Most blogs fail. No surprise there most things fail. Blogs fail in two important ways:
- their owners give up, just can’t be bothered
- their owners get despondent because their blog doesn’t propel them into fame and fortune
Blogs succeed because they have heaps of content that appeals to lots of people (a strategy that is strangely similar to ‘legacy’ media). Producing lots of content requires a lot of work. Seth Godin:
A quick look at the list of the ‘top’ blogs in the world will show you that almost all of them are written by teams of people. There isn’t one in the top 10 that’s personal.
The new crikey blogs platform is something of a hybrid – individual blogs for the most part aggregated and promoted as a ‘whole’ – and it will be interesting to see the impact this has on traffic and rankings over the next 6 months or so (it takes at least that to see).
Getting lots of traffic is critical if you want enough revenue to pay your way and also if you want the sort of mass influence that comes with being an A-list blogger.
For most of us, however, our objectives as bloggers are, or should be, much more modest and focused. Godin again:
I guess there’s an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)9 times out of 10, newspapers outsell books. No surprise. But they’re different. And we need both.
Who cares that you’re not writing a mass market newspaper? The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking. That’s the work of an author, and I think rather than kissing author blogs goodbye, someone should just start a new list.
A nice analogy but most blogs are not big enough (in readership and influence) to equate with books. So how to measure success.
I think a ‘what is the alternative’ approach is valuable here.
If your blog connects you with a few dozen or a few hundred people each day as a result of an hour’s work, isn’t that the most efficient way you know of doing that? If among that few hundred people there is a handful of people who are potentially important to your career, business or life then blogging is also a powerful networking tool.
Lists and stuff are just a distraction for most people what we need to do is see our blogging in a broader context of our communication with the people who matter in our lives. If you do that you’ll keep blogging, if you keep looking at traffic flows, lists and page ranks you’ll grow despondent and give up.
One Comment
Trevor,
The truly effective on-line media for me comes in a set of private, membership by invitation bulletin boards and email forums including one where authoritative people in air transport exchange candid observations and intelligence subject to an agreed set of rules. That particular forum doesn’t require Wordpress or fancy operating systems. Just an email client. I still use a very old version of Eudora because it has organisational features that I can’t get satisfactorily, or in some cases at all, in current stable email clients.
It doesn’t even publicise its name to those not on its list. Conditions of participation include not quoting anyone or any document without approval from the individual author, and transparency of authorship, Everyone knows who everyone is. There is no hiding behind user names. Your user name is your name. I think there are about 800 members, about 80 of whom actively post. I consider participation in this American based forum to be critical to my understanding of a broad range of issues in aviation, straight from high level authorities from every part of the world, and completely free of public relations or media manager filtering or distortion. The forum is the setting for some monumental arguments too, not all of them relevant to Australia, but you certainly become aware of the much bigger picture than one which would be visible by relying on local sources of information.
I share the Crikey aggregation of blogs with you in Plane Talking.