Here are 7 important things I’ve learned about the Blogosphere since I started blogging 2 years ago:
1. Kids Get Easy Publicity And Traffic (Especially If They’re Rich) - It always surprises me how easy it is for kids to get publicity on the Internet. There’s a good dozen popular blogs out there written by kids. No matter how badly they write, no matter how horrible their grammar is, people continue visit them.
2. Adults With Money Are Also Popular - Of course, adults who make money are also popular. No offense to the following bloggers, but do you seriously think they’d be nearly as popular if they shoveled horse poo all day instead of blogging? Shoemoney, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Steve Pavlina, etc. I am not saying they wouldn’t be popular at all, I’m simply saying I bet a good chunk of their readership is made up of people who only like them because they all pull in 5+ figures per month. People love hanging around rich guys.
3. Boobs = Diggs - A while back Bart from Florchakh posted a lovely picture of the Ubuntu Girl. It was an instant hit, and made the front page of Digg. The link also made it around the Blogosphere a bit. Apparently those virgin diggers just love boobs.
4. Certain Bloggers Can Say Anything And Get Publicity - Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis are perfect examples of this. I personally don’t give a hoot about their blogs, but I do care about the fact they could say “blah” and have it posted all over the place. For some reason the media and many bloggers have to go on auto-post mode when something appears with “Cuban” or “Calacanis” in the title. I am not exactly sure why those two are special in this regard, they just are.
5. People Love Plugins - I only e-mailed a few bloggers about the little Nusuni Technorati Links plugin I wrote. Daily Blog Tips wrote about it, and it soon got linked to from a bunch of other blogs as well. I am not sure about the total amount of traffic, but I bet it has brought in at least 5 thousand hits. Since I installed the Download Counter plugin It has had over 700 downloads. I installed the download counter after the big traffic came, so I have no clue how much it was downloaded in total (my guess is 2.5 to 3 thousand). Not bad for a few quick e-mails.
6. The Blogosphere Loves Google No Matter What - Despite the fact Google loves to screw bloggers the blogosphere still loves them. Yes, it’s a mystery.
7. There Are Blogs About Everything - There are blogs about girls drinking tea, there’s porn blogs, blogs about pet care, blogs about making blogs, and blogs about stamp collecting. Heck, there are even blogs about Internet dating (how lame is that?) There are blogs for everything!
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April 1st, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Besides what you mentioned, interesting videos and funny pictures are also important in the blog contents to attract more readers to your blogs.
April 1st, 2008 at 5:07 pm
True. there’s a lot of other things I could have mentioned, but I’ll save them for future posts.
April 1st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
2. Adults With Money Are Also Popular
This is a real big one. I often wonder how many subscribers the big blogs would have if they didn’t already have a ton of subscribers or a claim to fame like making a significant amount of money online.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Indeed.
I also often wonder how many of them would be able to replicate their results on a brand new, anonymous blog. It’d be quite interesting if someone like Darren Rowse started a blank blog from scratch with a new nickname and got it to the point of either having at least 7k subscribers or getting at least say $1k/month . That’d be a really good competition for popular bloggers.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:43 am
true…there are blogs about everything…:) and well what if google never existed?
April 4th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Yeah, if google never existed the search market would be so incredibly different. Yahoo would probably be the dominate player - with MSN closely behind. I don’t mind Yahoo search… but MSN is yuck! I suspect it would be a lot harder to find those blogs as well. Yahoo and the other SEs don’t seem to connect with young tech savvy people as well as Google. They seem to ignore that entire audience more.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Great idea for a blog post Jeremy. I think I cannot agree with point 2 of your list - those guys are not *rich*, just look around - there are hundreds of people that make WAY MORE cash online without getting much exposure, even if they have a blog!
Those guys have one other thing in common, other than money. They all mastered in doing an awful marketing BRAINWASH on their audience, that’s how they got the exposure, Showing the money isn’t necessary, in my humble opinion.
And who the hell is Yaro Starak? I haven’t heard about that guy, do I miss something? His name looks familiar to me, “Starak” sounds Polish a little
PS - Darren Rowse has a personal blog, is is available at http://www.livingroom.org.au/blog/
PPS MSN → Live Search
PPPS Thanks for linkback!
April 6th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Good points.
I have no clue what nationality the name “Starak” is, but he lives in Australia (melbourne maybe?).