about blogging. The reason I started a new blog about blogging is that I was planning to write tons of posts about blogging. Those would have seriously bored knitter to tears.

What’s Stumble? Can it help my knitting blog?

As to your not knowing what “Stumbles” are… that’s not surprising. I never paid attention to these sites until I started blogging about blogging!

But knowing what Stumble is may help you get traffic to your knitting blog. If you blog for business purposes, this could get you business for your store. So if you’d like to try, I’ll describe what it is and how to use it.

Here’s the story: There is a site called “StumbleUpon”. It’s possible to do a number of things. One is to nominate a post as “excellent”. (This is called “Stumbling”.) When doing this you place the post in a category.

The other thing you can do is visit posts people have nominated as “worth reading”. It turns out a lot of people find blog posts that way, so if a post gets enough “stumbles” in a particular category, it can draw a lot of traffic. (I don’t know if it works in knitting, but we can give it a try, right?)

Would you like your best knitting articles to be stumbled?

The most effective way to get stumbled requires doing three things:

1. Add a “Stumble” button to your blog. It looks like this:

   Stumble it (and place in knitting/crochet!)

   You can get the correct code for your blog at StumbleUpon I edited the text to suggest placing my posts in “knitting/crochet”.

2. Tell your blog visitors about Stumble. Otherwise they won’t have any idea what “Stumble” is, and won’t click on the button.
3. Write posts knitters are likely to love. Then your visitors will click. Knitters you don’t know who visit stumble will click. You may see traffic.

If you do get Stumbled you’ll benefit not only from traffic, but from good links Google counts toward your rank. This can help you attract more search engine traffic on things like “sock yarn”, which is a good thing!

If you have more questions about Stumble (or similar programs) just ask.

Offer to knitting audience.

If my regulars would like, I can explain some of the more useful “blogging tips” I post about over at Big Bucks Blogger. I figure roughly 1 out of 10 of those posts are of interest to knitters, knit bloggers and knit store owners.

Actually, even though my post on Jason Calacanis’s new “human powered search engine that will put Google out of business” won’t help your blog or store, knitters might be amused by screen shot of some results. Evidently, for some knitting searches, we knitters are offered links on gay marriage, bannana peppers or Disney Movies.

I think it’s safe to say these current results are . . . . irrelevant?

Well, evidently Mahalo is in Beta and only 60% complete. (Or Alpha and 5%-10% complete. I think I’ve read or heard both in the past few months.)

Anyway, enough for now! I’ll looks for more silly knitting patterns, and let me know if you’d like tips about things that can bring traffic to your knitting blog.