It's our Birthday!
Posted by Martin in Announcements | 10 February 2007
When we started out with Real Life News, we carried out quite a bit of research. The general view being, that a vast proportion of blogs fail to make it through their first year!
So at the very least we've done better than most.
However, have we achieved what we set out to?
When we first started, we concentrated our efforts on getting footie blogs up and running. The reason being, both myself and David new a bit about the game and we knew there’d be interest in what fans think and say.
At the time we were surprised at how easy it was to find fans wanting to write about the game and their particular team. We started with about five separate teams and blogs. Over the year we've seen that expand and contract as some writers leave and some join.
Halfway through the year we decided to bring all the footie blogs together into one, as we felt we could engage with our readers more as they would start to read posts about other teams. That's worked quite well.
Our aim on the footie blog was to get at least one writer per team, happy to share their views and opinions on the game. We've yet to achieve that. Today we have writers for Chelsea, Arsenal (me & David), Charlton, Liverpool, Man United, Newcastle & Wigan. So if you fancy writing or know someone that’s a football fanatic, please let me know.
Another aim was to start up new blogs around key topics. In August David kicked-off the Environment blog. In recent weeks and months we've seen the readership to the blog grow and whilst the number of readers is still relatively low compared to footie, the revenue it generates from google ads is often better than that from the football blog.
When we started out, we had visions of making pots of gold which we'd share with our writers. Unfortunately that vision has yet to come to fruition. And as my other half constantly reminds me, we've yet to go on that skiing trip with the proceeds from RLN!
Overall, both myself and David have learnt a huge amount about blogging and running a blogging site. So whilst we may not be rich in a monetary sense, we are rich in experience!
Comments
Congrats on making it through your 1st year. Just a little suggestion though. I think that a music blog could be quite successful, so perhaps you should think about starting it up. It's such a wide topic, that there is a lot of scope for people to write about various different aspects of the subject. Let me know what you think
Thanks for your suggestion on starting a music blog. Please let me know what areas of music you think we should cover?
Also would you or people you know be interested in writing?