There’s a lot of talk out there about the currency of the blogosphere. I’ve heard people say it’s comments. I’ve heard people say it’s linking. I’ve heard people say it’s literal sales and ad revenue. I suppose those are all true to some degree, but they miss the point.
A blog is about the audience.
The larger the audience, the more loyal the audience, the more powerful the blog.
One approach to blogging seeks to garner all that power for the blogger. Under this scenario, I would be writing GoodWordEditing.com as nothing less than an earnest attempt to take over the world. (Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight?)
Needless to say, I’m not really into world domination. Or market domination. Or any kind of domination. But I am really interested in the collective power of blogs. Is it possible to organize them?
Do you know how many bees it takes to make a jar of honey?
According to the National Honey Board, the life of one honeybee worker is astounding. For one collection trip, it beats its wings 11,400 times per minute, traveling over a mile at 15 mph to gather pollen from 50-100 flowers. It makes such collection trips throughout its entire life of 28-35 days—producing a total of 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in the entirety of its lifetime. In order for the average American to consume 1.31 pounds of honey each year, a colony of bees will fly over 72,000 miles and visit 2.6 million flowers.
Thank goodness for the sweet unity of bees.
According to Bits and Pieces, Bees can show us something else about teamwork. On a warm day about half the bees in a hive stay inside beating their wings while the other half go out to gather pollen and nectar. Because of the beating wings, the temperature inside the hive is about 10 degrees cooler than outside. The bees rotate duties and the bees that cool the hive one day are honey gatherers the next.
Sometimes we can get discouraged if we aren’t changing the world in fantastic ways. Bees are just insects, of course, but they show us the power of focus and unity. Consider the big picture for a minute. What inspires you about blogging? To quote Wendy Piersall, what is your mission?
Now think about all the active bloggers. Not the 75 million number. Not even the flogs and schlogs. I’m talking about the 15 million who post at least once every three months according to Phil Gerbyshak.
What is one small thing you can do each day to help other bloggers achieve their mission?
I’m not suggesting that bloggers are the beginning of the hive mind. I’m not suggesting that bloggers are a precursor to the borg.
But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a way to work together? And wouldn’t it be cool if we knew the most effective ways to work together?
That’s partially why I’m starting the HighCallingBlogs.com as a little experiment of TheHighCalling.org. I believe in the Long Tail—so much so that I think the real power of blogs is not the A-list super bloggers. Sure, they’ll give you a decent temporary spike, but spikes are not always sticky.
Nope, the real power of blogs are the masses of small blogs. When something goes viral through the blogosphere, we all see the real power of blogs.
With HighCallingBlogs.com, Gordon Atkinson and I plan to mentor bloggers. If you want to use “church-y†language, you could say we’ll be the world’s first ministers of blogging. Not blogging ministers. Ministers of blogging, guiding people to godly blogging. Because anything done well glorifies God.
Including statistical analysis.
For me, the best way to help bloggers is to find out what works and what doesn’t. And remember the currency of the blogosphere? It’s all about audience. So that means our goal is traffic.
With a mind toward good stewardship, I decided to see if I could measure what blogs do. And I decided to use a blog tour to do this.
This is a long series. There’s a lot to review and summarize here, and it’s really important.
If you stick with me to the end, here’s my promise:Â
I will give you a predictive formula that has a 0.8 correlation to a blog’s potential to send traffic.
That’s pretty heavy geek speak, I know. But here’s what it means. Stick with me and you’ll learn how to make a solid guess at the size of another blog’s audience. Think about the implications of that for a minute.
See you tomorrow.
{ 13 comments }
You’ve got my attention with the 0.8 – that’s really high (one nerd to another) – so where’s the rest of the story?????????
How powerful is my blog? Not very… but I’m not sure I’m focused on making it so. I am very intrigued about your bee/hive analogy.
So I’ll be tuning in to learn more from your series on collective blogging power.
Hi Marcus
I am intrigued as to where this will take you/us.
But….
“And wouldn’t it be cool if we knew the most effective ways to work together?”
knowing what works now (or when you/we find out) doesn’t have to mean it will work ‘tomorrow’
At the moment I think the best way to help the 1% of bloggers who create content (that phrase comes from Citizen Marketers – great book!) is to give ‘new’ bloggers confidence – by leaving proper, meaningful comments on their posts.
Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
Here’s the power of my blogs. And it has nothing to do with big numbers….
Last week, a childhood friend admitted she’s been lurking on my blogs. And you know what? She waits for me to post, with anticipation, because it makes her life better. That’s what she said. “I can always hope for one more post from L.L.”
To quote a tired ad campaign, that’s priceless.
(On another note, come read my bad poetry on Seedlings. Just for you. Well, and Eve. Okay, and Annette. All right, and that big blog community you were talking about.)
Okay, I’m definitely intrigued about what you’re up to. And boy, it’s been a while since I’ve taken statistics…looking forward to reading more.
Now think about all the active bloggers. Not the 75 million number. I’m talking about the 15 million who post at least once every three months according to Phil Gerbyshak.
Once every three months is considered an active blog?! Does that mean 60 million are just sitting there doing nothing? That’s a pretty staggering statistic.
Marcus — This is fascinating. I have thought about whether my blog has a purpose or not. If it doesn’t, I need to pack up. I’ve also thought about who I am writing for — 20-30 active commenters and probably another 40-50 active readers who would never comment are probably my “regulars” from anecdotal evidence. But I’m still a little fuzzy on what the grand goal would be for all of us working together. I’m intrigued to see where you are heading.
Susan. The o.8 is no lie, but there’s a caveat. My data set on this test was too low to be reliable. I worked with a statistician on the numbers, and he said they were good enough to make estimates. And certainly good enough to suggest a very high correlation. But there is still work to be done. Hang in there, I’ll give the formula soon.
ESI, I’m not on a power trip here or anything. It’s easy to get sucked into some kind of pipe dream about monetizing hobbies into billion dollar businesses. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I just want to work with more intentionality–and pass that on to others. That’s it.
Karin and L.L.,
I agree with you completely that the power of blogging is really the social part of social media.
Commenting on someone’s site. Linking to someone’s site. Both of those activities are ways to use technology to remind others that the internet is a network of humans, not computers.
And Karin, I totally agree about not putting too much into predictive models. A model is only true for the exact scenario under which it was developed.
Still, I find it very helpful just to describe what happened. Using what happened to speculate on future strategy is just icing on the cake. That’s the fun part.
spaghettipie, thanks for commenting! I hope you’ll stick around and help us think through the implications of all this.
Rory, thanks for commenting. That statistic boggled my mind too. Wendy Piersall speculated that 37 million of the 75 million are really splogs–blogs with no content except google adwords. En masse, I suppose splogs could generate some income. But those of us who plan on riding this social media wave all the way to shore need to remember the real key. Content is king.
Charity, I don’t have a grand goal or anything. I’m just trying to look at exactly what happened and think through the implications for we can learn from it to become better bloggers.
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