by Chris Harris
It was quite nice returning to blogging. Writing my collection of short stories has been brilliant, an amazing experience, but once you’ve actually written the stories, the sheer number of drafts and the level of thoroughness involved take up so much time. The end result is absolutely worth it, but still, it’s a long drawn out process.
Blogging, by contrast, is so much easier. Most posts take me twenty to thirty minutes to write and another twenty to thirty to edit and publish. It’s satisfying to see a finished piece out in the world after just an hour’s work.
What really struck, and fascinated me, when I returned to blogging was sitting down and looking at the stats. When I used to write only about Lewes FC, I could easily go three months without posting because nothing interesting was happening at the club. Occasionally, I’d check my blog numbers and they’d sit stubbornly at twenty five to thirty views a month, although when something big was happening up to 4000 a month is not unheard of. Since then I’ve written about forty blogs on all sorts of different subjects, and it’s been interesting to see the stats rise to around five or six hundred views a month. So clearly, the new evergreen and general blogs have been picked up by Google, where most of the new traffic has come from.
I’m reminded of someone I once saw on Reddit complaining that they’d restarted blogging after two years and were only getting five thousand views a week. Diddums! So yes, my numbers are still tiny in the grand scheme of things, but the increase feels steep and surprisingly motivating.
Three of my blogs consistently get two or three views every single day. One of them, The Rise of the Humble Tea Chest, still surprises me why. Another is Run Rabbit Run: The Children’s Song That Would Raise Eyebrows Today, which I wrote long before discovering it was recently featured in a Netflix series, so that explains its traction. And then there’s I Know What I Heard: The Barcombe UFO, which, being about a UFO, was always going to attract readers. These blogs are what people call “evergreen” not tied to current events, and therefore always capable of picking up views.
This is one of the challenges of blogging: one in ten posts does surprisingly well, and the other nine quietly sink. Even so, I always knew the UFO piece would do decent numbers, but the rest? There’s no rhyme or reason. In fact, the ones I expected to do well often flop completely.
I’m fine with that. Having run a business most of my life, I’m used to taking the rough with the smooth. One in ten successes is a perfectly respectable hit rate in almost anything.
Since my hiatus, I’ve also set up a second blog, The Novice Novelist, which is entirely centred around my book. What’s been interesting is that I have around a 60–70% “like” rate on that platform, compared with barely 5% on the main blog. I asked ChatGPT why that might be and it pointed out that most of my views on The Novice Novelist were coming from WordPress Reader, where users are far more prone to liking posts. And sure enough, the first six posts I published there received almost all their views through WordPress Reader. But when I checked yesterday, I noticed I’m now getting a few views through Google search. Tiny numbers, yes, but it shows the blog is bedding in. As I learned from The Rights of Fans, if you post regularly, the readers will eventually come.
The most important thing, though, is that I’m blogging for enjoyment again. Apart from the Lewes FC posts, I’m not promoting any of this on social media or pushing it across multiple platforms. I’m letting it grow organically because I hate doing social media. Again, I asked ChatGPT about that once, and it reassured me that most bloggers hate social media too. Which was oddly comforting.
BIG NEWS!
If it comes off, my next blog will make you fall over backwards. I have received an interview request from 11 Freunde, which is the biggest football culture magazine in the world, a million readers an issue!
#Blogging #BloggingForAmateurs #SelfPublishing #BlogDiary #LearningToBlog
The Rights of Fans. 