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Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million

We reached the One Million — 1,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors milestone for the first time (again!) here on BolesBlogs.com since we became the consolidated Boles Blogs a year and five days ago.

Reaching a million of anything is an accomplishment and a joy, but it also forces you to reflect on what was and where you once stood as you wonder if you’d stayed the course and kept a finite focus, readership would likely be over Ten Million — 10,000,000 — reader/hits/visitors today instead of just a million.

In November 2007, when we were only the Urban Semiotic blog — we were close to smashing the one million mark — and we did just that a few weeks later!  It’s hard to imagine how many millions of readers we’d have tallied by now if we’d stayed a single blog.

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Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

There’s nothing quite like the joy of being recognized by our respected peers for the work we spin and propagate into the wilds of the worldwide web, and when we received a welcome, and now more familiar, email last night telling us the great, good, news that our article of the day — Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns — was the latest WordPress.com Freshly Pressed editor’s pick, we were shining in shadow:

Hi, David!

I hope your blog is ready to welcome some new readers — your post ( http://bolesblogs.com/2014/01/21/repressing-the-american-dream-rural-villages-as-retirement-communities-for-younguns/ ) will be featured on Freshly Pressed as a WordPress.com editors’ pick!

Another thought-provoking piece, as we’ve all come to expect from you — thanks. It’s a great post that deserves a wider audience.

FYI, you can now spread the good news by sharing the link http://discover.wordpress.com/, which lets anyone see the Freshly Pressed showcase whether or not they’re logged in to WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is the biggest and best blogging community because awesome bloggers like you make it the best. Thank you for publishing with us, and congrats! Have fun with your new readers.

Cheers,
michelle w.

Continue reading → Three Time’s the Charm: Boles Blogs is Freshly Pressed Again!

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You May Now Buy the Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013)

It’s that time of year again for 2013 reflection and to get set for racing into 2014 and the New Year, and that means we are pleased to announce the — Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013) — now for sale on Amazon!

BUY NOW!

Over the years, many of you have asked for a way to promote the ongoing publication of Boles Blogs and to also have a way to read some of our best writing when you’re offline.  The solution has been a “Best of” series of books published by Boles Books Writing & Publishing that we sell on Amazon for your reading pleasure.

Continue reading → You May Now Buy the Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 4 (2013)

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Back Channel Blog Comments: The Wages of Sin for Not Facilitating Your Own Social Media Stream

I’ve been professionally writing for most of my life.  In 2004 or so, I bet big on daily blogging, and found a lot of success in the prairie days of the early, roughshod, internet.  Years before that, I was writing for paper and online magazines.

One thing I missed in my dedication to longform writing was the initial wave of mixing traditional work with social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.  So what I did, in effect, was to give over control of the discussion of my articles to the wild internet where — through back channel conversations of which I was not aware — my work was being discussed and evaluated.

Boles Blogs readership has remained vibrant and steady throughout the years and, lately, we’ve even been growing lots of Followers and LIKErs.  All numbers are up across the board, so I wasn’t searching for a cause — or even begging a reaction — concerning our direct-response comments flow.

Funny that people didn’t want to login using Twitter to comment on my articles here, but they were perfectly fine “discussing my work” on Twitter while logged into Twitter.  I understand that meme-shift, though.  Commenting here is participatory.  Starting a new Twitter stream makes you a publisher.  It’s all about dynamic control and perception.  You fight that sort of back-channel co-opting by being there and being alive and watching and responding.

The remedy for that missed meme was to not just propagate new articles into Twitter and Facebook, but to be more proactively lively in the Social Mesh to make more of a difference and to be more easily found.

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How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

There’s nothing quite like waking up early on a Sunday morning to a voicemail ping that a new message is waiting to be heard.  Imagine my non-delight as, at 7:00am, I listened to some woman start a five-minute rant against and article I wrote eight years ago — and she started it all off with this sentence:

“You’re a piece of sh@t.”

I’m not spelling out the her word of the day, but you get the idea of where the rest of her message was heading.

Based on the Googly mess that is a Google Voice email transcription of that voicemail, and the manner in which it started, I deleted the voicemail after that first sentence without listening to an insane person trying to wield imaginary power against ruining my day.

I found it highly amusing that the Google Voice email transcription ended the call with the woman admonishing me to be kinder and gentler and to become a “compassionate person!”  Harr!  There’s nothing quite like the cold fish of irony slapping a hapless caller right in the face as payback for drunk dialing!

Continue reading → How Not to Leave Blog Feedback at 7:00am on a Sunday Morning

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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Today is Our Eight Year Anniversary on WordPress.com

This morning, at 2:55am Eastern, as I was waiting for the Apple Store to open at 3:01am — a lovely notification popped up in my WordPress.com admin area telling me today, September 20, 2013 — was my eighth year anniversary on WordPress.com!

Now that is a milestone to celebrate!

I remember I was one of the super-early adopters here on WordPress.com and I was the in the early 500s as a registered user number — there are now over 80 million WordPress blogs in the world.  I loved the idea of Matt Mullenweg‘s WordPress.com right from the start:  An excellent publishing platform that was dead-simple to use all day every single day of your life!

Continue reading → Today is Our Eight Year Anniversary on WordPress.com