The Ups and Downs Of Being A Blogger

London Is Cool, my blog, which is all about my adventures and viewpoint on life in London has been up and running for precisely 10 weeks. During that time it has grown from 1 reader, who was my fine looking Staffordshire Bull Terrier Mable, who is stuck in Barbados due to fuck ups, first by the vet in the UK and then by the twats in Barbados, but that is another story.

As much as I love my crazy dog, having one loyal reader isn’t very motivating, and any Blogger that says they don’t care about how many people read their blog is a downright liar. Thankfully things have slowly improved and I now average around 200 visitors a day, which isn’t good but its headed in the right direction. What pleases me the most is that I get a lot of repeat visitors. I keep on hearing people go on about how many unique visitors they get, which is great, but if you don’t actually get people coming back again and again, you are missing the point.

I read somewhere online that the average life span of a Blog is 2 months, and that there are over a 100 million blogs currently up and running worldwide. From personal experience I would say that probably 99% of them are utterly boring, crap and totally unoriginal. It seems that so many people give up Blogging so quickly, is that because they thought it was sure fire way to make lots of easy money. Are these people or are you crazy? You would make easier and more money from stacking shelf’s in Asda or flipping burgers in McDonalds.

I hear that some people take up Blogging because they want to be famous, are there any famous Bloggers out there in the real world, who are house hold names, that get mobbed when they walk down the street. Who was the last Blogger to feature in Hello magazine or be interviewed by Oprah? If you want to be famous strip off naked at the next major sporting event, which is being televised life and you will have more fame than you will ever have from Blogging. It helps if you are female, good looking and have large breasts and then you could make a career from it, for the rest of us, we will get our 15 minutes of fame.

This isn’t my first Blog, I had one when I was living in Barbados, which even though I haven’t done anything much with it for over 8 months, it still gets double the traffic of London Is Cool, which shows me how important time is in the world of Blogging. But it seems that most people haven’t got time, in this world of where everything has to happen quickly or not at all.

Ever since I started Blogging I have heard about how important things such as Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Page Rank, which are all gauges as to how popular or well your blog is supposedly doing. Are they really? Well I will tell you something for free, the only thing that matters to me, is getting visitors to my site and then getting them to come back.

Anyway we all know how inaccurate Alexa and Technorati are, they are in fact a bit of a joke and are not a true measure of how popular or well a blog is doing. The bottom line is for example how can I take Technorati seriously, when I have a blog I stopped doing over 1 year ago, in fact the domain has been offline for 8 months and it is ranked 300,00 places higher than my London Is Cool blog.

I have finally learned that what is king in Blogging and that is trying to write good quality content. Most of my readers couldn’t give a dam, what my rankings are, they want to read good quality content. I hear those out there that are obsessed by their rankings, saying that we need something out there to measure how successful we are, that is true, but what we need is something that is accurate and works properly!

What confuses me with Google what we get from Google Page Rank is something that is months out of date. That’s just great!

When I first started London Is Cool, my first target was to get 100 visitors a day, which I’m achieving very easily. My next target is to build up to 1000 visitors a day, which god only knows how long that will take me. One thing that is pleasing me at the moment is seeing a noticeable increase in the amount of people that are arriving at my blog via a search engine. I feel the only way to truly achieve long term success with your blog is learn a wee bit of SEO, so that your site gets picked up by the search engines.

My Staffie Mable tells me it is time to take London Is Cool on to the next level, which is easier said than done. I just have to figure out how to make things more exciting and innovative. I hope to finally take my DVD Camcorder out the box and start doing something with videos on my site. The future is bright, the future is London Is Cool. If you don’t have confidence, faith and believe in what your doing, you might as well give up.

Related posts:

1. How To Become A Better Blogger
2. The Blogging Journey – Life In London According To Me