Monday, November 21, 2016

One Million Clicks On My Blog – What Is The Pay-Off?



It took me five-and-a-half years to make my first million.

A million clicks, that is.

My blog, www.BookMarketingBuzz Blog  has become one of my proudest accomplishments even though it hasn’t earned me one red cent.  Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I enjoy blogging.  With over 2,200 posts to my credit, I’m a veteran of writing probably the equivalent of a dozen and a half books. If the average post is 600 words long, we’re talking over one and a quarter million words.

I know many authors who blog infrequently, if at all some are successful regardless of their blogging, but the ones that blog and tend to be good at other marketing efforts, including social media, speaking, and direct sales.

Blogging offers many positives:

1.      Branding
2.      A way to voice a view or share an idea.
3.      An easy way to create immediate content that you can use for posts on Facebook and Twitter.
4.      A lead generator for sales of your book or other services and items.
5.      Showcases your writing skills.

There are drawbacks to blogging

1.      It requires time, effort, and dedication to regularly think up posts, write, research and edit them.
2.      Once you post a blog entry, you feel the urge to share it on social media platforms, which sucks up more time and brain power.
3.      It becomes addictive and a burden.

When you blog, you look for instant gratification.  You get a high when the clicks take off – and you feel depressed when a post is met with little reaction.

I’ve thought about getting advertising for my blog, or selling people’s books on it, or making it more commercial.  Though there’s nothing wrong with it, I just don’t feel I want to go that route.  I want to be pure and clean on the editorial side.  I don’t have to vouch for a product, and I don’t have to clutter my words with sales pitches.  The only thing promoted here is me.

I do have blog-envy when I hear people register some crazy traffic numbers to their blog but I conclude this:

Only a tiny handful actually draw big numbers.
Many people fake their claims or use a bunch of tricks to jack up their numbers.
Some blogs lend themselves to more traffic than others; for instance, more people will read a blog about losing weight, having better sex or making more money – or about a celebrity – than they will about book marketing.

I should encourage fewer people to blog so it frees up space for me.  There are so many blogs out there, cluttering the Internet.  Am I part of the free content problem? All of these blogs, podcasts, webinars, books, audio downloads, videos, and free content as competing for people’s time and attention when they theoretically could be buying and reading books.

I feel like my blog is a non-profit.  I genuinely love books, I feel for the plight of all writers. I fiercely defend freedom of speech and I advocate for literacy.   A million clicks into this – with no ka-ching to show for it – and I feel great.

Blogs didn’t exist when I was growing up and only became popular in the past decade or so, though early Net adopters blogged as long as 20 years ago, first on Links.net and then as weblogs. 1998 marked the first known time of blog on a traditional news site.  The platform that I use, Blogger, was launched in 1999.  By mid-2006, according to Technorati, there were 50 million blogs.  As af 2015, according to wpvirtuoso.com, there are over 152,000,000 blogs.  A new blog, globally, is created every half-second.

Blogging is one of the best things to come from the Internet revolution.  What would be even better is if these blogs were commoditized.  Maybe people should pay something for accessing all of this free content, but it would be very hard to figure out a fair price and disbursement system.  Blogging simply has its own reward and true writers know this.  

Go blog away and let the clicks begin.  Once you start, you may never stop.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.
Named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby 
http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  

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