I am what you might call a compulsive learner.  When I do something new, I immerse myself in it, at the expense of all other things.  And blogging, for me, has been no exception.   In the past six months, I've brought home (and yes, even read!) armloads of books from the library, on blogging, on Wordpress, on writing, on marketing (if you haven't read Seth Godin's stuff, do yourself the favor), on creativity, on CSS, on Twitter, on search engine optimization, on Adwords.

None of this makes me an expert blogger.  After only six months at it, I'm not even that experienced.  My blog (No Meat Athlete) has certainly come a long way since its humble beginning in March, but what blog's beginning isn't humble?  And while my rate of growth has been more than satisfactory for me, it's certainly not unheard of.

But I've noticed something striking in my time studying what other bloggers are doing.  Quite frankly, the food and fitness blogs are lagging behind the other blog niches.  (A recent post I read on a popular blogging site even expressed surprise at the fact that food blogs existed.) I am in total envy of the most successful blogs in our category, but a quick glance at them reveals plenty of little things even they could be doing better.  Yes, I know every blog industry is different, but making yourself as visible as possible to search engines isn't specific to the type of blog.  It's universal, and so are a boatload of other ideas that many health bloggers aren't using.

I've only recently gotten the courage to do some things differently from what I see other health bloggers doing.  And I've gotten great results.  I bought an e-book on search engine optimization and in a few weeks increased my daily search engine visits from 30 to almost 300.  This is partly due to a few small tweaks I made, and partly due to the very basic idea of writing the type of post that people search for, that people link to, that people share.  The type of post that goes viral.

Of the 300 searches that I'm getting each day, roughly 100 come from a single post.  Every day.  With a few affiliate links on it, this single post becomes very valuable over the course of a few months.  Just a few of these posts a year can make a big difference in the success of your blog.

I hope I've managed to express how interested I am in this subject without coming off as condescending.  Trust me, I know I have a long way to go.  But I really feel that the food and fitness blog niche, even those blogs that are far more popular than mine, can get to another level than where we are now.

My goal with this blog is to share what I've learned and continue to learn, and to learn from others with different perspectives.  (How to get more comments and how to use social media like StumbleUpon to their full extent are two ideas that come to mind that I've love to learn more about from others.) If this blog is nothing more than a place for me to share what I'm working on and thinking about, then it will have achieved its goal for me.  If it gets to the point where other bloggers are writing guest posts about what they're doing particularly well, and where health bloggers can come to communicate and share ideas about blogging, then so much the better.

It seems health bloggers communicate with each other mainly on each other's blogs.  But we can't very easily share our thoughts about blogging there, because most readers simply aren't interested in that.  That's what this blog is for.

For now, I've set up two pages that I think might be useful.  One is a list of the companies that have been kind enough to send me sample products to review, so that new bloggers looking to do a few reviews will have a place to start.  Of course I want to grow this list, so I'd love to hear what companies you have had the experience of working with to add to the list.  The other page is a place where bloggers can submit the giveaways that they're doing, hopefully to generate a little more traffic and comments to help them look good to their sponsors.

I hope to update this blog frequently, but I'm sure I won't be able to do it daily, like I do my other blog.  Hopefully some of the gaps will eventually be filled by guest posts, but even if not, it's ok.  These posts will take a little longer to research and write than "what I ate today" does.  If I can deliver about two new posts a week, I'll be pretty happy.

So what do you think?  Any ideas?  I'm all ears.