Popularity
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging is hard (for me anyway). I’ve read a lot of articles about blogging and how hard it is to make a living as a blogger and all the tips and tricks and guidelines to make it work. I don’t worry about it too much because honestly I didn’t ever hope that I’d be able to quit my day job because of this blog.
I follow a lot of different blogs, and I was recently noticing that one blog in particular – not going to name names – has not posted a single thing this whole year (which is particularly annoying because there is no RSS feed so I have to manually go check the site for new posts). Looking a little further I saw that there were only 3 posts in 2008, 5 in 2007, 4 in 2006, 8 in 2005 and 18 in 2004. In 2003 there were 34 posts, which is a more “acceptable” level of posts by blogging standards, but even that many is less than 1 per week and that was over 5 years ago! The blog in question is still considered to be pretty popular and even scored the owner a book deal and corresponding book tour. So how is it that a blog with such a shoddy track record became so popular? My guess is that it’s just plain dumb luck. Someone in the right place at the right time by pure coincidence. I was watching an interview with a software developer recently where attributing his success he says he “stumbled into a big steaming pile of gold”. I think that sums it up nicely.
I know there are bloggers out there that really work at what they do, and there are also those who really work at it AND have a bit of luck to kick them up the ranks. Then there’s me, who doesn’t really do either of those. But I’ve got the making a few sporadic posts per year part down, so I’m ready for the dumb luck and a book deal part. Who am I kidding, I don’t have enough to say to fill up a book. At least there’s no pressure on me to blog more often.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Shelly Bishop March 20th, 2010 at 12:38 am
I have been enjoying these posts on your blog! You do quite well with words…a writer in the works. I think you should look into writing a book. You sure have the knack and the word knowledge! You’d definitely have the fans too! A book signing would be terrific! Go for it!
Shelly