On Building a Blog and an Audience

Legal Insurrection is a conservative blog launched in 2008, and its creator came to speak in my Independent Media class.

William Jacobson is a Cornell law professor who said he was never really political until a dinner conversation he had with a friend the summer before the 2008 presidential elections. His friend, a liberal, said he had never heard a conservative talk about and explain their side so well, and suggested that Jacobson make a blog.

So Legal Insurrection was born. Like a lot of sites run by people who are not well-known writers, Jacobson's did not makes leaps and bounds out of the gate. He said most of his readers were family and friends.

In the beginning, he said the biggest upswing he got in viewership was due to him writing on other (more popular) sites. He wrote one particular piece on a political website that spread out pretty far and garnered a lot of attention. This got his name out to wider audiences and ultimately attracted a lot of attention back to his blog.

This tactic makes a lot of sense. A budding blogger can do freelance writing for another similar website to get their name and blog out to wider audience. Said freelancer may have to forgo payment to plug their own work but getting those big numbers can be really beneficial to the long-term success of the blog. Jacobson said that big numbers come from random, nice, successful people that link to little bloggers.

Legal Insurrection hit its one-millionth visit 11.5 months after it went live. During most of this time, the only contributor was Jacobson. The blog continued to grow and now has 11 other contributors, some paid, and nets in around $5,000 a month. What gets all that money? Advertising.

Legal Insurrection employs numerous different advertising strategies to make money. The site has no control over what ads appear on the pages, which may not be great for a blog with a political agenda but they make money nonetheless. The key component to making money off the advertising is page views.

To make a good amount of money off advertising, a site needs a lot of page views. Jacobson said one of the key components of keeping viewers coming back is to update regularly and often.

Updating with a new story once per day could be hugely beneficial because people can come back everyday with the fulfilled expectation that there is something new to see. If someone sees the site for the first time and comes back the next couple days to nothing new, they probably will be hard-pressed to keep coming back at all. People like to get into a rhythm with a website and not allowing for that will drive viewers away, even they like the content.