Ribbon Cutting

My name is John Nunemaker and I am a big fan of blawging. Oh, and by blawging, I don’t mean telling you about how my weekend was or what my cats names are (incidentally they are named Bob and Charles). Currently, I post articles on three websites—Addicted To New (general thoughts and web dev), Ordered List (where I work), and RailsTips (Ruby and Rails programming).

Recently, I have put a lot of effort into RailsTips and most of what I will post on here will be related to that effort. I believe there are specific things you can do that will lead to a successful blawg.

What is a successful blawg?

First let me say that there are many levels of success. As I haven’t flown to the highest heights, I’ll define successful as what I have done with RailsTips and what my business partner Steve did with Ordered List, before I joined him. Currently, both sites have around 4,000 subscribers according to Feedburner and between 30k – 50k impressions a month.

Neither of these sites is a top 100 on technorati or whatever, but both are serving their purpose. The blawging on Ordered List often leads to client projects which obviously is what pays the bills for our company. RailsTips, on the other hand, gives me an outlet to post ideas that the community can react to and gives me a place to release my open source projects. Of late, I have gotten into advertising and sponsorships which allows me to actually make money while blawging, something that I would do anyway.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that success is relative to what your goals are. If your goal is to create more project leads and your blawg does that, it is successful. If your goal is to earn a name in your community and have a launching platform for projects (and maybe make a bit of cash while your at it) and you do that, then your blawg is successful.

Blawgtips will be down right common sense ways of improving your site and will definitely have some stuff worth subscribing to.