365 Movies

Boy, this is turning out much harder than I thought.
I guess my main problem is making enough time to complete a proper review each day.
Some of these movies I know pretty well so can I can review them from the cover info and quick flashes through the movie and the credits.
Others I need to watch a bit to remind myself what’s what.
But some, some I need to watch again and take my time over.
Now I’ve completed the first quarter I can review the first position.

There are lots of way you can measure a blogs’ success.

• Followers
• Likes
• Comments
• Hits
• Search Position
• Ranking

Each has advantages and disadvantages and some take much longer to build than others and some are self fulfilling.
I guess I prefer the slowest and most difficult, Followers.
Now with each follower, as long as you can keep them, you have someone who has seen what you’ve written and elected to be notified of when you write more, added you to a list of stuff they are interested in.
That, my friends, is where the pressure point is.
Writing a blog that can gain such interest and then not losing such a following.

Comments are an interesting one. It is widely regarded in blogging circles that comments are the food by which they feed. Alas, sometimes I think they are a distraction from the content sometimes but perhaps they are correct. Alas they are the favoured trolling ground on the Web too. I try very hard to curate my comments and they are very low as a result, no spammy spamness! Perhaps I feel too obliged to answer too I I allow a comment. A curse of the one man band blog.

Of course the subject matter has a huge effect.
Movie reviews were always going to be easier than the parallel idea I had of Social Media Security. The issue I had though is that those Facebook, Twitter etc posts I write garner more hits, more footfall.
More still, the posts about immediately prevalent issues, like Apple iOS updates, can get huge footfall. But it all fades quickly as it become less immediate or even obsolete information. Movie reviews are a longer, sustainable piece of information. Though we all tend to change our minds about movies over time at least the salient points remain true. Mostly.
Now, I’m not expecting these blog entries to become some sort of IMdB or Wikipedia and to a small degree I do them for my own gratification. But any blogger likes to know people are reading and enjoying what he or she writes. Hopefully this brings about word of mouth, or at least cross-posting or profile visibility. Then you get similarly minded people all building up on each others platforms. That’s pretty cool, really. Like a little community!

Search Engines should not be ignored though. I have no idea how seven people in one day found my blog trough searching for “wizard of Oz” on Google but it’s welcome footfall. This kind of thing is really wild, untamed exposure. If your blog or page is anything like mine you get hundreds of comments a week claiming to be able to improve your search engine ranking, even for individual posts. SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, is something that I’ll leave to Corporations and Media outlets – for whom it is an essential and revenue affecting procedure. Me, I search for “Harlekwin“, and yes it’s a made up word, an I get my blog as the top result.
That’s good enough for me.

There are several ranking organisations, Technorati or Alexa for example, but I you want good rankings in these you’re gonna have to go full time on your blog and really need to pull in others to contribute. A ranking of <10,000,000 on Alexa an you’ve done well. A sustained ranking of <10,000 on Technorati and again you’re getting your message out there successfully.
I have a long, long way to go to match those targets.

Hits, now here we have footfall. My blog is a little messy, as you may be able to see. Several different topics all merged into the “thoughts of an idle mind“. But that incoherence has two effects. It brings in two disparate groups (IT and Movie enthusiasts) but also reduces the blogs effectiveness on either. Alas, I am an IT professional with a love of film. The IT stuff is far more popular, there are I guess many Movie Review sites out there. But my hope is that over time the movie reviews are still there, still current, still viewed.

Really, what we want is for someone to read what we write, find it useful and perhaps pass it on to others who may also find it useful. Or at least entertaining?
Finding time is tricky, work home blog balance so to speak. That’s my primary issue and one I hope to work on in the coming quarter. Good luck to anyone else also trying 365 Blog entries in a year! Hope we all get there (I may be writing a few dozen at Christmas…)
Now, where next…
Comments, likes, follows, reposts, post ranking etc. are welcome, as ever!