Revisions/extensions (12:41 pm 3/11/2008) – Now that Neocon News is back up, I added a bit from that site. I also threw in a couple of parting thoughts.
I probably should just do a revision and extension to yesterday’s piece on the 10 reasons blogs don’t succeed, but since John Hawkins decided to do a fresh post on it, and because I’ve got too much to stick in a revision, I’ll do so as well. Before I get to the meat, I recommend checking out the sites John highlighted today; after all, linkage is the currency of the blogosphere (no, that phrase isn’t mine; my hazy memory says it’s Sean Hackbarth’s).
I guess the initial post was fortuitous timing on John’s part. One could definitely use it as an explanation of how relatively insignificant blogs are according to Harris Interactive, which released that survey late yesterday.
I probably should have been clearer yesterday that “success” was “potential financial success”, not simply being around for a few years. Billiam from View from the cheap seats reminded me in yesterday’s post that most of those that blog do so because they simply want to vent. That’s good because I remembered something that Mark Cuban said at BlogWorld last year; if one isn’t drawing 1,000 hits a day, it doesn’t pay to even try to monetize the blog.
ALa at blonde sagacity makes much the same point. Simply put, do it because you want to. Things are too crowded right now to expect a huge audience, but if you put in your time, you’ll get an audience.
Neocon at Neocon News has a few words of encouragement for the bloggers-to-be. Yes, it can get daunting to provide a fresh perspective by the time you sift through your feed reader, but in the main, the blogosphere is not a “good ol’ boys club”. That reminds me; Drinking Right is tonight, 7 pm at Papa’s Social Club (7718 W Burleigh in Milwaukee).
Kate at small dead animals adds an 11th reason blogs fail – too much vulgarity. I try not to swear, but sometimes my inner Rottweiler/AoSHQ takes over, and I unleash Hell. I generally try to not have that show up on the feed, but each new version of WordPress tends to scramble the hacks I use to bury the vulgarities some. Besides, Ace, the Emperor, and Bill Quick have made names for themselves with a “few” choice words (not that I recommend it; the market is pretty much full-up).
I’m definitely violating Robbie Cooper from UrbanGround’s Rule 2A about not blogging about blogging right now. Oh well; I’m probably also violating the interesting rule (again), but sometimes this has to be done.
If I were a better blogger, I would have gone back to Charlie Sykes‘ old Rule of Five at some point here yesterday (unfortunately, the WTMJ archives for April 2007 got wiped, so the original post got lost). While most of those I know do read more than the 5 blogs Charlie said he read at the time (I’m somewhere north of 150 blogs in the reader) there still is a valid point to the rule. One has to be pretty good and consistent to be read regularily because there just are so many hours in the day.
There’s a couple more suggestions I can add. Don’t make your home page so busy people can’t follow it or load it quickly. There is a certain elegance to simplicity of design. Besides, some people are still on dial-up, so huge graphics will kill the load speed.
Unless you’re doing advertising, please offer full-text feeds. While in many situations you won’t know how many people are viewing the feed (I’ll plug FeedBurner because it does track that), most people keep up with blogs through feed readers, and most feed readers do not offer the option to bypass the excerpt without an additional click.
I think one of the biggest points is that bloggers have to enjoy it. While I would certainly like more traffic, I do it because I enjoy it, and, as you point out, want to vent. The minute it starts not being fun, I will stop.
Thanks for the mention Steve. I have to disagree with Mark a bit on the ability to monetize a site. There are people who get less than 1,000 hits a day who do monetize their site. There are folks with 100,000 a day who don’t.
Either way your over all point as was Mark’s is that you have to blog because you love it. It’s kind of like playing music. If you love doing it, it really doesn’t matter if you make any money at all. If you don’t love it then its just another job no matter how much money you make.
Hope you can join us again this year.
Blog on!
Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo
I wonder if most people really do keep up via feed readers. I’d love to see some numbers on that.
I tried a couple of feed readers way back, but I prefer visiting my favorites manually.
Let’s see if I can throw up some numbers and make them stick. Not including me, I’ve got 76 subscribers to my feed as of yesterday (that’s solid; I force everybody through FeedBurner thanks to the FeedBurner replacement plugin).
I normally don’t do anything beyond the total number of unique visitors, but StatCounter usually reports about 200 “unique visitors” (more when I get a spike, less on weekends). Some of them do check in from various feed readers, some of them show up for (now-erased) pictures, some due to AOL’s cacheing are reported as a “unique visitor” every time they load a fresh page, and some who don’t enable cookies get reported as “unique visitors” every time they load a fresh page. Throwing out all that duplication, and throwing in the FeedBurner crowd, I probably have 120 or so readers.
Those stats also confirm there are those, like you, that surf in and out. I’ve got a funny story about that. Back when this thing was on Blogspot, I “stickied” a post regarding an attempt to stick an ethanol mandate at the top, with a note at the top of the post to check below for fresh posts. The Cheddarsphere’s blogfather, Charlie Sykes (yes, THAT Charlie Sykes, radio talk show host and author), chose that time frame to redo his blogroll, and because he thought I hadn’t been writing new stuff, he dropped me. Needless to say, I’m about the only person who survived wearing the Sykes Cement Overshoes because he showed up here to apologize, put me back on post-haste, and has kept me on since.
Rick, not a problem. I know several Cheddarsphere bloggers who don’t quite meet Cuban’s standard, yet they put ads up (or at least try to). I know they don’t get a lot of cash from that.
It’s because I like blogging (most of the time, at least) that I do it. I just don’t feel comfortable monetizing this place; that would make it a job to me, and I can’t do enough rant…er, high-quality posts to keep more than my core of about 10 dozen readers.
I’ll definitely try to be in Vegas again this year. Last year was simply a blast, even if I jet-lagged real bad because I ended up taking a red-eye in.