State of the Blogs

One of the most important benefits I get from writing is that it helps me clarify my thoughts and take a critical look at what I’m doing. Sourcerer and Part Time Monster have evolved to the point that I can’t do that sort of writing on those blogs any more, so I’ll use this space for it for the next couple of months. If you are following because you are interested in writing, pay attention to what I’m doing here. I’m not creating art or talking about how to write better. I am writing to make sense of my situation and to capture a moment in time.

We’ve made a lot of progress over the last couple of weeks, but you can’t see it if you just look at the content quality of our blogs. Content-wise, Sourcerer’s slipped a little bit. Here, you’ve been getting nothing but reblogs for awhile. That’s because I haven’t been writing.

Here’s the progress we’ve made:

• Sourcerer and Part Time Monster both passed 300 followers and 4,000 all-time views on the same day.
• We had our best two-day period ever last week on those blogs. Each had a day that was almost as good for visitors as Part Time Monster’s Freshly Pressed day.
• I met a couple of bloggers on Twitter who who introduced me to a lot of other bloggers there. I’ve quadrupled my Twitter following in less than three weeks, and 70 percent of my followers are bloggers.
• We’ve been experimenting with Stumbleupon. We’ve stumbled a few of our friends’s blogs to measure the effect, and we’ve decided it’s worthwhile to Stumble things, but it’s going to take a while to get that going. I have a stumbledupon account for Sourcerer that I’m using to do nothing but stumble blogs. Eventually, this will be very helpful, and will give us a way to help other bloggers find more audience.
• We’ve set up a Facebook Interest List called “Bloggers with Fan Pages.” We’re in the process of adding every blog fan page we know about to it, and we’ve made it public so that anyone can follow it. That gives us a way to keep up with bloggers on Facebook and give them likes, shares, and comments to improve their news feed rankings.

Setting all this stuff up has cost me writing time, but it was necessary and it’s mostly done now. The experience made me realize that I need to streamline the process of creating and publishing a post, because there are going to be times when I have to do this stuff instead of writing if we want to keep growing. I’ve take a few steps to start doing that.

Just for example – I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for shareable images for my contributors. This is something I have to do. I can’t post something from a contributor without an image. If someone hands me a post, and I can’t pay them for it, I owe it to them to package their work with an image before I publish it. So, one of the things I am doing is reaching out to artists here and there, and trying to make enough friends who do the sort of art I need to have a few go-to artists that I can credit every time I post. Snagging an image that’s licensed for non-commercial use when I need it is ok, but I would rather be friends with 10 artists and promote one of them every time I publish.

January has been a great month for the Krewe of Part Time Monster. We’ve made the most of our opportunities, a lot of bloggers have helped us along, and we’ve gotten better at what we are doing. Our top priority for the next month is to post consistently and focus on the quality of our content.

In the next couple of weeks I will have a a strategic plan to take us through the spring, a post explaining my idea for the A to Z challenge, an award nomination post or two, and a new design for The Writing Catalog.

Shout Outs: Half Eaten Mind, Comparative Geeks, Scholars and Rogues, The Punchy Lands, Wine Wankers, Drifting Through My Open Mind, Alva’s Almanac, Taylor Grace, The Leather Library, Things Matter, Don Charisma, Peace, Love, & Great Country Music, Capt Jill, My Wild Surmise, True Classics, Lazy Lady. (If I’ve left anyone out, I apologize, and I assure you it was not intentional.)