Friday, March 01, 2024
Mar. 1 blog report
I'm going to do something unusual this month, and that is to give you a picture of what it's like carrying 36 blogs and a few dead ones in the hope that somehow it will turn into marketing success. It hasn't, but that may be more because of my inability to make them work. People are reading them more; of my top twenty personal ones, all are getting in the hundreds of views each month. Does this translate into sales? Absolutely not.
Success is actually mixed this month, some up, some down, actually kind of hopeful. It's consistent with a general theory of mine that 1) most blog traffic is originally motivated by shopping (therefore likely to be heavy in December, very weak in January) - and also, that most of the people that land on my blogs had no intention of going there or consuming anything on it. They were shopping, yes, thought this one looked interesting, and checked it out. For a few seconds, probably; I have no data on how long they were there. But they were not there deciding to buy one of my books.
I work hard to contribute something on twelve of them every month. Eight are commercial and want to gather traffic, but I'm not sure really if there's that much of a distinction; all are personal, and are there mostly for me to spout off on whatever I want. The oldest of them is my main personal blog that now gets over a thousand hits as month; it could be that it has so many words or names in it that they are bound to come up in a lot of searches. And people want to click on "out there" even if they don't especially want to be there. Who knows how much of my rambling they actually consume? I keep at that one for my own benefit, so I stay in the habit of writing even when I'm totally blocked. I write that one for me, in other words, so it's survived all these years because it's kept serving me well, and not because people pound down my door demanding more. I did once inspire someone though. It was one of those rare occasions when something you say actually reaches someone. Rare, rare.
I fantasize about a commercial Galesburg blog. That's because I drive around Galesburg every day now; I put in a lot of miles; I feel like I know the city. I could advertise it in the back window of my car. It would be fun.
I should actually be writing on my goals here with the 36 I do have. Clean them up. Connect them to each other better. Use them to direct traffic to my Amazon ite or somewhere where they might buy a book. Maybe that's futile. I might as well just have fun. Life is short. I have other ways to make money.
Success is actually mixed this month, some up, some down, actually kind of hopeful. It's consistent with a general theory of mine that 1) most blog traffic is originally motivated by shopping (therefore likely to be heavy in December, very weak in January) - and also, that most of the people that land on my blogs had no intention of going there or consuming anything on it. They were shopping, yes, thought this one looked interesting, and checked it out. For a few seconds, probably; I have no data on how long they were there. But they were not there deciding to buy one of my books.
I work hard to contribute something on twelve of them every month. Eight are commercial and want to gather traffic, but I'm not sure really if there's that much of a distinction; all are personal, and are there mostly for me to spout off on whatever I want. The oldest of them is my main personal blog that now gets over a thousand hits as month; it could be that it has so many words or names in it that they are bound to come up in a lot of searches. And people want to click on "out there" even if they don't especially want to be there. Who knows how much of my rambling they actually consume? I keep at that one for my own benefit, so I stay in the habit of writing even when I'm totally blocked. I write that one for me, in other words, so it's survived all these years because it's kept serving me well, and not because people pound down my door demanding more. I did once inspire someone though. It was one of those rare occasions when something you say actually reaches someone. Rare, rare.
I fantasize about a commercial Galesburg blog. That's because I drive around Galesburg every day now; I put in a lot of miles; I feel like I know the city. I could advertise it in the back window of my car. It would be fun.
I should actually be writing on my goals here with the 36 I do have. Clean them up. Connect them to each other better. Use them to direct traffic to my Amazon ite or somewhere where they might buy a book. Maybe that's futile. I might as well just have fun. Life is short. I have other ways to make money.
