I've been thinking about pulling the ads off my site.
When this site went live in October I was obsessed with page views. I wanted to build stupid levels of internet crushing traffic so that advertisers would beg me to let them put their ads on my site.
I've found that traffic generally increases the more I post. So for a while there, my traffic would be high on a Monday because that's when chapters S&KS came out and then it would fall throughout the week. I could always get a bump if I posted something on this blog though.
So for a while I really considered trying to write one post a day, getting out there and networking with other bloggers, building this place to be one of the premier blogs on these here tubes. But when I started to really think about it, how to get a new post up every day I realized something important.
I don't want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. And while it might be possible to write a post a day or every other day, there's no way I could write a short story a day or even a week. S&KS took me six months and I had been thinking about that story for years. This current thing I'm working on, I'd be surprised if when it's all said and done, it didn't take me a year of straight work. It seems that the pace of blogging and the pace of writing fiction aren't that compatible.
And while I'm sure that some people can sit down and write a blog post every day, I'm not one of them. Some days I'm too busy either with my job or with writing fiction, some days I'm too lazy and some days I just don't have anything to say. I try only write these posts when I really want to think something through and get feedback from you out there.
It's liberating to realize that and it's led me to a series of good decision. One was to release S&KS as a pdf* which was nothing more than me understanding that it didn't matter whether people were reading it on this site or if they were printing it out and reading it on the train on the way to work, the important thing is that they were reading my words.
It also probably saved the story I'm working on now. I was obsessed with having it ready to go the week S&KS was done so that my traffic wouldn't fall off. And so I overlooked some of the problems with the story in the interest of having it ready to go immediately. I kept thinking "well, it's not perfect but it's ready" which is stupid beyond belief.
Now that I'm not obsessed with my page views I've been able to slow down and start a serious rewrite that should fix the problems in the current story.
So what's all this have to do with advertising? It's easy to get caught up in that short-term "take the money now" attitude. From day one it's been my goal to really good fiction, the kind of stuff that I read and love. But if I get wrapped up in that page view / advertising dollar trap, then I undermine the whole reason I got into this in the first place.
Put another way, if you want to be a blogger then it makes sense to play that page view metric game. But if your goal is something else, then stay focused on that goal and don't get wrapped up in the short-term ups and downs.
*Download it, read it, love it, forward it to friends.
Posted by Ben Corman at 2:24 PM