When it comes to blogs or blogging, I find this option much easier to maintain than a website. About two years ago, when I was working on my MBA/Marketing, I did a business plan where I included a website to help promote my podcast. While the site was nothing fancy, I wanted to have an ongoing variety of scifi topics. Blogging was my answer to gain a great attraction for my fan base.

In this chapter, I went to the site: www.andrewsullivan.com to check out the content. I noticed that he had a site meter icon on his blog because I also have the same meter on my blog as well. I clicked on the icon to see his stats. At the time of this blog, he had already received on 47,000 hits on his blog today. Before I started getting depressed by the numbers, I have to remember that one, he belongs to The Atlantic magazine and the online version of this periodical has a seperate section for Andrew’s blog. Two, the content on his blog is more political in nature than mine. (Although, I did find this entry on Star Trek: The Next Generation http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/05/sex-on-star-tre.html - closet trekkie?)       As you can see from my stats, I am nowhere near the amount of hits Andrew is getting and that’s okay. I have not been writing blogs for very long. In fact, mid July will be my 1 year anniversary of writing my Monster Scifi Show blog. When I first started out, I would be lucky if I had over 20 hits in one day and 100 in one month. Now I am close to averaging 1,500 visitors a day and nearing 200,000 hits since last July.

This chapter also goes on to mention using Blogger. This is not to say that I hate Blogger but for one of my other classes, I had to use this service. While I am more partial to using WordPress, Blogger does have some features that you can easily insert into your blog. The downside are the limited numbers of templates one can choose from. You can insert videos but only on the very bottom of the blog. I pefer to have the option to insert the video link into specific entries.

Towards the end of the chapter, there are a few good suggestions. The one that I’ve had the most success would be commenting on other people’s blog. I try to write something more that I like on someone’s entry. When they read what I wrote, more than likely they will come to read my blog. If I’m lucky and they really like the content, I might be added to a blogroll or a favorite listed on their blog. In addition, I would also pingback on some of their entries if I wanted my readers to go to the source of a great entry.