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Pimp your blog!

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Cauliflower of Love said:
It is now!

(Guess I'll start a blog now, thanks blackace!)

did you really make retardedpost.com? :lol :lol once it is up I am there!
 
That is classic! when life gives you lemons...

You really do rock CoL!
 
I started this at the beginning of the year with the intent of posting one piece of music per day and trying to link from that one to the next days post, but it didn't quite work out as I kept writing myself into a hole. Then it was a dump of stuff that didn't quite warrant posting elsewhere, and now it's somewhat of an early 90s house/techno mp3 blog.

Please edit the url out if you're not happy with one that has mp3s for download, but the stuff I spot generally isn't available to buy in any form other than vinyl from ebay.

http://globalvariables.net/audio.out/
 
http://richphone.blogspot.com/

99% of the blog is posted directly from my phone (Sony Ericsson z710i), hence the frequent punctuation errors and t9 misspellings. I usually post multiple times per day, but it's mainly for my own amusement, I only get a couple hits a day, and they're usually myself. And whenever I swear on there, my mom leaves a comment yelling at me for using bad language.

Feel free to leave all the comments you like, even if they're slanderous and in poor taste.
 
I've got a blog that some people might be interested in.

It's called A Dribble of Ink and it focuses on speculative fiction (mainly Fantasy and SF). I've seen moderate success with it and have managed to rope in some pretty cool authors (Robin Hobb, Pat Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie) for interviews. I write articles, reviews, etc... about the Fantasy and SF genre. I'm actually pretty surprised at the success of it, I didn't think anyone would want to hear what I had to say!

You can find here HERE
 
aidan said:
I've got a blog that some people might be interested in.

It's called A Dribble of Ink and it focuses on speculative fiction (mainly Fantasy and SF). I've seen moderate success with it and have managed to rope in some pretty cool authors (Robin Hobb, Pat Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie) for interviews. I write articles, reviews, etc... about the Fantasy and SF genre. I'm actually pretty surprised at the success of it, I didn't think anyone would want to hear what I had to say!

You can find here HERE

that is good stuff!
 
Blackace said:
that is good stuff!

Thanks man. I've put a lot of time and effort into making it a professional spot, with high quality, exclusive content. People keep coming back for more, so I assume I've been doing a good job!
 
aidan said:
Thanks man. I've put a lot of time and effort into making it a professional spot, with high quality, exclusive content. People keep coming back for more, so I assume I've been doing a good job!

turns into a part-time job for sure. The comic book one I am making (about my comic) is almost off the ground... putting the most time into that!
 
It definitely does turn into a full time job! I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I first started the blog a couple of months ago. If I had known how much time it would eat up I'm sure I would have run for the hills! One major goal I had when I set out to create the blog was to make it more a publication and less a look-at-me-I'm-online type of blog. It takes work to make it happen, though.

That being said, the perks (free books, meeting authors, making contacts, etc...) make it all worth it.
 
alistairw said:
I have a workblog at http://www.littlemathletics.com, but I haven't updated it for ages. Nowadays, I just try to stop people from leeching my bandwidth by hotlinking my pictures. I find redirecting images to this image helps:

http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z262/littlemaths/GAF/bandwidth.jpg[/QUOTE]

that's a good picture but isn't it a little counter productive to have a gigantic picture? Why not just replace with a 100x100 goatse and the words 'bandwidth leech'
 
aidan said:
That being said, the perks (free books, meeting authors, making contacts, etc...) make it all worth it.

As long as you are enjoying it and on top of it you are actually working towards something..
 
You can be rough. I can take it.
The Book of Revenant.
I actually have to give Amir0x of all people the credit for inspiring me to start the blog, and use that actual name.
 
I wasn't expecting to get any kind words for mine, so cheers to those who checked it out and didn't proceed to bleed out of their eye sockets. Guess I should keep doing whatever it is I'm doing. I added another rant about another censorship move, this time by Disney regarding smoking.

Iamthegamer said:
Just threw up two new posts myself. I'll probably write a little more in the future when it comes to reviews, the problem is that I just couldn't get through the damn movie...
Hey, I'm a friend and/or acquaintance!
 
Mine is The Replay-Value Blog, a web-comic.
I've wanted to make it into an actual website for over a year (www.replay-value.com) but each of my four designers have kinda... left me hanging. The actual story arc hasn't been updated since last November, but there have been comics since then. And I have "Series 2" all but ready to upload here. With much better, more robust stories. Check back soon!
 
ok, http://saoh2000.blogspot.com

all in spanish, i write about anything (my main subject right now being Britney). i love to write since high school and i got a blog mainly to let it all out, it helps me feel a little less angry sometimes heh.

i think today i´ll write about the new iPods.
 
I'm still not sure what I want to do with the blog I've been sitting on for awhile now. Hell, I'll probably just start a new one. But I do have a question: for those of you who have at least garnered a modicum of readers/traffic/fame, how did you go about building that up? Right now I'm sort of clueless as to how to bring readers into a blog. Even if you have really, really good content, it does no good if nobody's aware of its existence, right?
 
The traffic to my blog is pretty decent from what I can tell (I just hit the 15k views benchmark after only a couple of months of being open) and I think the biggest cause of it is, all modesty aside, good and exclusive content.

I've chosen to focus on a pretty defined topic for my blogging (Fantasy and SF fiction) and so it is easy to target an audience and let them know about the blog. I do a lot of interviews on my web site (Robin Hobb, Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, Tobias Buckell) and many of the authors I interview have web sites and blogs of their own, where they are more than happy to promote our interview, drawing traffic to my site.

Also, posting/commenting vigorously on other blogs/message boards that focus on similar content. You can't go around just advertising your blog, but if you put a link in your sig, or link inconspicuously in your posts, then people will eventually check out your blog if they like what you have to say on the blog/message board.

Tag everything, title your posts clearly, give your blog a good name... basically anything to get yourself a good google ranking. I've managed to land on the top page most of the time when someone searching for "*Random Author* interview" in google, leading many people to my web site.

It take a lot of work to get a blog off the ground, and even once you start to have a steady stream of visitors you have to keep them happy or else they'll leave and go to another blog!
 
Belfast said:
I'm still not sure what I want to do with the blog I've been sitting on for awhile now. Hell, I'll probably just start a new one. But I do have a question: for those of you who have at least garnered a modicum of readers/traffic/fame, how did you go about building that up? Right now I'm sort of clueless as to how to bring readers into a blog. Even if you have really, really good content, it does no good if nobody's aware of its existence, right?

Go to Blogs that you like, write some comments. If you don't just spam like hell, eventually the other visitors will click your Link to find out more about you. Also, try to promote it wherever you are ;(

Yeah, I have some kind of small blog/website-hybrid, but I won't link it now 'cause it's german ^^

edit@aidan: So these tags really work? I should use more of them..
 
In terms of getting readers, Aidan hit the nail on the head: it's about finding audiences and making your way up the google listings.

Digg is also an option in terms of certain posts (Not all of them) that you feel might have a connection with a particular audience. I had a Heroes post, providing a catchup after the March/April Hiatus, that got onto Digg's front page, and my blog greatly benefited.

The other thing is, if you are able to tape into such an audience, try to foster that. I got a huge influx of hits from the campaign to save Jericho after I blogged about it. In the 4 months since that point, I've made sure to continue covering it and visiting CBS' Jericho boards to remain on their radar. I even decided to devote Fridays during the summer to the series, as a way to drive traffic on an otherwise slower day.

As for Google listings, I've had a lot of luck with them. As an example, "Lifted Pixar" has my blog post on the subject at #3, behind only a front page Digg story and Pixar's official site. How? Descriptive title, essentially. That's always a key, I find.

And really, a lot of it is about patience. A majority of my daily hits now come from archived posts, and that doesn't really happen until you have a lot of content. I've made 464 posts, of varying length of course, since January, so that level of content drives a lot of different people in my direction.

How many are staying, though I can't really tell.
 
Good posts on building an audience and driving traffic. It's much the same way that I started building mine as well. Posting comments with links, and in forums, but not pimping it badly in forums. Maybe putting it into your signature and so on.

I've found that if you post consistently and on a regular basis, you can begin to build a nice steady audience. My blog is definitely for a niche audience, and I still get between 250-300 hits per day, spiking up from time to time depending on the topic of discussion. I honestly never expected to get that many.

I also use Google Analytics to track all the stats for my blog, and that helps to know who are direct hits, meaning people who have you bookmarked, how many are returning, where they're coming from, search topics that might have brought them, and so on. Great tool.

In my year and a half or so of posting, I'm coming up on 1500 posts soon.
 
Thanks for the advice, everyone. My blog is, of course, a gaming blog. I know they're a dime a dozen, but I need some outlet for my thoughts. I've been trying to pursue an academic route for game studies in meatspace, but my first few weeks in grad school have been less than pleasing to me. I'm not fond of the constant theorist name-dropping and while there is a small group of other grad students interested in gaming, they are bringing their other disciplines into a very loose definition of the subject. In other words, they'd like to talk about art, architecture, theory, literature, comics, and so on in relation to video games, whereas I'd like to pursue the opposite route of video games in relation to those other areas. Realizing that I'm the only one in the position of putting games first has been rather disheartening. So, in a way, I want a place where I can reject academia, but at the same time be rather thoughtful and honest about my own opinions on various aspects of the industry. A blog seems to be a good way to accomplish that.
 
Mine is in Spanish, but what the hell:

www.anaitgames.com

Initially, it was a small blog where 3 crazy persons blogged about videogaming (myself included). Now it has grown a lot since then, and it has become a notable Spanish videogaming blog (8000 individual visitants per day!). We will soon jump into a full flegded videogaming portal, but we want to retain the blog flavour, period.

We generally try to apport "a different view" to videogaming, we don't want to became an automatic fifa screen posting machine. Each editor has its own humour, personality and bias, and applies his knowdegle when commenting videogames (we have graphic designers talking about the artstyle of several games, I use my marketing knowdegle for talking about the industry, another friend of mine which is an electronic engineer have exhaustedly analyzed several pieces of hardware, etc, etc).

Also, now that I am at it, I would like to thank Neogaf. It has become an unvaluable source of news for us, and its memes and comical gifs are apreciated by our readers (yup, gaf is also known in another non english speaking parts of the Internet, a la 4chan).
 
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