One year in the books

A year ago tonight, I went to the Blogger website and signed up for what has now evolved into monoblogue. Originally, the website was called “ttown’s right wing conspiracy” and it all started with this post called “Introduction“. Oddly enough, it’s dated April 2nd but I actually signed up prior to midnight on that Friday night – just took me awhile to write that particular post. And if I’m to believe the totals on the ttrwc site and here at monoblogue, this is post number 193 in toto, the 85th at monoblogue.

In May of last year, I started site metering just to see what kind of readership I got. The very first full week I had 28 visits. It took until mid-June to break 100 visits total. It wasn’t until the middle of August that I had 100 visits in a week, and that turned out to be a one-time occurence. When I changed over to the monoblogue site, I had a total of 902 visits in about six months. Moving to monoblogue.us helped me get my opinion out…I had over 1,000 visits in December alone.

Thanks to links that I’ve been fortunate enough to get, and hopefully people who are impressed enough with the content of the site to keep coming back on a daily (or more frequent) basis, in March I had a total of 5,583 visits and 19,635 hits, both creating all-time highs. Every month monoblogue has existed has seen at least a 70% growth in my average daily visit rate, and I have you, the reader, to thank. I know at some point the growth will level out but I’d like that time to be a LONG way down the road.

Like I said, it’s all about content. While the backbone of the site is political commentary, I write about stuff I’m interested in. The challenge is to write in an intelligent, sort of scholarly manner but keep the subject interesting to the reader! So I’m generally not going to write about what everyone else is writing about. Either I get to the subject once some time has passed so I can review and comment on the commentary, or I do what’s more fun for me and try to dig past the obvious takes. Going off the beaten path is a good way to go. Blogging also helps me when I’m asked to write articles by the editor of the newsletter I occasionally contribute to pseudononymously.

So where does monoblogue evolve to from here? As you can probably tell, I have some blog ads that I’ve placed on the site. One in particular I just added is for Blogburst, which is a service that will allow the “mainstream” media to access my blog and place my thoughts in print as circumstances dictate (with credit of course.) There’s a few papers leading the way in that department, including the WaPo. But paying advertisers are welcome to come to my site as well. (How about I say SOME paying advertisers?)

Content-wise, I do have some plans for additional coverage of the 2006 elections here and around Delmarva. I’ve already started by adding links to campaign websites so monoblogue becomes a “one-stop shop” for political links. While it’s obvious I have a biased opinion politically, my goal is to be fair in giving all voices an opportunity to air their views to better inform the voters. Thus I link to all the websites, left, right, and way out yonder. There’s a couple other things I’m working on as far as races go, and hopefully the seeds I’m planting now will bear fruit for the primary and general elections.

While politics will be a focus, I have other things in the hopper that will be fun diversions to highlight life in Delmarva. Like I said, it’s about what interests me, and I’m only a political junkie to an extent. The hard part for me will be blogging and paying attention to events when it’s summer on Delmarva. But I’ll give it an honest effort.

However, my growth in the blogging world ultimately depends on the reader. If a reader peruses monoblogue and finds it poorly written or boring, they’re likely not going to come back to read it again. Hopefully that’s not the case, as I’d guess that I’m retaining readers who come across me from the politically-oriented Delmarva Dealings, Justice For All?, The Goldwater’s Oracle, and Suitably Flip; or my blogger friends like Drea and “T.B.” I think it’s because I follow a simple rule when I do this: have a lot of fun!

On that note, I’ll stop having a good time with this post and start anticipating my next one. Hope you enjoyed the ride in year one, because I’m looking forward to making year number two twice as good.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

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