Yep, I’ve been doing this blogging thing for ten years. Well, ‘doing’ is a relative term. Back in 2002, I posted nearly every business day. Now I’m down to a couple times a month, sometimes less than that.
Warning: this post is a bit of belly-button gazing, and then star-gazing. My chance to think about where B2Blog is, and by extension, where I am, and what the future holds.
A fade in traffic
I’ll admit to blogging less, and I’m not ashamed to show the stats that B2Blog.com is getting less visitors Lots of things could be blamed for the fade of traffic:
- Search traffic for images (one mention of Dilbert = thousands of hits) was very high 2008-2010
- Blogging frequency dropped after 2008
- The advent of Twitter and Facebook
- An overall saturation of the B2B blogoshere
- “Readers” turning into “scanners”
- Less interest in what I have to say
What I miss most from the hey-days is the camaraderie with readers and other bloggers. Twitter is not the same, at all, which is why I mostly gave up on it as a means of expression.
Some more numbers
I am proud to say that B2Blog is a part of what I am, regardless of the frequency or the traffic. We have a saying in my other hobby, Geocaching, that “it isn’t about the numbers”, before toting out your stats:
- 201,000 page views
- 933 posts
- 791 Google Reader subscribers
- Three trips to events as a blogger
- Zero job offers
- $400 in ad revenue (dirty link deals before I knew they were dirty, if you must know).
- A couple hundred in affiliate commissions (for a web stats software way back in the beginning)
Skipping past the numbers, I’ve taken on projects with this blog, with two I’m proud of being:
- A series on putting product pricing on B2B websites
- Posting about B2B scammers, so that people getting the same strange emails and calls that I do have a way to start learning about the scam.
I’ve enjoyed the technology, the writing, the culture, and the people. Blogging has helped me solidify my opinions about marketing, and I’ve started to drive the point home in the last few years:
B2B marketing should be pragmatic, tactical, well thought-out, and practical. It is a result of an iterative process that weeds out the crap, ultimately finding solutions that you didn’t know existed.
So what is next?
I think the future of B2Blog is pretty simple … it’ll be more of the same. I’ve got a few wild ideas of things I could do, but I’ll stick to the basics. There is a market for that, even if it is just a way to talk to myself.