The Changemaker Family of Blogs began with our main blog, www.kathyberman.com (Changemaker: Change Your Life). After writing daily for 10-12 hours for 2 years, I came to believe that the blog had too much information. So I began reorganizing my thoughts and ideas into separate, one-main-theme blogs. My main blog follows my spiritual journey of the past 30 years.
I had decided during the first few months of blogging that I didn’t have the time to write about all I’ve learned in thirty years of recovery and answer comments. So I decided to not allow comments.
Knowing that I would be in for a long, lonely road without comments didn’t deter me from the decision to exclude them. I have had several people contact me by email so I do have some readers. I have always posted my email address and posted several times about new directions the blog was entering. Of course, my choice brought me not much traffic. Although I have been consistently and continually online for over two years, I continue to have little traffic.
I always try to return emotionally to the point of service. How can I get my message out in a world of 55,000,000 blogs and counting (Technorati—12/03/06)? I don’t have the definitive answers because it is an open-ended question.
But I do have a few clues. We live in a world that loves sound bites. The information highway of yesterday is bumper to bumper traffic.
Many solutions exist for capturing a small part of all the information. We can pick and choose what we add to our “readers”. We can choose favorites to revisit regularly. I have found that I have to be brutal in my selection of what sites I receive by RSS or I have so much information that I get nothing else done.
So—back to my question—how do I get traffic? Over the past two years, I have invested many, many hours studying that question by downloading most of the really great help that is online in blogs and is free (if you don’t count the time invested).
Did any of my reading lead to more traffic? The answer is obviously no because I decided to go in another direction than the ways the heavily trafficked blogs went. Most of the guidance I read was for those bloggers who chose to do things the regular way—allow comments, read and comment on the comments, post to sites to get noticed, join with other bloggers in some sort of network, and/or write articles with link back to the personal blog.
After two years, I still don’t believe that is the way for me to get traffic. I am a hard head and a slow learner, but it still doesn’t feel like me.
Thanksgiving is my sobriety date and this past year, 2006, I began my 30th year of sobriety. I was also 66 years old in 2006 so I felt that my time needed to be spend on writing what I’ve accumulated inside myself and on paper through all these years. I had never been able to find an avenue for all this flow until I started my blog.
I read blogs for several years before I started mine. I didn’t know when I started that I would be writing for 10-12 hours most days for over 2 years (started Nov. 2004) and still writing. However, last Thanksgiving 2006,I felt a need to reevaluate how I spend my energy. I also believe that there are many great blogs as well as mine with too much information on them.
How to package my information in a “sound bite” society? During that time, I also had written several ebooks that I offered for sale. My reservations about ebooks are: (1) the customer has to do all the download, (2) most ebooks are too long to read online, and (3) my main complaint, all the links in ebooks aren’t interactive. After I have paid or not paid for the ebook, I still have to type in the links that I want to visit from the ebook.
So, I decided to go another way. I do need to produce some income since I have no pensions. So I have elected to put the information from my ebooks and from my main blog as well as new material on several password-protected blogs. Each blog will have a separate theme from the main body of my work.
