Three Thousand People checked out my blog last month. Traffic has increased since I began linking to things that interest me while adding commentary or what I think about these articles being linked to. Many of my most passionate readers are still subscribing despite raising concerns that they’d rather see more unique editorials and less links but I felt that this was a good move. I also backed away from Twitter & Facebook as a way to share links & photos and decided to share things on this blog, Tumblr and Flickr. The outcome has been good. I doubt removing commenting ability across each post has been a good thing but I said at the time that most comments were arriving via social media and email anyway so the removal of a form for anonymous users to vent has been a good thing. I’m happy with the blog and where it’s going but it’s apparent that I won’t have the success that other bloggers do because I’m not authoring a blog that people want to read on a consistent basis. Consistency is one thing, subject and tone is another. Two things helped me realize this.
- I checked stats on MacworldBound.com last week and found out that MacworldBound (which was last posted to in September of 2009) is receiving the same page views each day as this blog which is updated multiple times each week with far more relevant info. I decided to check DailyTechTalk.com and that blog is outperforming this one by twice as much traffic. Both of those blogs are about 5 years old now but haven’t been updated since 2009 as I signaled to readers that it was time to move on to a more general-purpose blog. Combined, my other 5 blogs from 2001 to 2009 are receiving 5 times as much traffic as this blog which has been around for almost 3 years.
- A re-surfaced chat at SXSW from John Gruber and Merlin Mann explained how to blog and do it successfully. It’s a great chat (transcript) and was noted by Marco Arment in a post last week. This post uncovers a lot of things I won’t do in order to grow my readership and I’d like to explain my reasoning.
Taken from an email to me from a high-school classmate during a chat about our 5th year out of school:
You were never a nerd because you dressed to preppy and worked out but you always had that stupid laptop and headphones. No offense but thats why you didn’t have any friends. You were kind of in every click cause you did everything. You have to pick one thing to be cool and you didn’t have just one thing.
This “jack of all trades” business has its advantages but not when your’e running a blog. There’s a reason websites and magazines have editors. There needs to be someone who approves and denies story ideas and proposes ideas for the writers. Letting a writer loose isn’t a bad thing but you may get content back that has nothing to do with what the readers want. Some might enjoy it but it’s like an Apple rumor site posting photos of what an Apple engineer ate for breakfast. It’s sort of relevant but readers don’t care.
When I had 5 different blogs, each had a unique readership and very impressive numbers. I called this DTT media for a few years (DailyTechTalk being the hub) and I sold ads for the entire group of blogs and had writers who worked on various sections or “beats”. It was growing and doing well but not well in a huge way but I could have done pretty well with it over time. I was getting bored though when there were days I only wanted to write about travel or coffee and had to find the inspiration to write about Apple news or Macworld or Photography. It’s hard being forced to write about one thing. It’s so uninspiring and boring and simply not fun. I did it but I like the ability to hop around. In 2009, I merged everything into one. All of the RSS feeds became one but the unique domains lived on as an archive. You could read old DTT articles if you wanted or read new things on my blog. If I wanted to spend a month talking about coffee and, over time, stop talking about Macworld entirely (which is where we are now), I was free to do that. I owned the blog and a few friends wrote guest posts for me if I wanted some flavor to shake things up.
The problem with this model is people care about coffee but not tech, photography and cooking. People enjoy reading my travel posts but not reviews of a new iPad. Authoring a niche blog may have challenging days but it’s the best way to do things. Gary Vaynerchuck has said, don’t write about dogs. Write about pomeranian dogs who LOVE going to the beach and playing in the waves. Write so niche that you own the market on pomeranians who love beaches and you’ll get advertisers and a loyal following. Only write what you love and only write niche. Yeah, that’s excellent advice but I’d get bored very fast on that subject. Is it that I just don’t care that much about writing day in and out about technology or is it that I’m just lazy. It’s my blog and I’m not trying to make money so what am I doing here?
Sharing.
I share what makes me happy and what’s on my mind. I have less readers than ever but readership doesn’t matter that much but I miss the interactions from readers and hyper-sharing of my content. I don’t receive much validation these days on posts that I write so it’s hard sometimes writing what’s on my mind. I love it but I’m to blame for the huge drop in readership following the convergence to one blog and don’t want to go back to the old ways. Maintaining 5 WordPress installations and ensuring there’s always fresh content for each of those on a weekly basis is hard. I debated starting a link blog where only things that interested me would go and I’d share long-form things on this blog to make the experience clean and enjoyable. I didn’t want to do that either because I just hate dividing up the content and where it goes.
I won’t go niche and I won’t diversify content and I won’t bring on external writers and I won’t stop sharing altogether. I guess I’m trying to explain that I understand my readership won’t grow anymore and I’m okay with that.