I got this question this weekend, and it's a question ... frankly ... that I've heard before. Pruned down a bit, here's the gist:
Q.: A couple of us bloggers were talking and we all noticed that if we don't get promo'd on the MySA home page the day our blogs go up, no one knows we have a new one, so no one reads them. ... But if no one is reading them, the reporters aren't eager to spend time on them. Is there any way to push the idea with everyone who's posting blogs at MySA that new E-N blogs should, if at all possible, get a good ride on the home page the day they are posted? Or is that not likely for various reasons?
And my lengthy answer:
A.: The correlation between home page promotion and pageviews is not something that's escaped our notice. The obvious problem is that of labor supply and the steady flow of blog entries. An example, on Friday — a day when we're relatively short-staffed (meaning, I'm off) — we had at least 24 blog entries posted. I'm not sure what qualifies as a good ride, but trying to squeeze that much new content into the limited space we have to work with is a challenge on our best days, and it really is more time-consuming than it might appear to the outside viewer.
We have made efforts to improve homepage visibility of the blogs in general, and we do have some fixes in mind to try to increase overall blog visibility.
(Note: Here, I turn on the bloggers a bit ... I might sound harsh, but please bear with me ...)
Indeed, one of the biggest challenges here has been the obsession with traffic from the bloggers, and the concept of "it's not worth my time" is a familiar one to me. Problem is, NOTHING on the Internet is a success out of the box. The standard growth pattern of any online venture — whether a blog, a new overall site, or anything — is a long, steady, period of limited to no growth, and then — if it's to be a "success" — a tipping point at one point where traffic begins to grow exponentially. They call it the "hockey stick" graph. (Cuz the chart of growth looks like a hockey stick.)
Problem here is, reporters are so used to believing that everything they've written in the paper is read by each and every person who picks up the paper, they become — frankly — a trifle snobbish when it comes to only a few hundred readers (or, in some cases, 50-100). I know this, because I lived it from the other side ... making the jump from newspaper to the Web, where I could actually see the readership numbers ... well, the ego does take a bruising.
What this adds up to is a nasty mix of flagging morale and resignation that sort of cripples things before they have even a chance to hit that critical mass.
I suspect that many of those who feel like blogging isn't worth their time haven't been following best practices in regard to posting frequency. As long as you blog regularly (and well) and people know when to expect new work out of you (in other words, blogging Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays by 9 a.m. is MUCH better than blogging 15 times in one day, then twice another, then not at all for a week), you will build a following, modest though it may be ... especially at the beginning.
Which, upon reflection, is a little puzzling. A roomful of 100 people would make me nervous to speak in front of ... yet we dismiss them as "not worth the effort" when the blog numbers roll in. Even 75 people extremely interested in what you have to say are, in my opinion, worth at least as much as ten thousand who might — or more likely, might not — catch a whiff of what you're saying on the way to the the sports pages (or, in my case, the funnies).
The homepage promotion is a great way to expose a blog ... but it's not going to single-handedly elevate it into the "worth it" strata. Only time (and extremely hard work) is going to do that. The beauty of it is, once a blog is rolling, it's really hard to derail it, and it becomes an entity almost unto itself.
Well worth it, in my opinion.
I should note the blogger did respond with some good points, though they were a bit beyond the scope of what I wanted to discuss here. I wanted to post this because, again, I hear this quite a lot, and it is a major problem for our various ventures together. If you'd like to comment on this, either drop me a line at mthompson@mysanantonio.com or post it here.
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