I'm With all the talk about sustainable farming and coffee, what about sustainable blogging?
I’ve run a blog that pumped out 20 posts a day. On Buzzgrinder, we used to post every hour on the hour from 8am-4pm, five days a week.
We’d publish the same tour dates that are on 12 other music blogs. We’d post an interview nicely timed to the release date of a new album – just like seven other music blogs. We were adding noise to the echo-chamber.
I discovered (twice) that we were driving up the mountain, never able to let our foot off the gas. Then I looked at the map – the mountain never ends! And we’d always be looking in the rear view mirror, checking our stats, gauging the effictveness of the previous days’ content. And we’d look at how people showed up on our site from search keywords, and optimize our landing pages… and…
Stop.
Look, I’ve seen offices filled with people doing this, cubicles filled with hunched over kids, clacking away at their keyboards. I’ve seen people hand-cuffed to their inbox. I’ve seen people chained to their TV, covering some show on network TV. I’ve done it, too.
But is that sustainable blogging? Is it healthy? Can you do that for five more years? And if you can, then what?
You’ll just keep driving up the mountain.
Look at Daring Fireball, an Apple-based blog, written by John Gruber. Just him. No photos (or photo galleries) or rambling comments sections filled with drivel. The site (about a year ago) hit 700k unique visitors in one month. One guy.
Is he a special case? Of course he is; that’s the damn point. He’s written for years, built an audience and now profits from it. He doesn’t just republish press releases for SEO value.
Sure – you can build a team of writers and publish 10+ times a day. You can fill up the search engines and blast your headlines to Twitter and Facebook.
Doing that is like the old “TV industrial complex,” but instead of buying more ads, you’re paying for more posts.
But with more posts — just like more ads — when do people start tuning out?
Bottom line: is “more, more, more” a sustainable blogging strategy?