Since I last shared my frustrations, I felt that things were getting a bit better. Sadly, while things got better in terms of comments and such, it didn’t last. Things took a turn for the worst since the start of this year.
With Coronavirus outbreaks in Japan delaying some anime productions with more on the day, this does give me a lot of anxieties of the future of this blog. Not only that, the lack of comments on my recent posts, including my editorials from last month, which are hurting my motivation to blog. In addition, the lack of followers are becoming a sticking point too. What troubles me are the few who I follow are unfollowing me, which is a huge betrayal. I don’t know exactly what I am doing wrong since I do not post anything controversial.
Instead of keeping my frustrations in, I want to share them. Also I want to receive feedback from the readers on what areas to improve the engagement on this blog before I completely burn myself out. Hear me out.
Of course, this situation didn’t happen overnight. It’s obvious by now that I have dealt with some hard times. I had to leave my first job since it didn’t work out. It definitely took a toll on me and kind of made me into a hermit. It’s really embarrassing to reveal to others that you don’t have a job. It’s not until late last year I finally received a job offer. This is after three years of applying for federal government jobs and doing several phone interviews.
In a way, this is why I haven’t been active on social media and sharing stuff about my interests and some aspects of my life. Probably some of you unfollowed me mostly because I didn’t follow you back or I am not that active during that time. In other words, my Twitter follower count remained stagnant for several years without breaking 300 followers. This combined with the lack of comments made me felt that I am being left out of the blogosphere with mostly everyone ghosting me.
That said, I am very grateful to have a job once again and having a life. I am still adjusting to this once again not only socially, but in regard to blogging. I want to make this point very clear. It’s really frustrating that when I comment on blogs that I don’t receive any comments back. I don’t want to name people who are guilty of this in regard to this. This doesn’t give me any incentive to comment on other blogs if others aren’t going to do it in return. Regardless, this is very frustrating and demoralizing as well. It makes me feel that all the time spent creating content is a big waste.
To me, Blogging in general is more of a social thing that allow readers to give input or discussion of the content you created. Without comments, it’s just a gloried public diary or a website from the Web 1.0 days during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yes, this shows how old I am. During my childhood, I doled out Pokémon fan sites using HTML and web page editors like Microsoft Frontpage during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yes, it was pretty bad.
That said, in order for me to content to create great content, it’s very important for readers to engage with my content. This is why I highly encourage people to like and comment on my posts. This would give me other viewpoints and also ideas for future content. It also shows that people appreciate the content I create. There are some ideas for posts and reviews I want to do. However, I can only do them if people engage with my content. Otherwise, I won’t have motivation to do so since this indicates that nobody cares about my content and I am just wasting my time. After all, “if it’s not fun, why bother.”
Believe it or not, any hobby requires not only the time, but also passion. If you are not getting any satisfaction from it, why waste the time. While I am somewhat close to throwing in the towel, I realize that if I give up, my 11 years of work and money would go down the drain.
That said, probably the other things besides the lack of engagement is also the weakness in discovery. While I depend on sites like Anime Nano and in the past, AniBlogger Antenna, which is now defunct, I realize people don’t use these sites anymore. Back in the day, people also used Google Reader to keep track of latest blog posts. Of course, Google Reader is now dead for a long time since Google likes killing off good ideas. Also, web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari completely removed the RSS feed functionality. RSS is a feature that allows users to keep track of latest content from various websites.
With the demise of RSS, most readers nowadays use the WordPress.com reader. It’s not too surprising since a lot of anime bloggers tend to use WordPress.com. It’s easy to start a blog there and it’s free. In contrast, some bloggers like myself self-host WordPress on a web host since it gives more flexibility. In order to gain the features from WordPress.com, one has to install the Jetpack plugin.
A fellow anime blogger, Crow of Crow’s World of Anime suggested something about subscribing to Jetpack Premium to have posts appear in WordPress.com Reader. By default, blogs that are using WordPress.com are already included in the search and tags feature. The thing is, the Premium subscription is pretty expensive since it costs $99 a month, which is steep. Not only that, my blog doesn’t bring enough traffic to make enough ad revenue to cover it. Moreover, I was not working at that time last year. I didn’t receive a job offer until the latter half of the year. As a result, I didn’t think much of this, until now.
However, I looked into this this today. I find out that you only need any paid Jetpack plan to have your posts show up in the tags and search for WordPress.com Reader. In other words, at a minimum, you need a Jetpack Personal subscription. This includes automated backups, premium support, and better anti-spam protection. Yep, I kind of screwed myself over in that respect. After subscribing to Jetpack Personal, which costs $39 per year, my posts now appear in the search. Hopefully this will improve the discoverability of my content in the future.
In conclusion, I do not want to give up despite my frustrations and anxieties. I know I haven’t been doing a lot in interacting in the anime blogosphere. One has to understand the tough situation I was in for the last three years. With my life mostly strengthened out, excluding the whole Coronavirus thing, this is the only issue left.
If you have unfollowed me in the past, please reconsider and giving me a second chance by refollowing me on Twitter. I intend to follow back anyone who has anyone who has a blog. I will only unfollow only if you unfollow me. To me, there is no point of following people who don’t follow me back. While my time is limited due to my job, I will try my best to interact with the community. That is as long I receive comments on my posts as well. After all, I want to continue to create great content instead of complaining of how bad my blog is doing. However, I cannot do it when I don’t receive any comments on my posts for reasons stated.
As always, feel free to share any suggestions as long they are constructive and helpful.
My suggestion like the pause due to the virus right now is a lot of interest has died down due to money. Plus on anime nano your competing with more than 50 on their offer. So to drum up make your viewpoint more lighting and original.
No, taking a break is not feasible as it would cause the blog going into a worst place, especially given how long the pandemic is going to last and how many titles will get pushed back.
Be more clear as ice in originality.
Glad you found that Jetpack Personal is helping you.
One minor point: Jetpack Premium is $99 a year, not a month. I think it’s a great value for $99 a year. $99 a month? Not so much…
But I wanted the extra security patching and malware screening. I’m a security professional, and it would look pretty bad if my site got compromised!
Jetpack consistently provides the 2nd or 3rd highest amount of traffic to my site. It’s after Google and sometimes Pinterest.
Glad my wife turned me on to Pinterest. It’s been a great source of traffic!
I don’t like giving advice, because it can always go wrong. But I have found it helpful not to measure my success by number of comments or by number of followers. Based on what I’m seeing, and based on what I’ve read on other sites, episodic review sites don’t get a lot of comments. I don’t really understand why, but I remember that the most popular review I’ve ever published, a collaboration with Irina (I drink and Watch Anime) on Demon Slayer, had almost zero comments. Yet, it had 10 times more traffic than most of my posts.
So maybe using comment count as key indicator isn’t giving you the full picture of your success? Or, if you want to keep that metric and still write episodic reviews, maybe add a periodic commentary/editorial? Those tend to drive more comments, even if they are controversial. Controversy isn’t bad, if it’s handled respectfully. In fact, it can be very interesting, especially if it comes from your unique perspective.
I would like to comment more, but my challenge is that I read over 350 sites every week. I don’t physically have time to comment on all of them. Or even a high percentage of them! That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading your posts. I do. I thought my readers would, too, so when I reviewed No Game No Life recently, I included a link to your NGNL reviews.
But I completely understand that the situation is frustrating. When I notice that I’m getting frustrated, I ask myself if I’m writing the way I really want to. Am I conveying my unique perspective? What makes my offering different from other folks? Why would a reader look at my review instead of others that might (and often are — okay, mostly are…) better written? I find that the more I convey the perspective I want to get across, the less frustrated I feel.
Frustration for me, in other words, is an imprecise indicator that I use to take stock of the things under my control.
I don’t know if that makes sense of not.
And please do keep in mind that your site’s been around for awhile. That in and of itself is a major accomplishment. Sites go dark all the time. Continuing to publish is an achievement that means quite a lot.
I hope this helps!
Yes, I could have subscribe to premimum, but I don’t feel the need to have automatic updating, mostly because I tend to install updates when they come out, but I want to be cafeful in installing the correct updates. That said, I have the basic version of Wordfence installed, which provides web firewall and malware scan protection. Yes, I know security is very important since I work as a System/Database Administrator, although I didn’t take the Infomation Security position since I want to that kind of position, although the job offers were in the same Metro area and federal agency.
But that said, I want to overburden myself with too much subscriptions. Besides the Anime streaming subscriptions, which is about $16.50 a month, I have other subscriptions such as iCloud storage, AppleCare Plus, Office 365 Business Premimum (for latest versions of Office and hosted email), Adobe Photoshop/Acrobat DC, and hosting costs. While I do earn some passive income from my open source projects, but I don(t want to overburden myself with too many subscriptions. After all, I need to pay for my utilities, food, and my mortgage and still have enough left over misc spending (Anime merch, hobbies, and more tech) or saving it for the future when I don’t feel the need to spend it.
Yes, the search and when I publish new posts Anime Nano, will appear on the top referrer spots, but WordPress Android/Wordpress Reader when combined are not that far behind. We’ll see the results in a few months
I have to admit, that it’s very easy to get caught up with number of comments, page views, visitors and likes that it’s easy to self-doubt yourself and make it feel that you aren’t doing well. Back in the early half of the 2010s, things were great, 400+ page views, comments flowing in and so on. However, Google eventually changed the search algorithm with Google Panda and things didn’t look so good. Top that off with being complacant and demotivated with Twitter follower counts not growing, declining comment counts and pageviews, it’s easy to get demotivated from that. As they say, the number of comments on a posts do not tell the whole sory as you mentioned. A post can be succesful if it receives a lot of comments, but not as many page views and vice versa. I think using Business Intelligence tools like visualizations can give a better pictures. While I have experience with Business Objects when I worked on my first job and learned how to use Power BI and Splunk, maybe these tools might make more sense of the overall picture than just staring at the stats on WordPress.com.
But yes, in the past, editorials do generate a lot of discussion. The main delemma I am facing is that a lot of the easy topics I covered in the early days of blogging I already covered on. Part of it is the lost of drive of creating editorials due to my three years of unemployment from 2016 until February 2020. Sure, there is probably some that is worth taking a look at again since things do change
Believe it or not, I used to read a lot of blogs during the early days of my blog, I mean before I started working on my Master’s Degree in Fall of 2013. Also, I was really active on anime forums back then too. Free time went down the drain and I stopped reading as many blogs as I do in the past. During my undergraduate years, I had lots of free time. But yes, I need to earn a high GPA so I can get higher pay in a Federal job and not get stuck with a lower pay grade for my first job. Of course, when I started working in 2015 and even just recently a few months ago, it went downhill from there, especially before this virus stuff happened, I only have about 5 hours of free time before I had to sleep and wake up early to catch the train to DC. But hopefully when this COVID-19 stuff clears up, I intend to use that commute time more wisely and try to read posts and respond to them with my iPad Pro.
But of course, commenting on a smartphone, even on a iPhone 11 Pro is a pain, especially reading content on a small screen. Maybe I need to make some time and read other’s posts instead of focusing too much on a select few and on my own. But aside from that, yes, even if a lot of people review a title does not mean that the review will be the same, even for an episodic reviews. Writing quality is a factor and I do check over my writing before publishing of course. Even putting quality aside, I do agree that writing quality is not the end all as you said, everyone will have different viewpoints on what they watch based on his or her personal experiences and even tastes.
But thanks for the feedback. I will take account to them.