After more than a year at it, I think I’ve learned a few blogging lessons along the way. Maybe these will be useful to you, and maybe not. Thinking about starting your own blog? Or just interested in some of the process details? Perhaps both?
Whichever it is, here are four blogging lessons.
1. Promotion is important, and it’s hard work.
One thing to think about with a blog is how people get there. And so, that’s the focus of the first of the blogging lessons. Maybe people just Google some words and click your site? Sure, that’s part of it, and I’ll have more to say about that below. But active promotion plays a huge role, too.
I promote this blog in lots of places. I have social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. And I actively promote through my personal pages on Pinterest, Mix, and Reddit. In addition to all this stuff, several social bookmarking sites list Base and Superstructure or its individual posts.
All this is a bit more work than I expected. It doesn’t require active promotion all the time, but it does require a fair bit. I’ve mostly handled this by integrating use of social networking and social bookmarking sites into my daily routine.
So that’s one lesson: it takes some time. And not just writing time, but also promotion time.
2. Traffic spikes during major events.
I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know this. Stuff happens, and then people want to read about it. Not exactly a shocker, right?
Since this is a blog addressing politics, my traffic spikes during political events. During the first round of debates, posts on Julián Castro and Andrew Yang spiked. And during the second round of debates, it was mostly Yang and Bernie Sanders. Given that Castro and Yang were largely unknown when I wrote about them, those posts were particularly effective.
This pattern repeats itself. Last summer, I took an in-depth look at the Cathy Glasson campaign for Iowa Governor and its broader political implications both in Iowa and nationally in the US. It proved pretty popular, and I think it would’ve been much more popular had I written it in June rather than August. The primary was on June 5.
But it’s not just politics. An early post on baseball spiked around the start of the baseball season. And my post on leaving academia had a huge spike when another blog reposted it. In fact, that latter spike is this blog’s largest to date.
Wait, so what’s the second of the blogging lessons? If there’s a lesson here it’s one of timeliness and collaboration. Ask other people to share or re-post your stuff. And share theirs.
3. Traffic declines during the summer.
Okay, so I don’t want to make too big a deal of this. But there’s good evidence blog traffic declines during the summer.
Why? Who knows? Maybe people go outside more and spend less time in front of the screen. Maybe they’re taking more vacations. Or maybe more people decompress and avoid the kind of content political bloggers generate.
Whatever. Here comes the third of the blogging lessons. The summer’s a pretty good time to work on some of the non-writing tasks involved in blogging. What have I done this summer? Several things. I’ve worked on my editorial calendar, and I’ve done some of the promotion tasks I listed above. In particular, I built the Pinterest page. And, finally, I also did quite a few SEO tasks. I won’t bore you with the details, but mostly I solidified the blog’s internal links.
4. Lists and infographics generate clicks.
And we have the last of the blogging lessons. The fact of the matter is lists and infographics work. That is to say they generate clicks. Assuming clicks is what you want, these things get them.
Is this a good or a bad thing? I guess that’s the deeper question here. I really don’t know. If lists present useful information in a clear way, maybe they help people. But if it’s just clickbait, ads, and spam, maybe not. If infographics accessibly tell you what you need to know, they’re great. And if they don’t, they’re not.
That’s about the best I can do by way of an evaluation. Let’s not forget the irony that this post itself is a list. Was it a helpful one?
