Friday, July 16, 2010

Reclaiming My Twitter Account

Twitter logo initialImage via Wikipedia
I have decided to reclaim my Twitter account. What I mean by that is I am no longer going to be feeding TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek and Time into my Twitter stream like I have been doing for over a year now. They have had their free rides. Now I have a blog that intends to compete with them. I am going to link plenty to them on a near daily basis. But now the feeds into my Twitter stream are going to be only from my blogs. Most of the fed tweets will be from this blog itself because this is the most active of my blogs.

I did that feed thing because when I was desperately trying to accumulate followers on Twitter, I figured I could not fail in my attempt to create a great Twitter stream if I fed from some of my favorite blogs, news sites to visit, my favorite magazines. 

That worked for a while. It no longer works for me now that I am toying with the idea of pro blogging in a serious way. 

A spike in blog traffic can boost your self esteem. It has boosted mine. Now TechCrunch, Mashable, CNet, BusinessWeek, and Time come across as crutches, possibly even competitors. Why am I giving them all that free traffic again? 

TwitterFeed tells me the newest feed from CNet into my Twitter stream has 700 clicks. Those clicks could be mine. Those could be clicks for my blog. 

Hello people, the free lunch is over. 

I never really did the RSS thing, and I tried Google Reader but I did not become a regular. I was using Twitter for all that. But no more. Now I create my own news feeds in the form of daily blog posts that link to many news items from many different sources.

A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada
Traffic: Canada Top Country, 2 AM Peak
What Just Happened? 3,000 Page Hits
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A 4 AM Traffic Peak, Mostly From Canada

Internal development of Canada's internal bord...Image via Wikipedia

How do you explain this? I think people in Canada sleep less. Or this is traffic from the northern parts of Canada where the sun is around many more hours of the day. Or parts where the sun never sets in summer.

Hello there. Thanks for dropping by.

The page hits for today stand at 1200, which used to be the previous peak for the longest time. And the day is still young. Looks to me like this blog's traffic is about to take off, enough that I can do this full time, if not right away then perhaps in a few months, or maybe even right away.

Blogging full time would be the best thing I could do for my startup that I expect to launch in about 15 months after I get my green card. Blogging full time would allow me to read all I want to read, to network feverishly in the New York tech ecosystem. I would explore the landscape for my startup through my blog.

If I have 1200 page hits for the day, and the top page for the day is getting only 80 of that, and that page is not a new page, but from a week back, that means I am doing well with the search engines. Traffic from search is the best kind. Otherwise sometimes you get a spike in traffic because some big shot blogger linked to you, and then all that traffic has evaporated in a day.

Search engine traffic is the good kind. It is more stable. Although Google can always tweak the algorithms and make you go away. But then that tweaking can go the other way as well. You could see another spike, spike upon spike.

If I were to treat this blog like a full time business, what would I do?

I like the blog's name: Netizen. It is a solo operation.

Every day I would put out a page of links to all the top stories from all the top tech blogs and from top news sites. A top story is what I determine a top story is. I would be making no attempt to be objective.

And I would write a few blog posts every day on topics of interest to me.

I would go to and blog about many of the key tech events in town. The two top tech events in town are:
I would watch and share videos from the top tech events anywhere and everywhere. You do that enough and you realize watching those videos is often better than showing up for many of those events. You can't show up for all of them anyways. And if you are going to every event on the list, your networking is not focused enough.

I would be commenting at other blogs much more. You have to be out and about, you know.
  • Content
  • Traffic
  • Monetization 
Those are the three elements. 

As for monetization, the Google ads are back up. But Google ads only make good money if you have a ton of traffic. I wish I could dig into the NY tech ecosystem to have more companies let me do blog post ads. 

Or maybe it is too early to think of full time pro blogging. The traffic is building up but it's not there yet. But it would be nice to be able to do it full time for a year. And then I could do a $1 salary thing for my startup the way Bloomberg does for the city, he is a $1 a year Mayor

I should probably send out a few emails. Hey, how would you like for me to do a blog post ad for you? Letting me do a blog post ad or two for you is almost like hiring me as a business consultant. I bring along more than exposure. I bring perspectives. 
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