Once again, December 1st (and 8:54 p.m.) has rolled around and it’s time for my annual exercise in navel-gazing. Unlike last year, when I made this into a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at “great moments in monoblogue history“, this will be a little more serious. Perhaps that reflects the national mood.
On a personal note, the last year has been a tumultuous one, although that doesn’t mean all bad. If you look at certain other local sites you’ll see me in the company of a nice young lady and obviously that’s a positive. But it’s been a struggle for me in other areas as the local building industry tanked and I had a false start in a different avocation which didn’t work well with my strengths.
Yet I also got the opportunity for making a small amount to do what I enjoy doing, so as of last February I could claim to be a professional writer. (I suppose I fall into the freelance category.) It’s funny because all that took was an offhand remark to the publication that employs me. Ask and you shall receive.
So why not ask here?
Back on the first anniversary of this enterprise three years ago I wrote, “Probably the largest goal I have yet to achieve is getting monoblogue to be a profitable enterprise. Fortunately it’s not a really expensive hobby, but I would like to see SOME income from it.” In truth, the limited amount of advertising I carry now does make it profitable in the respect that I’m able to pay midPhase for the server fee and have something left over. But as a source of income it’s sorely lacking. And given the amount of time I devote to writing it would be good to make this a worthwhile income stream.
But to do that requires more readership. Over the last couple years I’ve found that I have a dedicated cadre of readers who care to comment, and I appreciate their patronage. Unfortunately, it’s not a readership that’s all that large – in fact, the readership highs I wrote about after year one would actually be quite good right now because the numbers have settled in at about 80 to 90 readers per day (where I was in 2006, as a matter of fact.) For whatever reason, I’ve not been able to get to my 2007 peak numbers again – perhaps it’s a case of dropping the local focus to an extent or simply having more competition. Instead of maybe 2 or 3 important local blogs, there’s closer to a half-dozen now – and that doesn’t count a number of others (some backed by the mainstream media) which have joined the fray around the state.
Yet changing focus a couple years back put me at a Catch-22 – if I stayed local I probably wouldn’t have gained national exposure or notoriety. I was noticed by the folks at Red County by my work at Red Maryland, and it’s possible I may not have been asked to join Red Maryland had I stayed focused on Wicomico County. But getting on Red County may have led me to being asked to join Liberty Features Syndicate. Onward and upward, hopefully.
However, I have an ambitious goal for the next year, and that is to have my weekly readership/page views become my daily number. For those of you not math majors, it’s to increase readership sevenfold. That gives me an opportunity to get in on advertisers who look for a particular number of page views. In the meantime, though, those who are interested in advertising can get in on the ground floor – just contact me at the e-mail address above.
Perhaps mine is a case of talent without marketing (assuming of course that I have talent) but for some reason I don’t feel right just asking people for things. Considering the bulk of my local and regional competition comes from websites with multiple contributors, I guess I just need to work harder at this. Lately my life has become one spent pursuing the perfection of the written word and, like they say about how to get to Carnegie Hall, this site is practice, practice, practice.
There’s a little box on my site which solicits questions, problems, thoughts, opinions, or comments – a phrase I allocated from my ninth grade science teacher Mr. Geer – and I still encourage all of them. While the last year of monoblogue was a pretty good one in many ways (like my first liveblog, introducing polling on my right sidebar, and multiple opportunities to participate in blogger conference calls with the movers and shakers of Washington), I’m looking forward to making the half-decade mark next year one of celebration. I even have some good stuff coming soon, like the unveiling of the long-awaited Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame and my annual legislative awards for the Maryland General Assembly, to name two.
According to my site’s dashboard this is post 1,655, which means I’m averaging over one per day. I’m pleased that I don’t have to retract that which I write and I lose little sleep over that which is on my site. So I don’t think my lofty goals are unattainable, but even if I don’t make it I’m not going to sacrifice my quality and integrity to get there. That’s one thing my readers can count on.
Congrats, Michael! I meant what I said in that post I put up. Though I don’t think we could possibly disagree more, I can always count on you to deliver intelligent, well-spoken, and, above all, mature debate and content. Here’s to keeping it out of the gutter.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the sidebar to vote my site sleaziest in Salisbury. 😉