Old media mention boosts new media

I was at the end of a radio interview touting the Fike High School blood drive when David Perkins, also known as "D.P. in the Morning," asked me about my former career and how I was managing the transition from offering my unsolicited opinion about most everything to being a mild-mannered manager of a nonprofit. What do you do with all those opinions, he asked.

Although I was not expecting this opening, I saw the gap and ran to daylight. Immediately after leaving newspaper employment, I told him, I started my own blog as an outlet for all those pent-up opinions. He asked for the address for this blog you're reading, and I gave it to him. He repeated it on the air a couple of times, and I joked that if I saw a sudden spike in page views, I would know that this oldest of the broadcast media still had power.

That evening, I checked my statistics on StatCounter and was amazed to see an obvious spike in unique visitors and page views. Compared to the previous Wednesday, my unique visitors and page views tripled. We're still talking about dozens of page views, not hundreds or thousands, but, still, saying "xeditor.blogspot.com" on a local FM station had an immediate and dramatic impact on the number of people who were seeing — and presumably reading — this blog.

Since beginning this blog with no illusions of becoming a "professional blogger" (I still doubt that anyone can actually make a living at this), I have struggled to increase readership and keep the writing interesting. The secret, as I told bloggers when I was still working for an "old media" company, is to be consistent: Blog every day; always give readers something new to read when they open your page. I did that pretty consistently when I was unemployed and built unique visitors to numbers approaching 100 a day. But when I got a job, my blogging hobby faltered, and I saw my statistics falter as well. My advice — blog every day — was good, and I should have listened.