Case Study: Blogging For Fun

Posted by Hyder on February 25th, 2008

You know this challenge experiment has shown me two things.

One, I don’t like to blog when I have nothing to say.
Second, I like to blog for fun. Profit is just icing on the cake.

This experiment has shown me what I really feel about this medium and I’m glad I did it. I guess if there’s any benefit of this experiment for me, and anyone, is to show that you really need to be into it, if you plan on sticking around for the long term.

I remember a year ago I would write random posts on this blog, sometimes 2 - 3 a day just to get more content archived, get more pageviews and more clicks on CPC ads, etc… Those days have long gone. I rarely post more than once a day and my overall obsession with other things blog related have subsided. I’ve also uninstalled my Google toolbar, I don’t give a hoot about my Alexa rank, I’m not as affected as I used to be when I would see positive or negative spikes in my RSS readership. I think probably the only real thing I’m concerned about is in making sure that I write what I feel strongly about.

If it ain’t fun for you, might as well stop doing it

I’ve taken this same approach with the test blog I created. Yes, the central focus was to gain as many RSS readers as possible in a month, a min. of 100 to be exact, running some promotions I did manage to hit a decent number in the past two weeks. I still have a few days left, I don’t think it’s going to get past a certain number though, and you know what I’m fine with it.

This is not to say that I was not up to the challenge, I had stated earlier in the month that this was a super busy month, and I actually had a week less as well.

The cool part was that the blog got stumbled twice and brought in a few hundred visitors, even though the content admittedly was sub-par. I was quite surprised by those incidents actually. My co-poster Zach did manage to write one post, he’s been pretty much missing since then. Maybe he doesn’t have the time, but an email would have been nice. Anyway…

I know I could have done a better job, but that’s not an excuse. My excuse is - I blog because I like to, not because I have to.

If this challenge experiment teaches you anything, let it be that.

Category: Case Studies