In early December, I drew up a plan for this blog.
It was a bold departure from the style of blogging I had practiced until now - the style I’ll call ‘direct response blogging’. It’s like direct response marketing… the blog had a clear, specific purpose which could be measured and tracked.
The new ‘experiment’ was to try a different kind of blogging - without a very definite focus, to write on a general theme, and with a plan to try out ideas including lengthy content-rich posts, link-bait posts, lists, controversy, and stream of consciousness rambles.
I had charted out end-points for the experiment - to be reviewed at the end of February. These were the targets:
RSS feed subscribers: 1,000 (I actually got 192)
Email opt-ins: 300 (I only got 82)
Unique visits per day: 1,000 (My stats show barely 100)
Establish contact with A-list bloggers: 15 (I guess this one worked)
Post guest posts on blogs: 10 (I only managed 2 on Problogger)
Over the 2 month period, I posted to the blog ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE times! Whew!
All this wouldn’t matter as much as the shocking figure I pulled out from my various earnings sources.
Through the 3 month trial period, my monthly income has dropped sharply to 52% of my regular monthly average!
That shocked me really badly. I shouldn’t be surprised, because the time to blog came out of other profitable activities.
But I was.
So, to make up for this steep decline in earnings, I must regretfully call off this experiment - and go back to my regular style of ‘direct response blogging’.
It was fun trying something new. Now, to get back to doing what works! 
Already I’m swinging into action - with a Leap Day Firesale - check it out, it’s cool!
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3 Comments Received
February 27th, 2008 @5:52 pm
Thank you Dr.Mani for being honest and sharing your results. You don’t many openly sharing their failed experiments.
It does raise a good point, like you mentioned… whatever you are doing right now, there may be something different worth doing which is more profitable and time saving.
Of course, you don’t really know if you don’t try. And good for you for trying! And because you were tracking, you were able to plainly see that it wasn’t worth your time.
February 27th, 2008 @7:09 pm
I don’t know if you could necessarily call it a failure or not.
1) Your RSS stats could be inaccurate. Despite FeedBurner only showing 192 subscribers, I’ve found it isn’t especially accurate when it comes to online RSS aggregators (like BlogLines or Google Reader), especially for the lesser-known ones.
In addition, if you View-Source your page, you’ll see that in the header that your RSS META tag is not pointing to FeedBurner’s feed, but to the default WordPress location. Native browser-based RSS collection (like Firefox’s Live Bookmarks) will use this instead of the FeedBurner one. Also, this might be the default feed shown to visitors if they click the icon in their Address Bars, which they could forward to an RSS aggregator.
You will need to look at your actual server stats and try to gain some sort of insight as to the actual number, which is likely surprisingly higher.
2) E-mail subscribers - Personally, I already subscribe to several of your other lists, and since I often get the same e-mail from each list, I didn’t care to subscribe to another. Sorry — I just don’t like hitting Delete all the time.
3) Unique visits per day - Considering how ISPs constantly reuse IP addresses, in addition to various privacy protection software, your stats will always report a lower number than the true value. I’ve seen variances of up to +/- 20% based on a complicated stat-collection system of combining cookies with IPs and session variables.
4) The other two seem more like “nice things to have” versus true goals.
5) Ultimately what it breaks down to is “Did you learn anything?” Even if what you tried failed spectacularly, then you at least know what doesn’t work, so it really isn’t a failure.
Just my few cents’ worth, anyway.
February 28th, 2008 @7:44 am
Thanks, Joel. I have Jay Abraham to thank for that. One of the most powerful lessons he taught me was this:
“The only risk you ever have to take, in business or in life, is an INEXPENSIVE test.”
Craig, you’re right - it wasn’t an unqualified ‘failure’. Only by the metrics I had pre-defined as justifying continuing with it. The only ’surprise’ was that my income from other sources dropped by half - which was startling. I had assumed that would practically continue on auto-pilot, but had missed the fact it required a little tweaking and nurturing from time to time.
That little bit was what I had been ignoring by trying this blogging experiment.
Great points about the RSS subscriptions, I didn’t know that. Nor the info about ISPs reusing IP addresses and skewing stats.
Part of the trouble is that the installation of WordPress is on a shared hosting account, to which my domain points - so the ‘View Source’ RSS feed reflects the domain of the hosted account.
I looked at my server stats (pretty confusing to interpret RSS feed data, though) - and saw that in February, the feed for this blog has been requested 6,632 times. That’s about 232 times a day, which pretty much matches the Feedburner data. Did I do that right?
Thanks for your feedback.
All success
Dr.Mani
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