Warning: If you are thinking about starting a blog, contemplate this.
So you are thinking of starting a blog either for business or personal reasons. Before you do you might want to think about what is involved. The blog aggregator sites have got their act together and submit their stats to World Wide Worx for collation. Arthur Goldstuck recently published the first instalment on Mail and Guardian’s Thought Leader.
Number of blogs at end of August: 25 037
Number of active blogs (updated in last two weeks): 2 953
Percent of active blogs: 11%
Number of posts in August: 39 938
Page views in August: 5 198 693
Unique visitors in August: 621 204
Source: World Wide Worx
This makes for interesting reading but also signals a few warning signs for wannabe bloggers.
Fact one. The Drop out rate for bloggers is exceptionally high.
It seems from the stats above that about 89% of bloggers drop out or radically decrease the frequency of posting. Many bloggers, when starting do not factor in the commitment a blog takes. Not only in time to create regular posts but also in the time spent becoming part of the blogging community. You have to read and comment on other blogs in order to generate links and readers to your blog. Regular posting is crucial to the success of a blog.
Fact two. You have to market your blog outside of the blogging community.
Of the 621204 unique visitors to blogs, only 25 037 could in the wider sense be counted as bloggers. Although one has to take into account that many of the readers could potentially be from other countries and could be bloggers. However if one looks at the popular blogs like Keo and Though Leader then, in my opinion, a large portion of their readers are not bloggers themselves but have migrated from traditional media or are finding niches not filled by traditional media.
Fact three. Generating traffic to a blog is a difficult as generating traffic to a website.
In May 2007 Technorati reported tracking 71 million blogs worldwide. The blogosphere is becoming increasingly competitive. According to Arthur the top nine blogs have more readers than the rest combined and the four media sites have more traffic than all of the blogs combined. With about 40000 posts in 31 days readers have plenty of choice so care has to be taken in terms of topic choice and headlines. Blogging for the sake of blogging is fine but don’t expect a huge readership base.
If you are still convinced that a blog is for you then perhaps the following posts could help you minimise your school fees in time and effort.
Josh Dorkin : Top 77 mistakes new bloggers make ( I wish I had found this when I started, I still haven’t rectified all my mistakes.)
David Airey : Top 7 blog mistakes to avoid (Short and to the point )
If at this point you are going ahead with your blog I can just say welcome and let me know I could just be just be your first subscriber.
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Blogged with Flock
September 18th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Yeah I think most people open up blogs without serious long-term commitment unfortunately. However, I do think that a 2 week period might be somewhat unfair. Lots of bloggers are active but life happens and sometimes we just don’t have the time to blog every so often. Last year during the exam period I didn’t really blog at all for more than a month, for example, and as you know it’s not like I’m not an active blogger.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
LOL Charl, I have been guilty of neglect from time to time myself. But overall I think the stat will still show that there is a high dropout rate for bloggers. I can’t wait for nest months stats.:)
October 4th, 2007 at 11:39 am
I disagree with David Airey’s first one — I tend to prefer to look at blogs hosted by a recognised blog host, like Wordpress or Blogger. Main reason is that if I find something interesting there, it’s easier to link to via trackback or “link to this post”.
Also, it’s more likely to be a “proper” blog, and not some advertising site running a blog on the side.
A second thing, um, well, I hate to be personal, but I find grey on black text very hard to read, and very often when I find a blog like that, I exit as quickly as possible. It has to have something very very important to say to compensate for the eyestrain. Nothing personal, but…
October 5th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Some very interesting findings! I especially like the site with the 7 mistakes. Makes a lot of sense especially point 7. It takes a lot of time and effort to blog. We all started out with lots of posts per week. Now its an effort to do one a week.
I have found quite a good rule of thumb. Take one day, write 7 posts and date them for each day of the week. Then if something quickly comes up you want to blog about, you’ll have even more than one post per day!
Now the trick is only to find the time to do all 7 in one day… Eish, hard work. No wonder the dropout rate is so high.