The Biz of Coding

5 Lessons learned from 1 Year of Blogging

by Ujwal Tickoo on April 24th, 2007

TheBizofCoding is now just over a year old. It got honored by listing in India's Top Technology and Web 2.0 blogs by long time pro-blogger Amit Agarwal in his post "India Blogs 1.0 - The Most Widely Read Blogs in India". Thanks for the honor Amit.

In the last 1 year I have posted a total of 222 posts. The blog has seen a total traffic of 51,251 page views (PV) an average of approximately 230 PVs per post. Not bad considering that I have not been a heavy duty poster. Five things that I have learned in the last year of regular blogging:

1) Quality Still Matters : Whatever you write even infrequently, people want to get value from the time they spend on your blog. Visitors to TheBizofCoding spend an average of over 1 minute on the blog and there are about 118 RSS feed readers. This means that for every 2 post I have written there has been 1 new RSS feed accepted from TheBizofCoding. From the traffic logs of this blog I have often seen readers spend over 30 minutes reading various posts. The most voted and read post ever is: Why Online Ad Models threaten Microsoft Corp? It got Dugg close to 200 times and reached the front page on Fark and keeps getting Stumbled Upon besides getting several interesting comments.

2) Content Distribution is Critical : Lets face it. If you are writing an online journal to share your thoughts and hear the opinion of others it is important that your blog post reaches out. Digg, Fark, IndianPad are some of the websites that users visit to read news and blog stories written and liked by a community. These sites have become the hub of blog content distribution.

A blog platform and network like KnowMoreMedia is very valuable to associate with. You learn from other passionate bloggers in the community and the platform takes care of Search Engine submissions, blog layout etc.

3) Unique Content is read, commented upon, and appreciated: Why should anyone read and comment upon your blogpost if there is nothing unique about the opinion you are expressing? It is obvious that Head Content Blogging sites like GigaOM or TechCrunch or Battellemedia are focused sites with dedicated bloggers. What is special in the thoughts and opinions you are expressing? Blog content has to carry the unique you, if is not necessarily carrying "breaking news" about the next tech deal that is happenning and covered by dedicated pro-bloggers.

  4) Consistency is Rewarded in the Blogosphere: In an interesting post "Top 100 Blogs have an Average Age of 33.8 months" Pro-blogger Darren Rowse found that it takes approx. 3 years of regular blogging before even the Top 100 Technorati blogs reach there.

This is an indication that a passing interest in blogging won't make hundreds of people read your blog posts and some to comment there. Consitency is appreciated and rewarded.

 5) Be Ready to hear ugly/rude/insulting comments: There are folks who will disagree violently or use rude/bad language. Attack the author not the line of arugement is often the path taken by some people. It is shocking that people express disagreement by trying to insult others: "You have no clue about what you are talking about, you moron…" is something you might end up reading on your comments list.

Your own blogging policy should guide you about disrespectful/negative comments. I prefer to either leave mildly insulting comments or edit out the negative portions.

POSTED IN: Blogging