John Hawkins is one of the very few "solo" professional bloggers that I know. Running RightWingNews, he makes his living from that site plus a few others. A couple of days ago, he ran a depressing post entitled "The Slow, Painful Coming Death of the Independent, Conservative Blogosphere" and he listed a few reasons why:
- Some established bloggers have quit & fewer are taking their place
- Some sites got big, got big quickly, and partnered with other sites and became real professionally crewed operations. Thus, they suck up a lot of viewers. As opposed to the past, new bloggers have an extremely tough time getting eyeballs.
- Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have peeled off a lot of folks that either used to read blogs or will never visit Right side ones.
- Most bloggers suck at marketing, double dealing themselves a bad hand:
Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.
So overall, recognizing that enthusiasm can float more boats, he’s a wee bit despondent over the long term future. At the end of his first post, his advice was Go Big or Go Home. Translation:
If at first you don’t get big enough to go pro, just go home.
My take on this? Nonsense! The Blog is Dead – Long Live the Blog! Reason is, I have a whole ‘nother take on this bloggish stuff from a whole ‘nother viewpoint.
First, John is a great Conservative guy and I am glad he can do the "roof, eats, & clothes" thing from his sites. But there is that part of him, and I think it shows in his outlook, is that he has to make a buck. That’s not a negative, it is how he makes his living. In fact, I’d love to be able to do the same (so, if you have a few extra bucks, hit the DONATE button, wilya?). However, after running GraniteGrok since 2006, just passing 9,000 posts (of which I have done about 4,500, another 476 over at GilfordGrok, and the vast majority of the 763 videos on YouTube and almost all of the videos on Blip.TV and UStream.TV) and just a tad under 2,000,000 visitors, it just isn’t in the cards for me to go pro, or so it seems.
And that’s fine. I’ve recognized that for me it isn’t about the money. In fact, if any donations come in, it goes not into my pocket but into more equipment to be used for what drives GraniteGrok: advocating for Individual Freedom and Liberty. And yes, contrary to what John might think, I have been doing this almost every day (or other forms of political activism) during that time, and yes, 40 hours / week is absolutely close to what I spend doing this. Don’t believe me? Come see my house and the benign neglect it endures.
Yes, we blog, but the difference is that while John might see blogging as a traditional writing activity, for me, it is merely but ONE tool in trying to convince people that the Founders original vision for a limited government gives us the most personal and economic freedom.
Sure, the ‘Grok is the anchor, the linchpin, of all of our activities. But we also do the social media (primarily Facebook and Twitter, and if you add all the Groksters reach together, we hit thousands of folks), we do Internet Radio (GrokTALK!), and Internet TV (GrokTV). And to make that all that happen, a whole bunch of electronic gear to make it all happen. "Grok Unit 1" has been me running around with audio and video equipment for a couple years now – and with donations, we are almost ready to unleash "Grok Unit 2" very soon. With both, we’ll be able to cover even more live events and create audio and video podcasts. In all cases, we try to showcase and push the message under the GraniteGrok banner and because we get up and get off the couch and get out and are visible, that "branding" has helped in our efforts.
Yet, with all that, effort, I wouldn’t say that our traffic is stellar when compared to the BIG sites; they may pull in a couple million hits /day compared to our rather paltry 1 – 3,000 hits / day (sometime more!) when political life gets hot around here. Yet, we seem to have an outsized impact on those we really wish to reach – those folks, normally called politicians, that can make drastic changes to our lives at a single vote or a signature of a pen. We also are plugged into a lot of the political groups and movements in the State, which helps to pick up changes in the environment and then help spread that around the State.
And that, for us, is our measure of success – that we can influence people. Going big – or at least bigger? Sure, would love to. But for us, it isn’t about the eyeballs, it’s about getting the right eyeballs and ears. Certainly on the Right, but make no mistake, we are followed by the Left as well.
Thus, the decision was made to move out of that rather precarious band of being both National / State focused and "downsized" to being a State level blog. Being in the small State of NH, we had the ability to to know all of the political movers and shakers, did so – and now they know us as well.
So, while we probably missed the mega-hit range, that’s OK. We have found our level of success in a niche that works for us – and we show up for work every day, paying or not. We take pride in that; many of the blogs that were around when we started no longer exist.
For us, the payoff was intrinsic – we had a hand in the enormous turnaround in NH from being all Blue (Democrat) and being almost all Red (Republican – and many, many of them Conservatives and Libertarians that put principle before party and put individual Liberty and Freedom first).
And that really is difference for us – we view it as a battle of philosophy and ideology – the Founders / Freedom vision vs the Progressive / Statist vision. Rick, Tim, and Don are all vets – they fought with guns and bullets. My sons have done the same, being combat vets. Here at the ‘Grok, it is with ideas, keyboards, cameras, and mics.
It works for us…we’ll be around for a while.
