Serious Anime Blogging Business
Author: nova
Blogging – Serious Business.
We are currently living times in which freedom of expression has gained a whole new level. Web 2.0 – and more specifically weblogs, blogs for short. Systems that allow any person with a computer and an internet access to share his/her thoughts, opinions and feeling with a massive, international community. At first blogging was thought of as the elitist hobby, but thanks to easy-to-use blogging systems and free hosting services blogging has become more and more like everyman’s hobby. However, at the same time it has become much, much more competitive as well. So today I would like to share some of my recent thoughts on the hardships of grassroot-level blogging.
Anime is a great thing to blog about because of the diversity of the subculture and the fact that it is indeed rather thought-provoking in a safe way (unlike for example politics and religion in which expression your opinion isn’t always that smart). An anime blogger can choose from several different branches of this field of entertainment and its related culture, to either specialize in one or a few, or attempt to cover several fields. But one of the most important things, in which many bloggers fail, is marketing your blog and gain readership.
Many emerging blogs fail because the author either lacks motivation or skills to market his blog, which is essentially very much the same as marketing any physical product. First and foremost thing is to get the blog’s URL visible to the public. There are many ways to do this, such as commenting on popular blogs, trying to get yourself added on more popular blogs’ blogrolls and whoring the link on IRC. The success rate of this varies a lot – on blogs where the blogroll is already populated by dozens of links, the chances of getting someone to click on the one that’s yours are slim. As for blogs with a very small blogroll, their authors often have the policy of not linking to anyone unless they personally read the site.
However these methods certainy are not the only ones. Thanks to the feed-system that is nowadays integrated to virtually every blogging platform out there aggregator sites such as AnimeNano can help a blogger to get his/her voice heard. Because these sites can result in substantial growth in pageviews, they are very commonly utilized by bloggers and are indeed a powerful marketing tool. But even these sites do not automatically result in something every blogger should be striving to gain; regular readership. This is what comes after getting your blog known and the only trick to this is to write posts that are thoughtful, interesting, funny or whatever that can get people to add you on their weekly checklist.
It all boils down to dedication – the more dedication a blogger has, the more popular he/she can potentionally become. This does not only mean dedicating your passion into writing, but on things listed above. This tends to involve money too. It’s surprising how much a simple thing as a new domain name can do – people tend to remember a place named jinx.fi a lot better than novasanimublog.wordpress.com.
You climb into a tree starting from the base. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just like you can’t become a famed manga artist after a week of drawing, you can’t be Riuva after the first five posts in. The way to becoming a popular and influential blogger is long and rocky, and very few reach this goal. Many grassroot-level bloggers harbor envy towards the sites that are on the absolute top which sometimes (although thankfully rarely) manifests as flaming and generally acting like a jealous bitch. As a mud league blogger myself I do understand this feeling, but I would like to remind my fellow bloggers that the top-level sites have not reached their position by accident. They have been around for longer time, the authors have had a lot of dedication to their hobby and have forged their way by hard work. Of course being dedicated isn’t always that easy and just the geographical location of the blogger can have a huge impact on this. In the backwoods of Europe it indeed takes a lot more effort and money as well to become a high level blogger, anime culture being heavily focused on Asia and North America. Just getting normal R2 DVD-releases can be a pain and involve a lot of budget being burned just on taxes, custom charges and shipping. It is no surprise that majority of popular anime blogs are by Asian authors.
Of course, many of the grassroot bloggers feel like being left out even when this clearly is not the case. It is easy to perceive anime blogger community as a Gentlemen’s Club of the elite bloggers and I believe it is mostly due to this mentality that whenever some effort is made involving the community, some people emerge to flame and object whatever is being done. I would like to use the recently started Anime Blog Awards as an example. It hardly was surprising to see many people object it and many for valid reasons too, but some seem to be against it just for being able to. It is indeed easy to see the whole thing as a circle wank of the top-level bloggers because it’s obvious that the popular blogs will win the category they’re in. This causes some people to start automatically building a massive inferiority complex which results in behaviour somewhat like your average tsundere-girl; claiming hard not to care or give two shits about the whole thing, but still being obviously interested.
As for my opinion on Anime Blog Awards as a small scale blogger, I do understand that for the most part it’s an already set game. However, even though there is no way I can get anywhere close to winning in the categories Jinx! is in (big thanks to Bitten for the nomination), the ABA is a precious opportunity for me to market by blog. Impz, the sort of main man behind the ABA, hardly has expressed this too many times and I very much agree with him. The function of the ABA is not only to recognize the obvious top-level blogs but to help smaller blogs to get some publicity.
That’s it for today’s rant. Finally I would like to point out that small scale blogging isn’t a bad thing. Not everyone has to be Riuva or Dannychoo. I find blogging down here in the mud league fun and satisfying enough. There really is no need to strive for the windy top if you enjoy what you’re doing right now.