Saturday, February 6, 2010

Click, click, click....

From the comments:

Who is Dooce? How do these people have so many 'followers'? How do you know they make $30k-$40k a month? That just doesn't make sense. On ads?

This is one of the areas that really pisses former MckMama readers off. MckMama is considered an "expert" on keeping people coming back to her blog. In fact, her BlogHer profile reads:

"Turn Your Visitors into Regular Readers - with MckMama
Chances are, most people who visit your blog will never return. It's hard to snag those visitors and turn them into active readers - someone who returns day after day and contributes to your blog community.

MckMama is a master at drawing her visitors into her blog. She turned thousands of passerby's who were concerned for her sweet son into a legion of active readers. Her blog, My Charming Kids, was voted the #1 Mom Blog of 2008 by Momdot.com. MckMama will teach us:

How to interact with your readers
How to draw a visitors attention
How to listen to your readers
Please vote for this room- we can't have a conference full of Mom bloggers without hearing from MckMama!"


MckMama uses Twitter as a driving force to send people to her blog. She has over 20,000 followers currently, and has mastered the "post coming soon!" and linking to her blog, sending readers to the new post. She hints at secret contests by mentioning readers might want to comment on certain posts. She keeps her readers coming back for more by hosting lots of fairly interesting contests and pretty much every other method in the book - recipes, pictures, tutorials, controversial posts, etc.

Is there anything wrong with this, you ask? Not a thing, I answer. She's a self-proclaimed "professional mommy blogger," and she wouldn't be doing her job if she didn't keep readers returning.

However (and this is big).

It is immoral and sickening to use your sick child as bait to keep readers coming back to your blog. MckMama did this every time her son was in the hospital, but last summer was the absolute worst. She commented often that a "post was coming soon!" or "updates to follow, check back", even going as far as preceding those with "Stellan is very bad off". But the blog posts she spoke of? Wouldn't follow for hours, MANY hours in some cases. This would leave her readers, who cared deeply about Stellan, click, click, clicking. She would follow up her twitters with comments on how she ran to grab a bite to eat, but the post is up now, or more often, no excuse at all. Just a very long delay.

You can verify this yourself by going back to last July/August and reading her twitters.

The price of those clicks were worth more than her dignity. The actual money worth for the clicks? Well, MckMama claims she has 100,000 readers per day (now that Stellan is not sick). We'll call that a conservative 3,000,000 page views per month (1 per person per day). At those numbers on an average BlogHer pay scale, her BlogHer ads alone would bring in $27,000 a month. A month, people.

Dooce has admitted to making $40,000 a month, so this is not an unreasonable number for MckMama.

You can see why the click, click, clicks are so important. But again, to use her sick son as bait? Disgusting.