Now that we have established quality over quantity as the rule for this blog, let me reflect on a few other points, and how they relate to my general world.
Writing a blog is not enough...you also need to worry about publicizing it, dressing it up, measuring it, and at times monetizing it. Sounds like, yup, a start-up. "If you build it they will come" may work for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but he is not me and I am not he (and this blog is far from as pretty as a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield).
The standard line we hear from start-ups after describing how they make a little green man jump up and down is "and then we need to market it by, you know, viral blah blah..." Meaning, they have no idea how to get people to use their feature, widget, doodad, whatever. Obviously they could also just say we plan to spend more money than the budget of the US Defense Department (an unknown and ungodly figure) on Google ad words to "bring traffic." As we usually invest sums far lower than that...need to come up with Plan B.
How do I hear about things for my blog? Usually from friends, or virtual friends (people who I have never met but know through email...they might not actually exist, whoa, is that weird). OK, back to focus here...point is that viral does work, but feature needs to be really interesting and of value for me to hear about it, and then integrate in my blog.
Now we come to my problem, is that I am a lazy blogger -- going for the simple approach, text being the main thing. Which means that keeping up with all the widgets becomes more and challenging. And of course I spend almost no time on publicizing fact that I have a blog (other than to put the URL on my email signature).
Sometimes I get envious of my friends that have thousands of subscribers to their blog, when I only have hundreds (but I love each and everyone of you!). Then I realize that I do have hundreds of subscribers, which is an achievement in of itself (don't worry Mom, you're not the only one reading!).
But for me this is all a hobby, and a very side one at that. If I were doing this as my business, as the main recipient of my entrepreneurial passion, I would hope it would look a lot "better," I would be totally up to date with latest technologies, and my host would be complaining of the strain on their systems because of all the traffic to my blog...And then I would need to see if I was building a real business out of this hobby, or it would remain just that -- a hobby.
In the "old days" (a few years ago) people collected baseball cards, stamps, etc., mostly for fun. Yes, there were a few people who said, wow, did you hear how much my Willie Mays card is worth? But go try and sell it...There was a tiny community, far from the eyes of venture funds, investment bankers, etc. that did trade in the results of hobbies...but they were few and very far between (and you probably didn't want to spend too much time with them).
Now we expect every second person to be collecting revenue from their "user-generated content," be that a text blog, podcast (audio or video), personal space, etc. The revenue, yes, is all expected to come from "advertising."
Where am I going with all this? Two directions. For my own blog, it remains a hobby, so I can afford to either not deal with much of the above, or randomly parachute in and out. For start-ups we look at, it's a whole different story. My expectations of them are very high -- after all, we are fueling their efforts with our hard earned dollars. They need to have answers to all of the above -- and if the answer is we don't know yet, better than a weak "viral" response.
We need to keep the line separate between hobby and business. As a hobby, might be fun to collect widgets, but doubt there is a business direction for the blog with the most widgets (don't think Guinness Book of Records actually pays anything...and they probably don't have virtual version yet...hmmm....is that an idea for a start-up...).
I like Widgets if they have something useful to share, ie never. So, if I can't get it in the RSS feed, it's fine for me.
Posted by: Adrian | February 18, 2007 at 06:59 PM