We all know how difficult it can be to get exposure for our journals, especially when we're relatively new to blogging.  The fact that we're always in competition with both the featured and the popular journals listed on the Journal Community page doesn't help matters, either. Even some long-time Bravenet members have trouble getting people to take notice of their journals and websites, which is surprising, considering that the Bravenet community is more than 7 million strong.

But, here's an interesting tidbit, provided by my friend Hazel (visit her blog): An examination of the journals listed in the Featured and Popular sections of the Journal Community page showed that most of those listed journals have essentially been abandoned.  I myself contacted Bravenet about one of those journals and told them the blog-owner hasn't been around in more than a year and he's not coming back.  They told me they'd take care of it, but here it is, several weeks later, and his journal is still appearing in that section.  Bravenet, my friends, I love you, but you guys really need to get someone over to that page to start clearing out the deadwood.

Not too long ago, I had a blog which served as a tutorial center, promotional area, and general Bravenet fan-base.  Each week, the JOTW winners' blogs were posted, and several in-depth tutorials about how to use and customize the blogs were written and posted.  Although it received approval from the Bravenet staff, the journal saw little to no activity from the community, and I confess that I was very disappointed.  Because of the ongoing invisibility, I deleted the journal.

The Journal Community page is an awesome tool - don't get me wrong. It links us to the JOTW winners, new bloggers, and long-time bloggers who do write on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not they get lots of visitors.  The question is, How many people actually use this tool?

As mentioned in the previous entry, I've tried to keep the graphics here down to a minimum in an effort to both prevent clutter, and speed up page loads. This place has a pretty good reader base (and thanks for that, you guys! ), and thus, it seemed logical to me to capitalize on that by promoting new and existing blogs I'd found that really caught my interest.  But, because I'm trying to make page load easier here by reducing the number of links and graphics added, these bloggers have to work doubly hard to get exposure, again; I've put up links to the journals on my website (I really need to change that fish! ), but the website doesn't see many visitors, either, so it's kind of pointless to post them there.  I did build a page, though, and I put the link here at the Tree - it's in the Blog Updates section on the sidebar...

I'm not sure what more I can do to help out the new bloggers who are trying so hard to get exposure.  What I can do, though, is encourage you to contact Bravenet and ask them to please update the Featured Journals and Popular Journals section.  I think that the more people who contact them about this, the better.  If they realize that many of the blogs in those sections have essentially been abandoned, and if they receive enough feedback from people about this, maybe they'll be able to assign a couple of people to the chore of cleaning things out.  It's worth a shot, anyway.

For my part, I'm going to be thinking about what more I can do to help out the new and existing bloggers who don't get much exposure.  I'm a part of this community, too, and as such, I feel a certain responsibility to take action when I see a need for it.

Have a great day, everyone, and thanks so much for visiting.  You always make my day brighter when you drop by.