To blog... or not to blog...

A few years ago DH (aka computer guru) and I took Christmas lights to another level after seeing a local guy in the press who used his computer to animate his light display. I have ALWAYS loved Christmas lights and the lights were my thing and the computer control thing was his.

We started the first year with a smaller static Christmas light display with lights up on the roof and a few things down in the yard-- no more then a thousand lights.

Nearly three years ago we bought the equipment to animate and basically took the static display from the first year and animated it. Last year we added some additional lights and another control board to be able to animate more elements in our display.

This year, we've added yet another control board and we've invested a considerable amount of money on new lights for the house which are LED, so we're actually quite "green" now with 90% of our lights being LED. Last year we even had three dedicated circuits added to our electrical panel to handle the lights and hooked these circuits to outdoor outlets.

The way we work the music for the animation is through a low power FM Radio transmitter. A visitor in the car would tune to a particular frequency and listen to the music that is synced to the lights. There's a sign in the yard to tell people where to tune to.

Now to my question...
We did a website and in 2008 I started a blog with the idea to document the process of putting together the show. Outside of the Christmas season, I don't find my life that interesting to actually blog about, so I'm left with the question.. so do I bother and keep the blog active at all??

I know a few others here blog, so I'm curious.
Shannon

ps. If anyone is interested in what I'm talking about in the animated Christmas lights... check out www.cincylights.com... there are some videos.

when we lived in MA our neighbor used to pick one color of lights and outline everything on his victorian two story, the stone wall around the yard, the garage, the gates, the driveway, and all of the surrounding trees throughout the yard. He would put in one light bulb in the wrong color somewhere in the display and then challenge people to find it and drop a slip of paper with the location in a box by the gate and on New Year's he would have a drawing of 3 slips and award joke prizes plus as many of the years' color of christmas light bulb as they wanted. The year he did blue it was almost magical, the year he did red it was ugly, green was neutral, and white was bright enough to cause a light burn.

they were always lighting in sequence and there was always music but the crowds were pretty fierce.

I blog, but I only update it once a month or so, just to keep biking friends from cross country rides in the loop- plus it is handy to have a blog site for keeping family up to date with ride activity and charity rides, primarily breast cancer, which I do all year around. Not to drum up business but just to let them know there are donation options and to keep the cause in the forefront in general. but that's just me.

It doesn't hurt to keep the blog if you keep your expectations to only updating others about your personal projects and for family and friends as an audience.

Keep the blog domain. If you delete it, you cannot recoup the name of your blog again in future.

I bet there are Christmas-light aficionados who look forward to your Christmas blog. I can never find the time to blog, although I did start one when I bought my house and started renovations. Now the renovations are complete, but I haven't updated the blog in over a year, maybe more. Oh well. Life goes on, blogged or not.

Based on my past life as a Website designer:

1. Find out what kind of traffic your blog gets. You may be able to add affiliate program ads and earn some money from blog visitors.

2. Do a monthly RSS feed of an update, just what you're doing in relation to the Christmas display. See something that inspires a new light creation? Blog about it. Share a favorite hot apple cider recipe for light watchers. Stuff like that. It doesn't have to be much, but if you have regular updates, your blog will rank higher in search engines.

3. And speaking of that, if you have the ability to add metatags to your blog, do it. Christmas lights, light displays, holiday lights, first noel, santa, reindeer, and so on. Then make sure these terms show up in the blog pages -- it makes for a higher relevancy rating in the search engine's algorithm and you'll rank higher on the search results page. YMMV.

4. If you can add a metatitle, do it. How to Build the Best Christmas Light Display Ever! Something like that, and then repeat that in your blog posts a few times, maybe as a sign off line. Again, it gives you a higher relevancy rating in the search results page.

The more traffic you have to your page, and it sounds like you could have a lot, especially if you post lots of pictures of the process, you could make a nice little sum from affiliate programs. People do.

When I spoke with a GoDaddy rep a few weeks ago about one of my domains that gets lots of traffic, he was amazed that I wasn't doing more to monetize the site. He kept saying, "Yeah, wow, um, yeah, you could do a lot with a traffic stream like that." He wouldn't give me details, though.

Anybody got some insight on that? I know I'm not the only site designer in the family here.

Good luck with your blog!

Roxy

I use Google Analytics to monitor traffic on both the blog and main site. It's REALLY low.. I mean like less then a hundred a month, even during peak. If I did more to monetize the site I could likely drive more traffic.

Another quandary...

My road is fairly small road that is also a no outlet road. I've been almost afraid to do TOOOO much to drive traffic to the house during the Holidays as I don't want a nasty incident over traffic down our quite little road. Yes, it's only once a year, but I've been given looks that could kill for less, like when we had a new stove delivered and the truck was parked out on the street for twenty minutes. I want to be a good neighbor. I've had neighbors actually stop and ask if we're doing the lights again this year, so perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself thinking I'd be shunned on my road if traffic increased.

Soooo you say... why DO a Christmas light display if you don't want people at your house. It's my inner Hobbit. I want to do the lights and hope anyone that sees them gets enjoyment out of it, but in the long run, it's likely more for me then anything.

Would I be tickled and excited if I looked out and saw cars lined up to see MY house. Yes. Overjoyed. Then I'd have a panic attack and hyperventilate.

Shannon

Well, I wouldn't necessarily expect a lot of local traffic to come to your house unless you include your community name in the metatags and content. People aren't likely to find you unless they already know you're there.

When I say attract traffic, I mean from people all over the country/world who may be trying to build their own light display and need a how-to. You might even consider posting videos on YouTube and direct them to your site for more detailed plan information. You can leave your actual address/town name out of it if you want.

If you want to monetize the site and earn a little to cover the electrical bills, you'll want a lot more traffic and ads that will get them to click on through and buy the stuff you're using to build your displays, you know? "Here's how I did it and here's where you can buy the supplies, too." And you get a little commission on every sale. It could work.

Good luck. I hope you do your display, regardless.

I like the inner Hobbit.

Roxy

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roadtrip

My road is fairly small road that is also a no outlet road. I've been almost afraid to do TOOOO much to drive traffic to the house during the Holidays as I don't want a nasty incident over traffic down our quite little road.

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Is there a local bike club in your area? Some clubs here have night time "light tour" rides. :D You could start one.

"monetize"

That cracks me up.

Roadtrip - I love your website and the videos how cool! About blogging, I see it as something you could do even if it's just seasonal, why not. Plus it would not be that hard to get the occasional post that is related to your light display even year round as I'm sure there is a lot of planning that goes on besides just the Christmas season and people might like to read about that.

I blog but for me it's more like a journal tracking my individual progress and don't market my blog outside of here, well, now and again I'll post a link to a meaningful entry on FB but that's only been a handful of times. If others with arthritis issues are also wondering about how it's compatible with biking they can find out there from a first hand perspective. Blogs are as unique as the individual who publishes them.

Back to your display, the music really really makes it for me! Thank you for sharing, it lifted me up today.

Thanks for the comments!!

I've added a few ads to my blog... "monetize" ... and will edit the meta tags so it's more SEO friendly.

I changed the template design awhile back and didn't think to go back in and edit the code to put some of those things back in. Even my analytics code had gotten nixed when I changed themes.

There's a RSS feed build into Blogger and I have it hooked up to my other social networking sites so anytime I blog, it gets pushed out to my Facebook and Twitter automatically.

I've decided to try and blog more, so we'll see.. it's nearing that time where weekends and evenings are all about the lights... so I'm sure I'll find a few things to blog about. I thought about blogging about me and my bike but only you girls really "get" that.

Oh, we had the videos posted to YouTube, but most of them got pulled because of Copyright issues. They scan uploaded videos for embedded music and tag them for violation and strip out the audio track. That's why I'm hosting the videos myself. It was more work, but in the end the only way, so it takes a little while for the videos to load.

Shannon