Thinking of starting a blog

[Kirbyfan34]

Got this idea from a Facebook group/blog I ran across a few weeks ago. It was the called 1988 Topps. The authors do a blog and a podcast, and go over cards and players appearing in the 1988 topps set. They also talk about a baseball video game on a Nintendo console, but I can't remember which one it was at this time.
Anyway I thought about doing something similar, except with Sega's World Series Baseball (my first bb video game) and talking about the 1994 baseball season and Topps set. I would start it as a Facebook group and hopefully expand it from there. I plan on getting a new copy of the game as my son got a Sega Genesis last summer, so he could play the Sonic games in their original format! Once I get that I will start the facebook group and post the link here, if anyone is interested in joining.

 

[Mike121]

If you're going to be writing a lot of original content, I'd recommend starting out with a blog rather than posting your articles on Facebook. If you think you'll get more users from Facebook, I'd still start the blog then just post links to your blog articles on Facebook.

The reason I say this is for a few reasons. First, if anything were to ever happen to Facebook, or your group, all those articles are lost. With your own blog it's easy to make regular backups of the data. Second, if your blog becomes a hit and has a lot of traffic, and a lot of readers, you'll want to monetize those articles with ads. You can't do that on Facebook. Instead of you getting paid for the ads, you'd be making money for Facebook. Also, when is the last time you searched something on Google and it lead you to a Facebook group? It just doesn't happen very often. More often than not, Google will have your personal blog posts ranked higher than anything you post in a Facebook group.

This is just my opinion, and I could be wrong, so take it for what's it's worth (which is not much).

 

[Kirbyfan34]

If you're going to be writing a lot of original content, I'd recommend starting out with a blog rather than posting your articles on Facebook. If you think you'll get more users from Facebook, I'd still start the blog then just post links to your blog articles on Facebook.

The reason I say this is for a few reasons. First, if anything were to ever happen to Facebook, or your group, all those articles are lost. With your own blog it's easy to make regular backups of the data. Second, if your blog becomes a hit and has a lot of traffic, and a lot of readers, you'll want to monetize those articles with ads. You can't do that on Facebook. Instead of you getting paid for the ads, you'd be making money for Facebook. Also, when is the last time you searched something on Google and it lead you to a Facebook group? It just doesn't happen very often. More often than not, Google will have your personal blog posts ranked higher than anything you post in a Facebook group.

This is just my opinion, and I could be wrong, so take it for what's it's worth (which is not much).

Thanks for the input. New to this so every bit of advice is taken into consideration.

 

[Rhubarb_Runner]

There are a lot of folks out there who blog about card collecting (myself included, kind of) -- you can find a bunch at http://bdj610scblogroll.blogspot.com/
I have a free site at WordPress, and a lot use Blogger as well. You'll find it much better served than on FB, as you can easily send folks to one of your posts with just a URL, whereas anything posted at FB is only really accessible to someone also on FB. Your own blog is much more flexible.

 

[Kirbyfan34]

Thanks for all the info guys, I did start it and here is the first post. Feedback and comments, good and bad are welcome.

Introduction

Back in 1994 I started my obsession with baseball video games, when in late spring of that year I picked up my copy of Sega's World Series ...

1994toppsandvideogames.blogspot.com

 

[Mike121]

Finally got a chance to read this tonight. I like it! I was quite the video game nerd back in the day, and I like how you're going to tie the games in with collecting cards. Very nice start! I look forward to reading more!

 

[Kirbyfan34]

Finally got a chance to read this tonight. I like it! I was quite the video game nerd back in the day, and I like how you're going to tie the games in with collecting cards. Very nice start! I look forward to reading more!

Thanks Mike! As with everything you get a little nervous as I had sent the link to a few close friends and been checking periodically to see if there were any comments, and their wasn't, til now. Appreciate the comments and will try to keep it as interesting as possible. Will try to throw vn in personal experience/anecdotes and interesting trivia about the players.

 

[Mike121]

Thanks Mike! As with everything you get a little nervous as I had sent the link to a few close friends and been checking periodically to see if there were any comments, and their wasn't, til now. Appreciate the comments and will try to keep it as interesting as possible. Will try to throw vn in personal experience/anecdotes and interesting trivia about the players.

It's definitely tough starting out. It takes quite some time to get a good following. Don't get frustrated. Just keep chugging along and it'll eventually pay off. I'd recommend sharing every article to Facebook, Twitter (use those hashtags!), and here on The Bench, to help get folks interested. Might not be a bad idea to include a little summary with the links to each article, leaving out all the good parts of course, so folks will know what they're coming to read.