About three weeks ago I was talking with Ricky LaBlue – who my wife refers to as my “adopted internet son” about engagements and other data on our websites.
For Ricky – and a lot of others just like him – the numbers are important. They’re trying to blend something they enjoy with the constant need these days to generate income, and good numbers mean someone might advertise.
I’m conversely a little different. I’ve never made a dime off this website, and have only run ads for someone where it might help them and no money exchanged hands. Some have a “golf fund” for fun things in their budget, and the site is my version of that. I budget enough to pay for everything from maintenance to hosting, and I also add a little extra to help someone if a need arises and I can.
When some of you have graciously donated here, that’s where the money goes. Many a person who has lost a job, or needed a few bucks to move, or just had an awful day has gotten emailed a few bucks from the site to at least have a decent dinner and a few beers. We never say anything about it because that’s how such gifts are supposed to be handled: The left hand should not even know what the right hand is doing.
But we all have pride and egos, so it’s nice to see hundreds of people read a story. I suggested to young Mr. LaBlue that perhaps a continuity of content might help with a site’s statistics, as none of us smaller sites are ever going to be a destination place people go looking for. But I know if I check out a site more than once and there’s no new content, I don’t go back.
So based on this I told Rick I’d try to write something every day for 30 days and see if that changed anything. We’re three weeks into it and several trends do seem obvious. Among them:
- People are coming to this site not for the writer, but the subject. When I’ve written about Virginia Tech sports, the response is in the hundreds, sometimes the thousands. When I don’t – like the panda at Dulles – the response is in the tens.
- People like criticism. Even within the subset of Virginia Tech sports, if I write something that says “gee, they really played well,” 500 people will read it. If I say Brent Pry’s a bonehead for putting two guys wearing No. zero on the field at the same time, 2.000 people read it.
- The smaller number of people who do read the non-Virginia Tech stuff are pretty loyal. They also subscribe and they occasionally leave comments. It’s similar to what you see on social media as I have thousands that follow me, but it’s the same 30 to 50 who interact with you, like your posts and become more of a friend than a consumer of the information you post.
I also think the discipline of writing something every day makes you better at your craft. When you write once a week, there’s a certain mindset you have along the lines of “I’m writing a story” where when you write every day, it’s like continuing a discussion with a group of friends from the previous day. Your style becomes more conversational, you’re more comfortable in stating an opinion or presenting the point of view you’re trying to portray, and that in my mind leads to a better story.
A business analyst would look at these bullet points and say it’s obvious I need to write more about Virginia Tech sports to get those rookie numbers higher. Being a life-long contrarian, I’m going to go the other direction. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to write about Virginia Tech every time they play.
But I have no plan for world domination, so the numbers don’t matter to me. Billy Joel once said he hated writing music, but after he had, he was glad he did, and I’m kind of the same way without all the money, success and supermodel ex-wives. It’s a craft that got into my soul at a young age, just won’t go away, and I’m glad it hasn’t.
So I’m going to keep writing every day about everything under the sun when the Hokies aren’t making news. The greatest compliment I enjoy these days is someone saying I wrote something that made them smile, and it seems the stories about life I write tend to do that for the smaller audience who reads them.
I’ve told every young writer I’ve ever met at least 5 times that “writers write.”
I now have the time to do it every day.
I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
