Outside the Beltway

BLOGGING ADVICE REDUX

James Joyner · Tuesday, September 16, 2003 · 2 comments

Kate tells us 10 Things she’s Learned About Blogging. Two in particular that I’ve found helpful are:

3. [N]ever make the mistake of thinking that outgoing links are lost traffic.

1. If it’s not fun, don’t do it. . . .

Most of us violate that one from time-to-time, feeling obligated to “post something.” I’m learning to resist that urge most of the time now.

Also amusing is

8. [G]ive some thought to how wide of an appeal you want your blog to have and then accept the choice you’ve made. If you choose to blog only about Canadian hockey, for instance, you’ll need to realize that folks who aren’t interested in hockey (or who don’t like Canada) won’t be your core readers

A few days after starting OTB, I started a blog devoted exclusively to Dallas Cowboys Football with Steven Taylor (later of PoliBlog fame). For the first few weeks, DCF got several times more traffic than OTB. Now, I get more traffic in a decent day than DCF has gotten in its history. (That was especially true until DCF got a couple of links from Salon.com via the King Kaufman column.)

Which, come to think of it, is rather odd: You’d think more people would be interested in following America’s Team than reading my thoughts on politics and other stuff I find amusing.

Update (2116): Also, an earlier discussion with Kevin Drum (CalPundit) reminded me of another reason to adhere to this one:

Don’t try to make a name for yourself by bitching about the bigger bloggers.

other than the ones Kate mentions: The big guys fork over lots of dollars out of pocket every month to sustain their sites. The handful of sites that are consistently getting over 5,000 visitors a day–let alone those getting over 30,000 a day–are paying through the nose for bandwidth. Even more if they’re maintaining a comments feature, which eats up tons of bandwidth. Other than Andrew Sullivan, who has had wild success with his telethons, I don’t know of too many bloggers who are making enough to break even.