Lessons Learned
About a year ago, I initiated a new chapter in my long and depressing saga of blogging experiments by creating a new blog caffeinophilia. The question was whether a blog with a tightly-focused theme, unlike the ramblings here on überfluss, would attract a larger and more steady readership. The answer is a crushing no, and the results underscore the fact that content is irrelevant without a solid base of promotion.
The new blog caffeinophilia contains reviews of coffee and tea shops from the perspective of someone who does not drink coffee. It is a guide to finding caffeine without coffee, particularly in Seattle, Chicago, and Portland. From this standpoint, it is a relatively unique site, but not one incapable of developing a small but regular readership.
Yet the failure could not be more spectacular. Despite a flurry of posts during this summer, the site has attracted a mere 11 hits in the past 30 days, 4 of which were me. There appear two main reasons for this: lack of promotion and Yelp. Both are obvious, but the Yelp effect did not occur to me when I was originally creating the blog since it was before I became a regular Yelp user. Essentially, Yelp has eliminated the need for independent online restaurant reviewers, by having information on virtually every restaurant and coffee shop known to man. The user reviews are frequently of poor quality. Still, no one ought read my paltry collection of tea reviews when Yelp contains so much information.
So what is the next experiment? I have been impressed with the success of Cosmic Variance, a blog on mostly on cosmology co-authored by a collection of physicists, now engulfed by Discover Magazine. I also enjoy reading the Becker-Posner Blog, although I occasionally find their entries repetitive. In particular, the use of multiple authors on these sites permits more rapid updating and multiple perspectives on the same issue. So, anyone want to start a new blog?
The new blog caffeinophilia contains reviews of coffee and tea shops from the perspective of someone who does not drink coffee. It is a guide to finding caffeine without coffee, particularly in Seattle, Chicago, and Portland. From this standpoint, it is a relatively unique site, but not one incapable of developing a small but regular readership.
Yet the failure could not be more spectacular. Despite a flurry of posts during this summer, the site has attracted a mere 11 hits in the past 30 days, 4 of which were me. There appear two main reasons for this: lack of promotion and Yelp. Both are obvious, but the Yelp effect did not occur to me when I was originally creating the blog since it was before I became a regular Yelp user. Essentially, Yelp has eliminated the need for independent online restaurant reviewers, by having information on virtually every restaurant and coffee shop known to man. The user reviews are frequently of poor quality. Still, no one ought read my paltry collection of tea reviews when Yelp contains so much information.
So what is the next experiment? I have been impressed with the success of Cosmic Variance, a blog on mostly on cosmology co-authored by a collection of physicists, now engulfed by Discover Magazine. I also enjoy reading the Becker-Posner Blog, although I occasionally find their entries repetitive. In particular, the use of multiple authors on these sites permits more rapid updating and multiple perspectives on the same issue. So, anyone want to start a new blog?
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