Milestones

I guess this is in the larger theme of posts about my blogging process, identity, and purpose.

What’s a Wednesday morning before christmas without a little bit of healthy existential angst?

Though the merging of my old TealArt posts into tychoish muddies the water a bit, I think I’m going to pass an important marker in my blogging soon.

Sometime later this week I’m going to pass the 900 post marker. Having 600ish of my TealArt posts helps this, but it’s noteworthy to point out that I’ve posted so much to tychoish in a bit less than 6 months. One of my big struggles with TealArt was finding the time and energy to post. Now I can hardly live without it. That’s the Journaling Instinct, I guess.

I wouldn’t have posted about this except that I’m closing in on another milestone as well, and I figure, what the hell. What’s another odometer effect?¹

Sometime a bit after post 900 (I guess a week or two but that’s just a guess), my weblog writings of the past 7 years will past the 300,000 word mark. Egads. I always was a bit wordy. And the funny thing is that there’s another year or two of data that was lost…

One thing that dave and I have been talking about is how to jump levels in terms of another kind of milestone about readership.

One thing that I’ve been pretty conscious about with tychoish is regular posting. If I want to make a go of this, I figured, posting often is the key to making that work. If there’s never new content, who’s going to come back? It’s not like I don’t have things to say, it’s just a matter of getting it out there.

One thing that I’m seeing is that regular posting will get you to the top of your class, and allow you to make the most of what you already have, but if you want to jump levels you have to do something else. What that something else is, might be another issue.

Probbly the best thing is to be on the cutting edge. If you’re the 1st whatever, it’s easier to make it than if you’re the 20th. But assuming for a moment that we don’t have time machines or ESP…

Part of it is having friends. Getting links from other blogs, even smaller ones drives traffic, and user participation (I guess to backtrack for a moment, I’m measuring blogging success as a function of comments and traffic). Another part is participating in forums and other blog comments which can help a lot. There has to be a strategy out there for choosing the right places to participate and get involved--from a game theory/social dynamics perspective--too big and no one will click on outbound links, to small and no one will see it. For instance, my inbound traffic from ravelry, has gone down slightly has ravelry has grown. I’m still loving raverly, mind you, but I think this is just how the world works.

The other strategy is to work on additional projects. For a while, because there were so few podcasts, doing a regular podcast would drive a lot of attention to your work, but in this vein collaborative blogs, guest blogging, twittering, youtube contributions (and so forth) are all ways that you can sort of draw attention to your blog, but aren’t connected to y our blog, I guess, if that makes sense.

This whole marketing thing is clearly not my thing, but I think I get the concepts on a pretty basic level, so it’s sort of fun to play with the ideas. And of course, I do want tychoish to make it. Even if it doesn’t it’s still a great deal of fun, so it’s not like I’m going to stop… but, it’s worth a shot.

Onward and Upward!