thoughts on blogging

Lake St. Clair
July 17, 2008

There really isn't much about boating that I don't like so of course I was quite pleased to get a boat ride in before leaving for Wisconsin. As we headed further into the lake away from the comforting sight of land, I couldn't help but ponder at what a perfect metaphor it presented in more ways than one. In the big picture it reinforces just how small and insignificant you are. On a smaller scale I'm going you use it as a metaphor for blogging. And you thought I was going to blog about the trip which I will as soon as I get these thoughts out.

In my travels through the blogosphere yesterday I came across a blog that showed a graph of the life cycle of a blog. According to the author most blogs last an average of 3 months before the author get tired or bored with blogging or the author gets frustrated because they aren't getting traffic. The thing about blogging is you really are in a huge sea with a lot of other bloggers. If you don't make yourself stand out you won't get traffic. Like many blogger I have used traffic generating websites with my favourite being BlogExplosion until I discovered Entrecard. Both get blog exposure using an earn credits that can be used for advertising your blog however, unlike BlogExplosion credits Entrecard credits have a monetary value. I really do think that Entrecard has been good for my blogs especially in terms of meeting other bloggers and generating traffic. Within a couple of days of joining my cooking blog made its way to the most popular page in the cooking and dining category of Entrecard and has remained there since. This morning I was in fourth position so that means I must be doing something right.

Recently Entrecard encouraged joining Digg to increase blog commenting which I did so now you see a Digg button on all of my posts. The premise is if another Digg member sees one of your posts they like they click the Digg button to register a vote. If you get enough votes your entry will make it to Digg's front page thus generating a lot of traffic to your blog. The newest thing Entrecard has done is to pair with SezWho, a comment rating site. Members can rate the quality of your comments and earn Entrecard credits for it. I'm not fond of rewarding people for commenting on my blogs as I would rather them simply comment if they feel like it. At any rate I added the code to all my blogs and of all times when we were in Wisconsin SezWho had a problem so many blogs including mine were not loading at all or crashing browsers. That's a bad thing for any blog so as damage control I took the SezWho code off my blogs for the time being. I want to be sure it is working properly before using it. But Entrecard as good as it is presents another problem.

You are allowed EC drops per blog per day or 600 drops per IP address daily if you have multiple blogs. So I aim for a split of 300, 150, 75 and 75 for my four blogs. Despite claims that you can drop 300 in 15 minutes there is no way unless you are using some type of script. So essentially you are working for your traffic each and every day. What some bloggers are doing is focusing on dropping aka generating traffic but forgetting that if you don't blog on a regular basis you will lose your readers. I've come across some very good blogs that unfortunately the author has not posted anything new in well over a couple of months. All of a sudden these authors will check their stats to find the only traffic they are getting is EC traffic that are staying on the blog for less than 30 seconds. That means no one is reading their blog. These blogs are destined for failure which is a shame. Others are taking a different approach by posting short almost nonsense entries that have nothing to do with their theme with the premise being that any entry is better than no entry.

Now if you put everything in perspective a blog needs good entries with some substance in order to survive. Sure you can get away with the occasional short post or participate in things like Wordless Wednesday or even the occasional cartoon as long as you are making quality entries on a regular basis. A good blog can even weather going close to a month without an entry but I don't recommend that especially now that entries can be scheduled ahead (Blogger). Generating traffic is secondary. So both BlogExplosion and Entrecard are very good traffic generating sites but the main focus of any blog should remain on making regular entries.

Garden Gnome
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