We’re all friends here, right? Of course we are. Blogging friends attend to the micro-publishing portions of our souls, those parts of us that crave, secretly or otherwise, online attention, followers, subscribers, links, and traffic. Friends pick us up when we’re down and tell us the truth even when it hurts.
Because we’re all friends, I’m going to share a plea for help I’ve recently received from a fellow member of the Nature Blog Network. The frustration, confusion, and even pain this nature blogger is feeling is apparent in her missive. Could you consider her questions and offer her the advice of a friend?
OK, I have been doing this blog faithfully since summer. I have visited other blogs, joined other blogs and worked nearly every day at building my blog. I have in this time still noticed that while I work feverishly several days a week to ensure I have new and interesting things, other blogs are stagnet for days, even weeks, and maintain a higher following then I am getting. What then am I missing?
Please give me your best advice here, for I am wearing myself out, while others sail by and get the rates and rankings. Thank you so very much for your time and consideration. I love this, but I just still do not understand, the whys…
12 Comments
Hi Mike,
Not having a little more information about your friend’s blog, it’s hard to offer specific advice.
One question that occurs to me, though: What qualities in a blog inspire us, as readers, to return?
If we chime in on this question, we may all find ways to improve our readership and our enjoyment of blogging too.
Thanks for posting. This is a great reminder that we must think as readers as well as writers to reach our intended audience.
Cheers,
Lené
‘Timing is everything,’ so they say… You’ve entered the blogosphere at a point it is already quite saturated (something like 100+ million worldwide even though most are no longer active); lots of readers have already picked out their favs and their bookmarks and it’s difficult for new ones to punch through. And if you’ve only been at it since summer you are NEW — I follow science blogs assiduously and yet almost every week I find a good one I’ve never seen before, and wonder how I missed it — it’s usually a yr. or less old, that’s how.
People will suggest practical tips like carefully choosing (search) words in posts and especially post headings, and using social netwkg. groups, commenting, contributing to carnivals, etc., but more than anything I think it’s just a question of patience and persistence in an overcrowded (and still growing) field of competition. Don’t despair too soon! (I’m betting you’re relatively young — young folks want everything to happen right away
What’s your blog style/personality? I follow one blog that has beautiful photos and poetic lines. I follow another, because it is fun and informative- I always learn something there. Another: has a big personality with fun travels.
Remember who you are and do the best at being you. On days you don’t get big hits, and feel discouraged, remember how much you learn everytime you write.
Certainly, I do not offer the biggest or best blog, but I learn more about plants and nature each day, and some folks choose to follow along for the ride. Relax, do your best but have fun, the “hits” will follow. And if they don’t, you still had fun and learned something. It is all good.
Cheryl Harner
I’d tend to agree with the above. There are of course techniques to use such as carefully wording blog post titles, seeding keywords into your first paragraph and using tags well but in general these are only going to make your blog easier for an audience to find. They are not going to make them come fast. If you just started your blog this summer is it not surprising you don’t have a large audience. The biggest thing you can do is have patience. Readership is built one reader at a time. I’ve been blogging since 2001 but I started a new, more public blog last February. I probably have around 60 subscribers or so now. I probably add a handful each month. They come one by one.
One thing I think people forget is to invite their friends to be subscribers. Many have good friends who have never read their blog which always seems odd. Invite them. Ask them to leave comments.
I think there are two things above and beyond good content that people look for when they visit a blog. 1) Is there and active conversation going on. Does this seem like a community. and 2) How many other people are following this blog.
Applications like networked blogs or google friend connect that show the little icons of your readers can act as a quick litmus test of your blog for readers. If XX number of people have already subscribed it must be pretty good right? The flip side of that is frustrating though because you may have a great blog and 5 subscribers and people may be turned off by the lack of a following. This is where we come back to patience. You gain readers one at a time.
Personally I’m really interested in offline blog promotion and that may be my next step. I think bloggers can learn a lot from traditional media and marketing. We are essentially creating mini-magazines where we are the only columnist.
No one ever starts a new magazine, prints a bunch of copies and then stores them in a warehouse and wonders why no one wanders down the dark alley and stumbles upon their awesome new magazine. New magazines work their ass off at promotions. They give away free copies, they take out ads, they get mentioned in other media. They stage events to get attention.
We need to do the same. If your blog is about photography why not put up a flyer about your blog with little tear off tags with the address in local camera shops? Blogging about birds? Make an announcement about your blog at the local Audubon society meeting and ask people to come to your blog.
I think most of us do as good a job as we can promoting our blogs online but I think the next step is to actively promote your blog in the real world. There are millions of people out there who would probably enjoy our blogs but they have never even heard of a blog or at least have never read one. I have a co-worker the other day who came up to me and asked me what a blog is. She’d heard the word but never seen one. This is a person who works on a computer all day and owns and ipod.
People like this could become valuable readers. I think we need to be better at inviting them in the real world. Maybe I need to send kids from the local school door to door asking people if they would like to subscribe. Seems to work for People and Glamour.
I can only repeat some of what’s been said above: you get readers one at a time and you need to be patient. Perhaps a more important question is: what do you hope to get out of your blog? Is it a higher number of visitors than some other blogs? Is it a few people who you come to value as readers, almost like personal friends? It is personal expression that may or may not get readers?
For instance many artists and writers paint and write because that’s what they want to do. They’d also like to make a living at it but they’re two different things. My background is more art than blogs but I do think they are similar. When you come out of art school you often expect instant recognition. But as you look around you begin to see that there are thousands and thousands of people just like you. What differentiates you from them? In my book it is honest expression, with talent being secondary. In my view that’s also true in blogs. First write something that’s honest and seems valuable to you. If you can do that and your enjoyment in writing your blog shows through then I think others will eventually find it.
But you need patience, just like artists, writers, musicians, and in honor of the World Series and my poor losing Phillies, even athletes.
Most of the important points have been made already. One thing that strikes me is the idea of doing a blog since (this?) summer and feeling it should be a large and flourishing community already. It could be, I suppose, but that would depend a great deal on what you’ve done to draw people in (participate in related carnivals, visit and comment on related blogs, produce interesting or captivating content, etc.). Otherwise, it takes some time to grow a community–because the folks who might want to see your content regularly have to find your blog first, which doesn’t happen overnight.
Also, as Ken pointed out so eloquently, good blogs come from passion. They’re not intended to be popular and aren’t aimed at an audience; they’re extensions of the bloggers’ passions and personalities. And it’s the passion and personality that bring in readers and followers. If it feels to you like you’re working at it, it’s going to feel that way to visitors as well.
On a personal note: I started my blog for me–and I still blog for me. I love nature and photography and I love writing, and I certainly love my cats, so it all spills into a passionate yet capricious mix of stuff (mostly nature and nature photography with the cats thrown in from time to time lest they beat me up for ignoring them). If I never received a comment and never had a follower, I’d still blog–because it’s what I want to do: it’s my cathartic and creative outlet.
I think part of it depends on your content. If your blog is the sort where your posts are included in Google search results for people looking for a certain term, you’ll do well, and your numbers will grow quickly. If you have more generic commentary, your numbers will grow more slowly, but they will still grow.
Even now, my blog only has 21 RSS subscribers. On an average day I get more hits to my post about milk snakes (24 views yesterday) than I do people reading my blog by feed. If I stopped writing my blog today, I could expect my hit count to drop, but it would always do fairly well just on the strength of past posts I’ve written.
Those people who haven’t posted anything in days or weeks may not have a regular following adding hits to their count, but you can guarantee that they’ve got a strong Google presence that continues to drive traffic to their site despite their inactivity.
Yesterday, my blog stats indicated I had 235 page views of particular posts (that is, not the root/main blog page). Of those 235, only 25 were of the most recent post, written the night before. The other 210 were distributed among 96 other posts I’d written over the course of the last two years, since starting the blog.
A young blog’s greatest disadvantage to achieving a high hit count is age. The older your blog gets, the more posts will be banked in Google’s archives, the more posts Google has, the more your blog will be found by people searching for things. To help yourself here, make sure you do your best to optimize your Google search rankings, and then just be patient and continue to produce good blog posts.
Some good points Seabrooke and they remind me of another tip. If you are really interested in the reach of your blog you need some sort of data collection mechanism other than just relying on a followers count. I personally like statcounter.com but also use google analytics for other data. These two sites together show that I get far more hits than just my subscribers and over time helps me realize how my blog can be more useful. For example, I wrote a post back in August about the Perseid meteor shower. It was a fine post but by looking at what search terms people used to find the post I could see that the number 1 thing people were looking for was WHERE to go to watch. That was the one piece of info I didn’t have in the post. So, with another meteor shower coming up I’m doing another post but I’ve learned that it will be more useful to people if I also include a little bit about where to go to view it. The more useful they find my blog the better chance they’ll stick around and become a regular. I couldn’t do that without a tracking program.
I’d like to comment on the Carnivals. I have submitted to two carnivals - each time unsuccessfully. The first time I realized when my link didn’t appear that I’d sent the submission to the wrong e-mail. The second time, I researched what I thought was the link on the website, submitted my link and, again, was not successful. This is discouraging. I think it would help if an unequivocal e-mail address was provided for the submission.
In addition to the comments above I’ll toss in my two cents. Coming from a web designer perspective you also should consider the look of your blog. Is it easy to figure out what it is about, is it easy to navigate, is the design clean and intuitive? WordPress and Blogger have lots of great templates but you need to take the time to sort through them and choose a good one - not all are created equal!
From a content perspective, have you resized your images to reduce the file size so your page loads quickly - if your page is taking forever (read 30 seconds) to load, your potential viewer might just think “This is taking too long” and close the browser window. Since the web is a visual medium it helps to add good quality images to your posts (I’m sure that you already do that) where they’ll be seen when the browser window opens. If they’re great images but they’re below the bottom of the visible part of the window their impact is lost.
The double edged sword with written content has been hinted at above as well - there are so many blogs out there now that often people don’t have time to read them all (think about the 500+ links on Skywatch Friday). You need a good hook or powerful image in the top part of your post to draw the reader further in. The “You Might Also Like” feature provided by LinkWithin is pretty cool for letting your readers know about other things that you’re writing about.
Finally, Google rankings are related to the number of quality links that are both attached to your blog and going out of your blog. It’s a good idea to include some links to other blogs that you like in your blog roll as well as listing on blog directories (like NBN) - you also start to build community that way. I use my own blog to access the blogs I like, its easier than using bookmarks! If you’re a member of Facebook, consider using the Networked Blogs application to reach that audience.
Those are some ideas that might help - I’d say just keep doing what you love to do and blog about it. How does that quote go? “If you blog about it, they will come.”
Cheers,
Dave
Many important issues have already been addressed by others here, but I will chime in as someone who does not receive much traffic herself if for no other reason than to sympathize. One thing to think about, though, is the “why” behind why you want so much traffic? Of course you want folks to read and pay attention to what you are putting out there in the internet ether, but what else do want from those readers? Reassurance? Compliments? New friends? The company of like-minded folks (I would guess that’s a big one, or you wouldn’t be a member of the NBN!)? To create a dialogue? To create a community?
Don’t waste time comparing yourself to others, or you will run yourself ragged. Post what inspires YOU, and what you are passionate about. That’s what will ring true to potential readers. And just be patient. Easier said than done, I know. I still get frustrated when I put up what I think is an a really good/interesting post but which doesn’t garner many comments. Imagine my surprise, though, when people find me through someone else’s blog, either via a comment I left or through their blogroll (a good argument for keeping a blogroll of your own - call it blogger promotion karma, if you will!)
The positive side of small numbers is that I have a set of regular visitors who I can count on, and they are my friends, my community, not just “stats,” and that’s turned out to be way more valuable than I ever imagined.
Also, don’t be fooled by those “followers” lists (like the one available through Blogger). There are quite a few folks listed as my followers who I never hear from in the comments, and I don’t know that they visit my blog that frequently, either.
By the way, Kirk, I’m intrigued by your offline “marketing” ideas. I never really thought about that.
As always, a big thanks to Mike for posting a question that encourages such dialogue and thought among us!
We hear the Copenhagen Climate Conference will be a failure. No binding international agreement will be made. The last best hope for humanity to sensibly address climate destabilization has been turned into a steppingstone to nowhere.
A colossal tragedy is in the making. Father Profit wins again and again. Mother Nature loses.
Now for some good news: “THE(only)GAME(in town)” is in the bottom half of the ninth inning and, therefore, not yet over for Mother Nature.