There’re different motivations for running a blog. The motivation for me here on www.virtual-commerce.de is not only to observe and comment the development of virtual worlds. No, my primary intention is simply to run a blog. This sounds stupid to you? I’m in the online marketing business and simply want to know how blogs work. And the easiest way to find out to setup an own and see if and how it works.
I have to confess, that I’m not very succesful with doing so. From the start in March last year up to now I have more or less 50 visitors per month with roughly 200 pageviews. This isn’t very much! But it doesn’t matter because I made some valuable experiences about blogging so far. I think I know now what to do to have a little more succes with a blog.
- The first experience is, that it is much more work than I expected. As I mentioned it isn’t the technical part, setting up a blog with wordpress for example is very simple. It’s the content! If you are not able to produce a new post at least every few days, than you wouldn’t be able to get frequent readers. I recommend to share your blog with others, a good example you can find at http://www.mediacoffee.de/. If you plan to run an corporate blog, why not having many authors from different units?
- Be part of a network with other blogs. I would say that you should plan as much time as you spend writing your own articles for reading other blogs and comment the posts there. The goal is to start a dialogue about the specific topic of your blog with others. Over the time you’ll be a part of a big community. The best way to comment other post is to do it on your own blog and set trackbacks. An important thing I disregard all the time.
- Provide valuable content. It’s very easy to complain about this and that, but who cares? It’s much more valuable for your readers if you can give them some usefull information or share experiences you made with them.
- It’s only a feeling, I can’t deliver hard facts on this: the daytime of publishing the posts seems to have an influence on the amount of readers. If I publish a post in German in the morning i have a lot more (at least some
) readers from Germany than if I publish the same message late at night. Normally nobody will notice because it’s displaced in the rss feeds for example at Technorati by newer messages.
That’s what I’ve learned about blogging so far. I started a few more experiments and I’m excited about how they work. I let you know. Maybe I exceed the limit of 60 visitors per month!
