Post 200...Observations on writing a blog

200 posts...

That's a lot more than I thought I would have written at this point - almost 3 posts a week for nearly 16 months straight.  Over the course of those posts I've learned a few things about the process of how to do this, and believe me, it is a process.  Some things totally make sense when you think about them.  Some are odd and a bit counter-intuitive, but they also strike me as interesting.

Here are the top 4...

1.  Publish Regularly -  This probably sounds obvious, but trying to publish new posts on the same days of the week on a regular basis seems to improve readership.  At the beginning, posts came rather haphazardly whenever something came up.  Once I started trying to be more consistent sticking to days of the week, readership on those days improved.  To that end, recently you may have noticed aShortChronicle posts are coming out Monday/Wednesday/Friday (or more accurately, late the evenings before).  That seems to work well and will probably be the plan going forward.

2.  Promote Posts Consistently - New posts get put on Facebook and Twitter immediately and linked to comments on related stories on other web publications such as other blogs or news sites.  Hat tip to David Boraks from DavidsonNews.net for explaining to me the different ways to use Twitter and Facebook for getting out a story.  Promoting one's own stories may seem a little self-serving, but then again if nobody knows they're there nobody is going to read them.

Now, for some of the less obvious...

3.  Patience is a Virtue even in Web News - Sometimes, waiting for a story to develop is better than blasting something out just to be "first".  I can't tell you how many times I've waited on printing something just to see how it played out.  Waiting always pays off rather than really embarrassing oneself by spouting off like bloggers have a bad reputation of doing.  I've learned that the hard-way a couple of times.  Writing a "correction" or a "retraction" is not what you want to be doing with any sort of regularity.

4.  Never expect a story to get a lot of page views.  The web will always surprise you. - The stories I've expected or wanted to get a large number of hits almost never do, and the ones that have gotten the most come out of left field.  Three of the top four posts since writing this blog fall into that category of  being a "surprise".

• One was the story about a Stand Up North Carolina meeting in Mooresville featuring talk show personality, Vince Coakley.  Soon after that story, Vince Coakley was taken off the air at WBT Radio and that story got a huge number of hits for people searching on him. 
• Another in that same category was this piece about the dustup between Governor McCrory and Charlotte City Council over the proposed Charlotte Streetcar.  That story got a bunch of hits weeks later when Mayor Anthony Foxx was selected as the nominee for Transportation Secretary.
• The most read story in the history of aShortChronicle remains "HOT Lanes: The Empire Strikes Back".  That maybe should not be that much of a surprise considering how passionate people feel about this toll road project, but what is surprising is how that one story almost single-handedly changed readership patterns for the blog.  Enough people read that one story on a wide enough scale that daily page views have stayed almost double than before it was published - even on days when there isn't a new post.

For anyone else who writes a blog or is thinking of starting, as a testament that #1 and #2 work, readership of aShortChronicle gauged in page hits has nearly quadrupled since January of this year when I started doing both of these things with some regularity.  However, as important as these are, a bigger lesson may be to  just keep writing and trying to find interesting stories presented from different angles than the more traditional media.  You never know which one will take off and be a game changer.

Check out the new "Blogger's Chronicle" page at the top of the blog for other posts on writing the blog.