3 months and 18 posts later…
nekosasu | April 22, 2007 | 5:30 pm
It’s been over three months since I created this anime blog, and I just felt like observing what has happened during this period. It would be very appreciated if many people would take their time reading (and commenting) this, as this concerns everyone indirectly.
A little piece of neko history first. As explained in the “who’s neko?” page, after my first posts on Blogspot I immediately went over to Animeblogger to reach a broader audience. My motivation was peaking back then, and I started blogging about Pumpkin Scissors and Getsumen To Heiki Miina. I made “short” (sic) summaries and added my personal comments in the so-called “thinkbox”. My first goal was met, namely to simply write and vent my feelings. The second goal though, to get my point across and to establish a steady readership, has, as far as I can see, never been met. The lack of feedback caused me to lose my initial motivation after a while, and I started omitting my blog (by playing ludicrous amounts of Pangya), and eventually dropped Getsumen and Pumpkin. And the only thing that kept me linked to this blog was the myriad of spam reports I got from my Spam Karma2 through e-mail.
Yes, the Spam bots continuously kept reading my first 2 posts, and tried dropping their lovely meds comments on them. No sign of human movement yet. Only recently was I being drawn back to keep my blog active, due to my recent Gundam SEED addiction, but, yeah, my “comeback” was somewhat ignored. Actually, noone even noticed I wasn’t posting anymore for 1 month, for noone went to my page anyway.
Honestly speaking, I don’t know if I’m doing the wrong approach to everything. For anime, with my finals coming up it will be hard doing a steady blogging work with recent anime – right now all I’m watching is Gundam SEED Destiny. Of course newer anime get more attention but then again, I’m already way to late to catch up to all the lost episodes, and most good series are overblogged anyways. Standing in the shadows of those daily updated and popular blogs, there’s no way that this blog can stand out in some way or another. Another possibility, the way I report over those series might not be appealing at all. Right now for Gundam I omitted the summary and simply wrote down my thoughts. I have yet to see any positive reaction. I claim to have watched many anime series beforehand and being a translator, but I’m lacking the references. Maybe it’s simply my writing style that is scaring the readers away. Too long, didn’t read? Too long-winded? Too superficial? Too many spoilers? Noone has ever told me yet.
I thought, maybe my little photoshop/vectoring skills might help me catch the interest of the people, but I guess I was wrong. Not attractive enough, huh. Unless I’m doing the wrong approach again? I guess posting the blog link all across the internet is not a good idea.
But, then again, there’s something different about me. I do measure the popularity of this blog in a different way than many others. While others are bragging with (daily, monthly, total) hits, I care mainly about comments, because they show me that people react to what I’m saying, and that it was interesting (or wrong) enough to leave their own ideas, outlets, words in a comment. You want hits? From January 19 on, at least from what my SlimStats plug-in tells me, I have over 25k hits (I assume that the 3271 is the number of unique visitors). A huge “thank you” goes out to the Spam Bots out there, without you my hits wouldn’t have exceeded 2k.
25k hits. It’s over nine thousaaaand etc -_-
The counter on my page on the right is quite wrong, lol. I created that account much later than January 19 and set the date to Jan 14 and added a 200 visitor treshold that might have visited the blog in the mean time. Well, now that SlimStats already passed that count, I think I should either get a new one for my page or simply get rid of it. As if anyone cared about those anyway, small pages with high numbers look sad anyway.
Call me a hypocrite, I know I am. My ambitions are quite high, such that I’m asking way too much for what I’m actually giving out. It’s rare for me to go to someone else’s blog and to leave a comment (I try, seriously), but not only don’t I have much time but in most of the cases, the concerned blogs don’t do it as well. Yet, they’re quite popular, they’re recommended by anyone, etc. It’s funny, I don’t want to admit my jealousy but I know I am jealous as hell right now. I know that those people have the possibility to be known through other mediums, such as IRC. Yeah, in the end it’s maybe my own fault for going to a dorm that restricts internet access and prohibits most of the regular chat applications. Shit happens, duh.
Right now, the only way for people to notice my blog is the antenna… and after 10 posts from others, it vanishes into the endless list. My hope rests on those few minutes that my post lands in the 10 most recent posts, because then someone might notice it. After that, chances are near 0.
So what to do? ¯\(°_o)/¯ Advertise more? In IRC, my quit message is this blog. In MSN, my personal message is this blog. On every forum, my homepage is this blog. But most of the people I reach through that either ignore me or don’t understand or don’t like what my blog is about. Be on everyone’s blogroll? What for? Spam people’s shoutboxes/comment fields? I’m not like that. I’d rather give up than to force people to absolutely visit my blog. If they don’t want to, I have to accept that. So in the end, I don’t know much what to do next. All I know is that I am not in a dead end and that I am not desperate enough to close my blog down yet. However, I do notice that my motivation keeps going down at a steady rate. With such awesome series like Gundam SEED, I’m sure I will keep writing about things without receiving much feedback but after that…? Maybe things will get better after my finals, who knows.
I hope at least a few people dared to read this (and to tell other people to read it as well), and I hope this can trigger a broad discussion about this issue, as I bet I am not the only one suffering from this. I just hope that I won’t be seen as a selfish emo (whatever you’d like to call me bad) for letting out this small outcry of help. Thank you for your time.
~neko
I read the entire entry since I am a fairly new blogger and posts like these are pretty interesting anyways.
Sorry to hear your readership troubles, you are definitely not the only one. Roughly 30% of the listed blogs on AnimeBlogger are going to die or have died and have not been removed yet. As if readership killed them, maybe, but also a lack of interest and dedication also played a factor.
Yeah its good to see you are not blinded by that stupid counter bloggers love to brag over. Actually few do really o_O. For example I had the number one search result when you search for “Bleach 122″ I recieved well over 600-800 unique vistors from google alone in a span of 1 day and had a 80%-90% exit rate (immediately left the site). But I guess that’s how the game is played right?
Most bloggers are in for the readership but they really do not know the hidden competition that occurs on a daily basis for readers. With sites such such as RandomC taking the major fan base (a very small one at that), small casual blogs stand no chance when their favorite shows had already been blogged the moment they came out on TV on the bigger sites.
All in all …. my rambling is about done …. good luck … and just keep at it … the top blogs are the top blogs because they had stood the test of time .. though RandomC did have its death sentence in set for a period of time o_O .. my only real suggestion is to post at least once a day. It could be the shortest of posts .. but whatever .. anything … is better than noticing a blog owner hasn’t done anyhthing in 2 weeks.
Finally for bloggers to change their mentality. Rivalling RandomC, That AnimeBlog, momento (my top 3 =) plug plug ) is serious business o_O … even worse 2 of those are run by more than one person …. oouch >
Wow, someone wrote a lot! <3 Thank you Rednights!
Indeed, a lot of the factors that decide upon the success and appeal of one’s blog are, as you said, determined by the blogger him/herself: interest, time and devotion. True, I often can’t meet many those requirements (especially with my finals, blabla excuses). But for some other people, they don’t need that, as they’re fairly popular and people care about them to value their opinion. As you said, a third of the bloggers drop out, but noone cares further. Now imagine that one of those big blogs you just mentioned was taken down, the impact on the community would be striking.
Then again, they had to build up their communities from a small blog like yours or mine. I’m sure, they most probably had hard times as well. It’s small fish like me that keeps getting impatient and wants to have everything in an short period of time. I know that, sadly. But to get to such a high level, there’s more to it than simply patience. Acquaintances do play a huge role in that. And the more time you spend chatting with them, the more people care.
Maybe I’m simply too late. I guess the space up there is limited, such that many blogs will need to wait for a loooooooooong time until they’ll be noticed. The more bloggers there are, the more difficult it is to stand out, and I’m but one person. I’d probably need to post four times a day to annoy people enough on the antenna to make them click on it once.
Or write more attention-whorish posts like mine above. lol.
Competition is tough. I always remember the Intel vs. AMD monopoly, any other processor manufacturer can’t compete with those anymore. IBM used to be on the spot but it had to retreat and specialize in other areas (now, Cell processor for the PS3 for instance…). I know you can’t compare bananas with jeans but that’s a bit how I feel in all of this. If I do have chances to make this place get popular, lol, I will try to make use of them. Maybe I should specialize in other subjects, who knows.
But I guess for now I’ll keep steady in my noob anime blog and try to make the best out of it, until after my finals. Maybe time will grant me some chance to attain my goal. But as long as I can get a single reaction from someone, I’m satisfied. At least I’m not completely ignored. Once again thank you very much ^^ (wow, what blogger thanks their readers for commenting… ahaha~~ I must be desperate.)
Most of my comments and readership…views/hits come from the bots also, but I do have humans who drop by. I found that my visits to my site increased when I was approved for animenano and animeblogger antenna. Surprisingly Technorati and Google count for the most of my visits. And then there are visits from the comments I leave on other blogs where I finally remember to leave my blog link. So, you do have to advertise your blog.
But it does get a little depressing when there are more hits from bots than from anyone else. And the long stretches where no one leaves a comment. But I just write because I want to.
I’m glad you have the motivation to write. For me that’s one of the few important things to have. Stay motivated and enjoy what you write
Hi, i’m also just starting out with blogging and in my case visitors are also quite few but commenting in other blogs really helped a lot, most of them visit my site back and generously comment on entries they find interesting. i’m also busy with other matters and just write during my spare time, so i’m just glad other bloggers still visit even i don’t post that often. I think you write well so just keep it up. ^_^
As said by others, it is really not an easy task if you bother about readership and comments in your blog if you don’t blog actively. As said by Rednights, the trick to having visitors is simple yet the hardest thing to do: Write lots, write well.
It is a simple philosophy but most of the people out there have a huge problem trying to motivate themselves. Hell, even I have a problem motivating myself when I need to, and it can be a really huge problem since most of my other writers are generally inactive most of the times.
Trust me though, that there are always the odd series that is not touched somehow, and being an excellent series of its own. I generally found a few shows just in this spring season, “Kaze no Shoujo Emily” and “Oh Edo Rocket”, both interesting series of their genre, without much coverage.
I have said before how much it took with blogging in order to get some attention from the small fanbase of people who bothers to go into an anime blog for information. I mean, I have to suffice with absolutely low viewership with no comments for a long while and it’s really irritating because you are like blogging to an empty shell in the wired net.
It sucks, trust me on that. Still, if you continue to take it in your stride, write good entries and also improve on structuring, design and writing excellent entries with catchy headlines….You never know how far it will go :)
Cheers and good luck!
Well, I don’t mind the sugarcoating, I would do the same in such a position ;) But once I don’t post for a few days, I’ll lose readership (if I ever had one), while in your case, people would get worried – by no means would they leave your blog. It’s obvious. That’s the fine line between modesty and arrogance. In no way am I trying to cuss at you, I’m just stating how I view things. False modesty often gets my opposition.
“Write lots, write well“. I do write lots without anyone prompting me, allright. But write well? Do I write well? I don’t know. As I said in my post, noone ever told me. Why? Because they don’t care. And if people just read all of this without leaving any sort of feedback, I simply feel ignored. As I said, sugarcoating looks nice and all, but definitely doesn’t add much to the issue.
It sucks? Oh lol, I do trust you, since I am going through such a phase, no, more precisely I have been enduring this all this time. Is that your case? This has been three months now. I’d like you, Impz, to check back in three months (if you don’t do it in the meantime ^^) to see if the situation has improved anyhow. I hope for that. “See how far it will go“, huh. If noone ever prompts me to write, well… most probably not very far. I have other things to do than to be the laughing stock of AB. Too bad.
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