I spent most of yesterday writing and researching an article and then deleted it because I was not satisfied with my conclusions. I started writing a different post today but then looked at the statistics for the last couple of months on this Blog and wondered why I am wasting my life digging up information and writing new articles that so few people are going to read anyway. In other words, this writer and administrator is getting Blog weary.<\/p>\n
I have to read three or more hours of news and articles each day just to keep up with things in the world and church in order to find things to write about for my posts. Each comment sent to my Blog has to be read. About two thirds turn out to be spam or they are written by people that just want to use my Blog for some soapbox. They do not get posted. The remainder I have to analyze and make a determination if it is necessary for me to write a followup comment. Some comments are brief and simple and some are long and almost need to be as complex as the post. I probably now average writing about 10 or 20 comments a day. There are also emails connected to something said in the Blog that also requires reading and perhaps a response. My website and Blog takes almost 80 hours of my time each week and the Blog is probably taking up 80 percent of that time.<\/p>\n
If a Blog is growing that can be a powerful incentive to continue. I have done many modifications on this Blog over the last year to make this Blog more readable and easier to find older articles. Yet the stats tell me that it has had little effect in increasing viewers. Last year around this same time of the year I said if the views did not get to 1000 a day by the end of the year that I would have to reconsider the time that I was spending keeping up this Blog. Readership did pick up to about 1000 a day for awhile, but it is now back down to about 800 views a day if I subtract out the visits to the home teaser page.<\/p>\n
I also have to realize that about half of these 800 page views are the same people reading or posting follow-up comments. So when I consider all of that, I doubt if there are more than a few hundred people actually reading any post on my Blog each day. When I put a link in an article I am lucky if more than a handful of people even click on the link – yet even read it.<\/p>\n
Consider this. The main website gets about 6500 page views a day. That has been increasing slowing since I started this website 12 years ago. The whole Blog still probably generates less than 20 percent of the website page views for the website but the Blog has more than 80 percent of the articles and also takes 80 percent of my time. Something does not add up there. Had I posted just a couple of hundred articles that are now on my Blog to my static website pages I probably would now have over 10,000 page views a day instead of 6500.<\/p>\n
Blog readers seem to only care about reading the latest post unless they come via the way of a search engine. Even though I have a teaser page that gives a short excerpt of the last 50 articles, and I have a sidebar that gives the top 66 read articles, and other aids on the Blog, hardly anyone clicks on anything except the latest post. It is the same with the RSS feed. It gives the last 10 posts but people only click on the last one.<\/p>\n
The problem with a dynamic Blog is that the articles that you write soon become irrelevant and almost lost in time, but if you put them on a static website under a category people visiting the site seem much more likely to find and read them. I also think Facebook, Twitter and others are making blogging less relevant today.<\/p>\n
I also cannot understand why my articles rank high in the Google index under keywords likely to be queried on, but I only get 200 or 300 hundred hits from search engines a day for over 1000 posts? Heck, on my static website I get 200 hits a day just on my “The Coming Economic Collapse Caused by World Debt” article alone. Yet, I have to keep in mind that some of those 200 or 300 people a day might then go to my main website and increase the numbers of page views there, so it is hard to figure the worth of having the Blog within the website. Even so, I do not think the number of people that actually go from my Blog to my static website articles are significant. I probably can count those that do each day on my fingers.<\/p>\n
So what to do? I know what I am not going to do. I know I am not just going to now delete the Blog. There are some good articles on it so they would have to be transferred before I would even consider doing that. I guess I could just turn off the comments. That would save me a whole lot of time and it probably would not effect the original views much. However, it would stop your input and my responses. How important is that? People can still reach me by email.<\/p>\n
I also seriously think that after 2013 (if not before) all this will be censored in one way or another anyway. Let’s face it, in the name of national security and politically correctness our constitutional rights are being taken away. Its not all being generated by government either. It is the website hosts, the internet service providers, the domain name registrars, the indexes for search engines, and the self appointed politically correct police that will try to get websites shut down that say things that they do not like, or they might even hack it. A static website is more easy to protect than an interactive Blog.<\/p>\n
I have not made any decisions yet and I am open for discussion and suggestions on this.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the answer is to get my best articles on my static site and then eventually do away with the Blog. However, there is no easy way to do that without redesigning the whole website which means that I would have to buy more modern website development software, do the considerable learning curve and then do all the tedious copying and pasting of\u00a0 all the Blog articles that I want to keep. I would also have to once again search engine optimize each article using metadata\u00a0(I do think there is a way to transfer the metadata) and do redirects on all kept posts. Of course I also would lose all the comments.<\/p>\n
The other much more logical route is to put everything on this whole website on a new Blog and then customize the Blog to be more like a static website, but that takes learning script coding that I really know nothing about, so it would be a big undertaking for me. I also could not spend the time required to do that and continue to take the time to administrate and add new content to this Blog. There simply are not enough hours in the day.<\/p>\n
So I just don’t know what I am going to do at this point. I do know that something is going to have to change because this guy is getting Blog weary. I am open to constructive suggestions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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