Hi Fellow Blogger,
I’m Troy Johnson, a few years ago I created a website, Huria Search to showcase and highlight the websites of Black content providers, including magazines, newspapers, major websites, and bookstores.
In April of this year, I added a database of Black bloggers (http://huria.org/blogs/). Today there are 195 blogs in the database. I personally added about 75% of the blogs. Basically, I went to every blog roll and best blog ranking I could find, and added the blogs that were still online and active. Your blog, , is in our database.
I’ve read content from all of the blogs. Several blogs are well designed, have great content, enjoy a large audience, and are doing well financially. However, all the blogs can benefit from more readers and revenue.
I feel we should, and can, do more to support each other.
I have both a personal and collective interest in seeing this happen. I have been blogging for over a decade, and understand the challenges bloggers, especially those just starting out, face attracting readers. From a collective perspective, I know many good writers who no longer blog, because they were unable to attract readers or effectively monetize their blogs. Without their contributions, the Web does reflect the richness of our culture and is a less interesting place. In fact, looking at the list today, I see we have already lost a few blogs since April.
Some bloggers are migrating to Facebook, but the creativity and unique design of a Blog are simply impossible on Facebook page. Of course there are also the issues of revenue, privacy, control and even ownership to contend with.
I see no indication the difficulty in attracting readers and generating revenue on a blog will change, in our favor, unless we take action to reverse it. My list of blogs can help readers discover the blogs in the database, but again I think we can do more to help each other.
I don’t pretend to have solutions, but I think if we figure out ways to collectively leverage our blogs, we can all benefit. Before search engines we used webrings, while that may not be a great solution in 2015, it may be better than what we are doing now.
I’m appealing to you for ideas to help all of us in our effort to attract more readers to our blogs. If you have any ideas please consider emailing me at troy@aalbc.com, or even better, share your thoughts on a conversation I just started on my discussion forum
You may add additional blogs to our database by using this form.
