That said, i did post earlier today in my own (irregularly updated) blog a question about whether blogs are essentially dead in the new social media landscape. (see post at http://www.temafrank.com)

In fact, besides a few really popular blogs, most blogs don’t have enough readers for a pickup game of basketball. Please don’t lecture me about the long tail — I understand niche, even micro-niche. I think as marketers, though, we have bigger is…

Keep up the good work….

May G-d help us all, or should we say may Google help us all?

Very nice post and congratulations.

Couple of comments:

1. I got an error message trying to access the blogsite.com links you provided (500: Internal Server Error).

2. As for the ill-formed URLs … I thought I had set these up correctly in my Permalinks. Possibly part of the problem is related to the .htaccess file coding — which I know nothing about. I just copied what was on the Permalink page.

No worry about ‘beating me up.’ If the feedback is constructive and helpful (which it was), I can take it.

Thanks again. I’ll look into these areas and see what I can do to make corrections.

“…but lately I’ve found it extremely difficult to come up with something to say on a regular basis.”

I have a number of suggestions…

1) Take a look at this free eBook (Spend Less Time Blogging in 7 Simple Steps)– http://blogsite.com/public/public/item/191394. Pay close attention to #5 and #6.

2) Read this post (Looking for Blogging Ideas) – http://blogsite.com/public/blog/162374. It turns out that one of the best sources for blogging ideas is right in your inbox.

3) Create a blogging intelligence system. You can do this free with Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts). Just create a series of watch-lists about your market segment – look for keywords that are controversial and interesting — specifically, you want to find new topics that would be relevant to blog about. This will cause new emails to arrive daily about subjects that are new and topical.

4) Use a newsreader to read 15 other popular blogs that write about your industry – I’m sure you’ll find a bazillion things you might want to agree (or disagree) about.

“…my blog languishes and the visitor count is practically nil.”

For starters, look at your Blog’s index footprint in Google (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=site%3Awriting-etc.com+inurl%3A%2Fblog). Pay specifically close attention to the URL’s that Google has indexed for your blog pages — example…

http://writing-etc.com/blog/http:/www.writing-etc.com/blog/2006/08

This is an ill-formed URL and it leads nowhere. It looks like all your posts are being indexed this way, and it could explain why your traffic is nil.

Lastly, take a look at your index footprint in Google’s BlogSearch – http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tab=wb&q=site%3Awriting-etc.com+inurl%3A%2Fblog. Note how none of the indexed posts point back to the individual post URL’s – they point to improperly encoded aggresses such as (http://writing-etc.com/blog/http:/www.writing-etc.com/blog/copywriting/how-to-make-sure-your-website-copy-gets-read). This is a major disconnect and most likely caused by a faulty RSS feed although, it seems to work fine in a newsreader.

I don’t mean to beat you up in public, but these (and a bunch of other factors) suggest you really don’t have a functioning blog so the low traffic seems reasonable given the technical state of the blog. I’m no SEO expert, but Ive noticed recently that many of the search engines will index your content but not include it in results if there are technical quality issues.

bf

You wrote To really feel the benefits of blogging … you have to do it regularly and you have to do it well.

I like to write (I was a website copywriter for nearly 10 years), but lately I’ve found it extremely difficult to come up with something to say on a regular basis. As a result, my blog languishes and the visitor count is practically nil.

Any suggestions?

I fully agree that over the last 12 months more and more people have fallen victim to “self-proclaimed gurus” who fill their head full of marketing lies just to watch their own bank accounts go up.

Bryan, you and your team have helped me to help others in more ways than I can express in this comment.

Thanks and keep up the great work.

Never Give Up,

Troy Dooly

I do wish we could do something about the abuse of placeholder sites, though. I’ve discussed that issue a bit on my blog. See for example: http://webmysteryshoppers.blogspot.com/2007/11/free-domain-names.html

Joel, I think posting to other people’s posts helps you by getting trackback links, but also helps services like Technorati decide how important blogs are. Technorati bases its authority ranking on the number of links a blog gets.

Sean Stefan
http://www.reginabusinessblog.com

Joel Cohen
http://www.RestaurantMarketingBlog.com