Note blogs have a particular failure-mode that it’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking it’s private when it’s really public.

@Lynne - it has a lot to do with you who know. Don’t believe the hype. The bloggers who get many readers tend to be connected self-promoters, right-place-right-time, or very, very, rare talents. If you don’t fall into the favored few, you will blog forever and not get heard (and have people telling you to try harder and it’ll happen someday, though it won’t).

If you’re writing about something that people are interested in then they’ll read it. Essentially that’s all you need but to get those people through the door as it were you need to entice them. If you look at some of the big names in UK blogging, they have different styles that they’re “famous” for. Devils Kitchen has a potty mouth but he really, really knows his stuff. Guido Fawkes writes in the third person and gets some really good gosip. Iain Dale very subtly takes side-swipes at people and has a lot of audience participation.

If all else fails, whore your blog around the internet! Put links to it in forum signatures. And, of course, the best way of getting new people to your site is through Google - read up on how Google rankings work and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to manipulate (for want of a better word) search results.

No point me writing a book about blogging now is there? I’ve just given most of it away for free!

What makes some blogs take off and others (hundreds or thousands, I suspect) just wither on the electronic vine?

It’s really little comfort to be told, after the damage is done, that one shouldn’t have made the mistake. It might even be adding insult to injury. And again, looking only at the winners, the people who have had big successes, gives a very distorted view of the risk/benefit ratio.

I am surprised though that you’ve twice implied that blogging can be destructive. While I can certainly imagine pitfalls await the poor executive who quits his job first, starts his blog second, and finds it a failure third. I can’t imagine how the Om model - blogging while working and switching to full-time blogging only if it’s successful- could cause damage.

Note also there’s an extreme survivorship-bias effect. People who try, and find it all a waste of time or worse, don’t often publicize that (or might even find themselves attacked for saying it didn’t work!).

However, this is an extremely small percentage of the population. Almost all of us are not in the sort of jobs where running a personal trade newsletter makes economic sense. And done wrong, it can be quite destructive to one’s life.

About 2 years ago, I blogged about bringing a Superman museum to my hometown of Cleveland (where Superman was originally created in 1937 by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel) and it got picked up by someone in the city of Cleveland who later contacted me about it.

Hopefully, plans are now in place to bring an authentic Superman museum to Cleveland (and I certainly hope to be included in the process) thanks to me constantly blogging about it…

Great post, Jeff!

“I make very little money out of blogging but I make a good living out of having blogged.”

Like you, the blog brings in directly something like beer/holiday money. But the work that is offered from having the advertisement of a blog makes a decent UK middle class income. (Which, given that I live in Portugal goes really rather a long way.)

So you plan to IPO when ?