Comments on: Why donâ€™t more blogs succeed? – Reloaded

By: steveegg

steveegg — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:25:08 +0000

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.

By: steveegg

steveegg — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:20:34 +0000

S. Weasel said on March 13th, 2008 at 10:23:

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.

By: S. Weasel

S. Weasel — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:23:50 +0000

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.

By: Rick Calvert

Rick Calvert — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:28:36 +0000

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

By: William Teach

William Teach — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:32:00 +0000

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.