Much as I think blogging sucks time out of your life, one of the cool things about running your own blog is that you can see how people find your page, and what they’re looking for when they find you (Puggles, recipes, and the seemingly no longer available NCIS transcripts). You can even see the search engines that haven’t been announced yet spidering your site and gathering your content for whatever nefarious purposes they have. Or see exactly how frequently the Googlebot pays your writings a visit.
The advantage of this is that you can then tailor what you write to better match what people are searching for, or explore other areas around the topics to see if maybe there’s some other closely related topic that’s even more popular. Combined with Google’s Adsense feedback about what parts of the site are making money allow you to further optimise what you write, attempting to search for local maximums in what you might earn you money.
Interestingly, it seems not unsurprisingly that content is king (as Philip Greenspun’s been saying for some time now). People don’t find pages through the flash animations at the start, or the carefully designed front page, they find sites by starting in the middle at the page that’s got the info that the search engine indexed and for which they were searching.
Sadly though this leads to those strange sites which consist of people paid to write essays about high paying Google Adword keywords, like “Asbestosis Lawyers”, “Aromatherapy” or something (note subtle insertion of those keywords into this post :). These sites for whom search engine optimisation is their sole reason d’etre.
Really smart people create sites they don’t have to create content for themselves. They can throw a bone-like meme to the rabid dogs of LiveJournal and other social networking sites and then wait for them to spread it amongst them, each linking to their meme pages with ads upon them. Hopefully with some less-than-small clickthrough ratio. The rest of us schmucks still have to write their content themselves.
Or there’s always something like DunkinDonutsTalk.com or other ‘Brand Talk’ sites which provide brand news and gateway comments from consumers to management and back.
Most advice is that your blog should focus on a specific area of interest. Unfortunately I find that the internet has commoditised most of my interests, and being some sort of science fiction loving computer geek who role plays just doesn’t cut it as interesting in the days of the Internet. However I guess I’ll probably just keep writing about what I know, and that’s most easily summed up as ’stuff’. Or my spinoff Mac blog 
