The Shield of Achilles: One year old today!

Birthday Cake by Don Solo

Hard to believe it, but this web site is one year old today. My first post was dated May 4, 2007, but I didn't actually publish it until the next day, making May 5, Cinco de Mayo, as this blog's anniversary.

As expected, I didn't have many readers at the start. In fact, for the first few days I could count my daily readers on one hand, and by the month's end I was averaging only a little better. Right now, I average between 100-300 a day, and one post of mine back in July received over 23,000 hits. Not bad for a blog that I designed, wrote, and publicized all by myself - especially when I knew nothing at all about web publishing when I started. My goal is to reach an average of 1,000 people per day, and I am getting there. The climb is slow, but I am getting there.

I've sifted through a lot of joy and frustration in the past year. Joy, when posts of mine are successful, frustration is when I spend many hours on a post and it is virtually ignored (such as this one on the BBC which took a tremendous amount of research, but garnered few readers).

That said, I've learned a lot this past year, and so I'll provide some advice for first time bloggers:

1) Get in early.
This is the best advice of all, and unfortunately, not much anyone can do about it now. There wasn't the explosion of blogs in the early days of the Web as there is today; blogs that started early got the lions share of the traffic and built up a loyal following (the hugely successful Instapundit is one example). You can't turn back time, but the fact remains that the earlier you start your weblog, the better off you'll be. If you are thinking of starting a site, don't wait - do it now.

2) Make friends.
Andrew Sullivan and Eugene Volokh were successful right from the start, because they had friends in their professional fields (publishing and law, respectively) that helped them out and spread word of their site to other friends. By leveraging anti-war friends, Army of Dude, gets a healthy readership even though it has one of the ugliest and most amateurish layouts I've ever seen. Unfortunately, while I have my fair share of friends in real life, I had none online or in the publishing industry; I had to slowly make them all from scratch. Today, many of their web sites are on my blogroll.

2) Publicize.
Unfortunately, this is even more important than writing. If I could hire a full-time assistant, this is all I would have him/her do. There are so many ways to publicize your site that I could hardly fit them all here. Leave comments on other web sites (but really comment, don't spam!). Submit your better articles to social networking sites such as Reddit, Digg, and Fark. Sign up at Haloscan to help leave trackback to other sites, which helps drive traffic to yours. You can also use paid advertising; I experimented with both Blogads and Google adwords. Adwords was completely useless; I got almost zero hits from them, but fortunately, they only charge you if you get hits to your site. Blogads worked much better but in the long run it was costing me about 1 dollar for every four hits I was sending to my site. That might have been worth it if I was selling some product, but my blog is non-commercial, so the price was ultimately too high.

3) Write what you know.
It's hard for people to take you seriously if you are not an expert in your field, like Professor Bainbridge, a professor of law, who blogs about law. There are exceptions; many bloggers, such as Ezra Klein have no real work experience or education to speak of, but he was able to leverage his other writing jobs to his site instead. Experience does certainly help. I simply don't recommend writing straight out of high school or college for most people. Get some life experience first.

4) Be unique.
If you write the same things everyone else is, then you are wasting everyone's time. There are already a million blogs on politics; why not pick something different? While many of my subjects are fairly common (the War, immigration, etc), some are not. Recently I got a huge surge of readers who found me by typing in "Lt Van Ulm" in their search engines. This was probably because I was one of the very few English language bloggers who wrote about him. This wouldn't have happened if I was simply writing about overexposed personalities, such as Paris Hilton or Barack Obama. Jos, the Comics Curmudgeon, is hugely successful because he picked a heck of a niche for himself; making fun of the daily comics.

5) Watch the quality.
Your subject matter might draw people in, but quality will make them stick and come back sometime. If your blog is full of grammatical errors it's hard for people to take you seriously, even if you run a humor site. Be accurate as well; don't just shoot from the hip or your own words may come back to haunt you later. Also, don't hesitate to correct yourself when you are wrong; this is a common mistake I see on other sites.

6) Dont fall for scams.
When I started, I tried blog-sharing services like Blog soldiers. For every certain number of blogs you read, others will read yours too. But this didn't work for me at all; I was reading 12 other sites for every one hit to mine, and these were low-quality hits too - they seldom looked at more than one page.

7) Don't overdo the widgets or ads
This is a common problem; try to keep it simple. A site swamped with advertisements or funny widgets is confusing to the reader and takes longer to load.

So what's in my future? In order make my site stand out better from the crowd, soon there will be some major formatting changes to the Shield of Achilles. This will include a three-column format and a more distinctive look. Stay tuned.