Thursday
Jun022011
On Blogging
Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 6:00AM If you're looking for some good blogs to read, it's worth checking the Top 200 Church Blogs by Kent Shaffer.
If you're a blogger, it's worth reading some of Shaffer's observations. Specifically:
- Blogs that have been successful for many years can afford to not post much and still rank high because they’ve earned a nice Google pagerank and stockpiled inlinks and RSS readers. After my light posting in 2010, I don’t deserve my ranking of #14, but having over 1,000 posts with strong search engine optimization sustains my traffic.
- Having a successful blog requires more luck or divine intervention than ever before. If you started blogging in 2000, you needed to be consistent to be successful. If you started in 2005, you needed to follow best practices. Now great content, consistency, best practices, and networking do not guarantee success. Some of the best blogs I have found do not appear on the list.
In other words, don't get too discouraged if you're not soaring up the list. Some of the best blogs out there will probably never be famous, but they're still making a contribution.
Reader Comments (4)
"Some of the best blogs out there will probably never be famous, but they’re still making a contribution." Sounds like almost everything else in the Christian faith.
Interesting observations. I recently added a plugin that counts and displays the views on individual posts. My 2nd most read post has less than 200 views, while my top post (written very recently) has more than 1,300 views. I guess the latter fits the "luck or divine intervention" category? Ranking well on Google remains a mystery to me....
Good post, Darryl. At my peak, I may have gotten a copule of hundred hits a day, and as time went on, more and more of those came from bots. Finally, as I moved over to Twitter and Facebook, the services like Add This and Shareaholic just made it so much easier for me to share links and comment on the news of the day that there wasn't much point in me maintaining a full blown blog. By that time the only people who were reading were folks with whom I'd connected via Facebook and Twitter anyway. Do I still get to develop the online relationships with strangers that I used to develop? No, but then that had more or less dried up anyway once the novelty of blogging wore off, for my readers and for me.
I actually found this blog on that list. Thanks for the insights and the honest words!