Writing vs. Marketing

[Dante311]

As I tirelessly updated my twitter and facebook accounts and looked for ways to promote discussion and my blog, I suddenly realized the amount of time per day that is spent not even writing on my blog. Which poses the question:

How much time (percentage) do you spend marketing your blog (forums included) versus how much time you spend actually writing content for your blog?

P.S. I realize that as your blog matures this percentage could change thus please provide the age of your blog
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Lateral Drift

[Nathan]

My blog Inkweaver Review is one year old.

I spend about 50%/50% time one writing vs. marketing. However, my subject is book reviews, so that doesn't count the time I spend reading the books that I review. If I counted that it would be more like 70% for writing and 30% for marketing.

In reality, writing also involves research and reading other sources, etc.

It could be that I don't do as much marketing as I should. I know that my blog could probably be much more popular than it already is if I bothered to Twitter, etc. But I don't even do that.

[trailofpen]

If you have the right content and market correctly, then you should start seeing a snowball effect where your blog starts to market itself. It may take a while, and most people never get there. Once search engines start to picking up on your blog, focus mostly on your writing, SEO writing to be more specific.

[Nathan]

I agree. If you look at some of the top blogs out there, according to Technorati they get 10000 other blogs linking to them every six months. At that point other people are doing your advertising for you. I haven't yet reached that point, and probably never will, because book reviews aren't exactly a hot topic, but it is possibility if you have a really good blog.

[Dante311]

I have to agree about the marketing taking care of itself at a certain point but for those like me that are mainly focusing on a non-niche blog it would be extremely difficult to build traffic if it wasn't for promoting. Hoping that one day I could turn blog into online magazine of sorts and then might be able to have multiple niches in one website -- those days are still in the distant future.
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Lateral Drift

[melvin]

well my take is 70% marketing and 30 for writing. as i noticed there are a lot of blogs writing good content that never really took off the ground while there are also some reasonable no.of blogs providing so-so content getting so much traffic, wht do you think?

[Dante311]

Anyone else? I am curious to know how other people are distributing their time.
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Lateral Drift

[ricardo001z]

Marketing is better than writing when your blog is new. You can write an award winning article, but no one would read it. But if you write a rubbish article, people would blog about how stupid you are on their blog.

[QuirkyJessi]

Hmm, I'm not really sure. It varies from month to month for me. I want to say I spend more time writing, but I know that's not really true.

There are lots of things I do that I don't consciously count in my "for my blog" time breakdown. I spend a lot of time reading RSS feeds, and often times, things I read there somehow turn into content on my site, spark an idea, remind me to do something behind the scenes, try out a new blog-related item, etc. Because I'm not specifically reading all of those things "for my blog," it'd be hard to calculate it, even though it effects my site a lot.

I often forget to count in time I spend posting here, too. While a side effect might be it bringing people to my site, I'm not here *because* I'm trying to get people to go there. Another side effect might be that I learn something new to try on my site....a new addon, a new marketing technique, etc....but I don't come here just for that, so the time I spend doing it is for lots of reasons.

[QuirkyJessi]

Originally Posted by ricardo001z

Marketing is better than writing when your blog is new. You can write an award winning article, but no one would read it. But if you write a rubbish article, people would blog about how stupid you are on their blog.

And I disagree. The opposite holds even more true. If you write horrible posts, nobody is going to care....and they're certainly not going to return to your site, much less blog about it on their own site. Occasionally they might if it becomes *controversial* (not just 'rubbish') and gives people something to talk about.....but if you're just coming off as stupid, incomplete, not adding anything to what's already out there, etc....then people are going to move on.

On the flip side, write great content in the beginning, and sure, people might not know it exists yet. Once you start marketing, though, they're going to want to keep coming back for more because they know there is quality content to be seen there.