It’s the same bat-time, same bat-channel as I’ve done this retrospective the last couple years. And aside from the terrible twos when I was busy at a convention, each previous year I’ve done an anniversary post.
I use these retrospective posts sort of like a President uses the State of the Union address, except I don’t bring in a number of guests to pander to the viewing audience. Each year as time passes I assess what I’ve done for this enterprise, good and bad, and figure out just what I’d like to say about it. And obviously with each passing year I believe things get bigger and better – maybe not necessarily in audience numbers or influence (although both were pretty close to a peak this year) but in terms of self-satisfaction. There hasn’t been a year yet where I didn’t think I did a better job than the last, but I can always find room for improvement too.
It goes without saying that monoblogue had a different appearance this year than in the past. This time last year I was playing around with a new look and found a theme I liked – it was adopted earlier this year.
The reasons I wanted the new look were twofold: I had a legacy theme which precluded me from the usage of widgets, meaning I had to painstakingly fix the two sidebars to get the look I wanted with the information I wanted to share, and the change allowed me a more flexible base for advertising. (In case you’re wondering, the theme is called Black Lucas 1.2. I haven’t run across any other blogs which use it, so I like that uniqueness.) It also provided a cleaner look where the headlines popped out and weren’t buried in the overall text of the story.
Another big change was the number of truncated stories. Beginning in March I had an Examiner.com blog and gained a second one in May. At the moment they both lie in a semi-dormant state, simply because I found writing for Examiner wasn’t all that lucrative considering the time investment. I’ve also found their new interface and site backend to be most annoying and their advertising too obtrusive, even when I put the finishing touches on articles. Knowing a number of other Examiners I’ve noticed their output has decreased as well, since it seems to be a site which focuses more on lifestyle and celebrity than politics. But I’m not shutting the doors there quite yet, as there may be a call to resume on it once the General Assembly session rolls around.
A more successful endeavor was being hired by Pajamas Media to cover the 2010 election here in Maryland. I had to step up the quality of my writing and subject selection in order to be included – listen, when you’re competing with guys like Victor Davis Hanson for space you’d better have your ‘A’ game on. (Plus I was well-compensated.) I was thrilled about giving Chuck Cook and our other ‘Off-Shorebird’ friends some well-deserved national ridicule – the video I shot has over 1,200 views. (Even better, Andy Harris was elected despite their efforts.)
Speaking of the election, on the whole I was pleased I didn’t join the stampede toward attempting to be a video star. I’m a writer, and that’s how I choose to present myself. Putting an amateur in front of a camera rarely leads to a good result and that’s particularly true when he’s trying to overshadow the candidate and become the star of the show. You probably don’t know this but at one point I was approached by a candidate about doing a ‘Meet the Press’ style video featuring other local bloggers and I but nobody wanted to work with anyone else. It’s probably better this didn’t come off.
That was part of the reason I used the Right Coast videos, for Matt Trenka isn’t a blogger so it wasn’t about promoting his website as much as it was about informing the electorate.
And since practically all these videos had viewership in the low three-digit range, to be honest most candidates would have done better to go out and signwave or make phone calls during the time spent.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment for the year was not getting any traction as far as advertising goes; in fact I lost a longstanding advertiser (I had their text-based ads for nearly three years) because their business went south. I got some advertisers during the campaign season but this year I was determined to keep free advertising to a minimum.
To this end I have taken a few steps to see just what my audience is, and quite honestly I’m surprised by its reach. If you’d asked me beforehand I would have guessed about a 50-50 split between local and the rest of the state; it’s actually closer to 2-to-1 outstate. Salisbury makes up just over a quarter of my readership, and my Google Analytics readership map is freckled by dots all over the state’s center. (That is probably due to my Facebook marketing, since a whole lot of my friends live across the Bay Bridge.)
So I can’t just cater to a local audience or advertisers – they have to think more regional in scope. Of course, I’m not turning away local advertisers and for some businesses (like restaurants and retailers) there’s nothing wrong with expanding the market area. I’d love to have wineries, breweries, or others who look for the tourist trade as advertising clients!
As you may know, I’m not a super-aggressive salesman (Hard$ell is a good band but it’s not my nature) because I prefer to just put out a good product and let it sell itself. But losing that text-ad client put me in the red for next year because they covered my server fee after about six months. In this case, I may have to do a little more to spread the word.
Last year I had an ambitious goal to increase my readership sevenfold by making my weekly readership numbers my daily ones. In truth, with being on Pajamas Media and other media outlets (let’s not forget my op-eds as well) there were days I achieved that – just not on this site.
Perhaps there’s only so much I can accomplish by keeping a local and state focus, but if I can make it a profitable enough venture I have a good base of operations from which to work on higher goals. Given the rapid amount of change in my life and this business over even the last year I really can’t say just what will come next around the corner. I’ve been fortunate enough to have opportunities presented to me and some are panning out even as I write this.
My chief goal over the next year as I begin another half-decade of this enterprise is to provide the utmost in quality while maintaining a reasonably decent quantity of work. I’m not going to be able to type out six good posts a day, but keeping my present pace of one to two (occasionally three) a day is doable with my other existing workload. I did my 2,000th post in mid-June, since then I’ve cranked out over 250 more.
So there you have it. Perhaps this is one of my wordier and more verbose posts but that’s how I write. As long as I continue to earn the respect of my peers and can advance in the writing profession life is good. And monoblogue has succeeded in that aspect beyond my wildest expectations.
