My Garden Blog Gets Changed Yet Again and Why

So what’s with the changes here? What are you doing now?

I can almost hear some of this type of comment from readers as they take a look at the changing blog layout (again).

So here’s the real deal and my take on one aspect of the garden blogging world as it sits today.

First of all, the majority of readers here are also bloggers. Interesting bit of data but one that’s repeated over and over across the Net. If you read blogs, you tend to be a blogger yourself or involved in some other Net way (forums etc). It’s actually a bit of a loop, garden bloggers tend to talk to themselves and each other a lot. So if you’re not a blogger, this might not be of interest to you and you can stay tuned for an increasing flow of garden related info in subsequent posts. If you are a blogger, let me give you a bit of an insight into how I currently see blogging.

My primary consideration is reader reaction. I measure this with stats packages and other less esoteric ways that don’t concern us right now. If I’m doing my job, my readers become better gardeners or more informed or whatever, but they show me this kind of thing in the underlying stats of the blog over time.

A few months ago, I went with a magazine format and this had immediate impacts on readership. The most glaring was that income went up. I made more money from the magazine format than I made from other formats. Fascinating stuff and I learned a lot from looking at how that happened. But I also learned that my primary objective in involving readers was somehow not working the way I had wanted. And my writing frequency had changed because of the demands of working within a fully featured content management system. it had gone down because it took more time to post. And my readers responded in various ways.

But I made more money.

Let me digress for a minute and tell you about Google. Google engineers are trying to develop a system of evaluating websites using their mathematical formula that mimic a human brain. (Terminator fans – Skynet step one) To do this (in very simple terms as I currently understand it) they divide Googles’ operations into short term and long term memory. And they measure thousands of variables about each website they spider.

So for example, a bounce rate (the time a visitor stays on a site) is an important measure of how visitors react to your site. I’m told the average blog has bounce rate of 75% within the first 3 seconds. In other words, 75% of all visitors will stay on your blog less than 3 seconds. Only about 1% will stay for a minute or more. And yes, this will vary slightly from blog to blog. This is partially because blogs tend to be date oriented. The structure of a blog is date based, with the most recent on top and the oldest hidden. Few folks search for old news or old posts. Google sees this and classes blogs as short term memory. You rise to the top of the search engines fast and you disappear just as quickly on the downslope; put into the supplemental index faster and then dropped faster.

In contrast, websites have hierarchical structures and are not date based. Bounce rates are much better on websites and visitors tend to stay longer. For these and other reasons, Google classes websites as long term memory. You rise slower but stay in the main index longer.

This means if you want to work with Google on short term memory items (news and views) you use a blog. If you want to work with Google on longer term material, you use a website.

So what does this mean for the average garden blogger?

it means that garden blogging is wonderful for some kinds of objectives. If you want to blog to meet other gardeners – an over the backyard electronic fence kind of thing – blogging is perfect. If you want to rant, rave or pass along current news, blogging is great software and Google will short term love you. If you want to pass along many different trains of thought, blogging is perfect. But if you want to write great gardening tips that will be found for a long time, blogging isn’t the software (remember as a rule of thumb, blog posts will be forgotten more quickly than website pages) And while there are exceptions to this; this is the general pattern of how Google treats blogs and websites.

So what’s that got to do with anything here?

Glad you asked. Long term readers know that I’m constantly experimenting, trying to figure out the best technologies to help other gardeners learn and become better gardeners. That’s what I do for a living – for over 30 years now. In one form or other, my life’s work has been to teach gardening skills and promote the use of plants as a lifestyle. This is just the latest incarnation.

So the magazine theme increased my income but reduced other more important variables that I wanted to achieve from this software platform. This means the format really wasn’t working in the long run and it had to be changed. Really, I don’t blog to make money. I established a very long time ago that garden blogging was never going to make enough money to justify the time spent on it. So you blog for other reasons. In my case, I want a fast platform to share news stories, quick tidbits, pictures, video etc. All things of interest but probably not of lasting importance to Google – but things that one of my reader segments like to read and don’t fit on any website or newsletter.

Reader segments? What are you talking about. Well, you know that I have a newsletter as one segment, a forum for some folks, this blog for some folks, a seminar series for others. Everybody learns and works in different ways so my enjoyment in garden writing is delivering systems to help as many as possible. As I said on my webinar video last week, I’m having way too much fun doing all this stuff! Seriously, it’s a lot more fun than digging and selling perennials in freezing rain in April.

I’m very fortunate in my life’s work. I get to work with plants, write about them and actually make enough money to afford a few toys. I love what I do and I try to do the best I can do with the tools I have.

Blogging doesn’t make much money but it’s a heck of a lot of fun and it meets the needs of a chunk of my readers. The magazine format was getting in the way of this so it had to go.

And that’s why I’ve just deleted the magazine format and why this looks pretty plain. I’ll likely search around for another blog theme that catches my fancy but for now, I’m enjoying plain and simple. Back to basics and having a good time doing it.

So stay tuned, I’ve once again started to rethink blogging and what I want to use it for. And you gentle readers will once again, in your own ways, show me dramatically if I’m on the right or wrong track. The only thing I can tell you is that I’m having a great time doing it and I hope you’re equally amused at your end.