Blog Advice #3: Finding Your Audience

I like very much that Dave! and Julia have disagreed with my last snippet of advice, in the comments. It provides a nice transition to today's bit about blog readers. I think Dave! and Julia and I actually agree more than we disagree (a blog is NOT a journal or a burden, and your choices about what to omit are as important as those about what you include, and a frequently updated blog with poorly chosen or perfunctory entries is no fun to read or to write). But the fact that they chimed right in and disagreed there on the comments makes for a nice segue to this post, about readers. Because one very interesting thing about blogs is the way they create conversations and ties among a group of strangers. The conversation might take place in comments, or via email, or by trackbacks left on other blogs, and there are raging debates about which is better. I like comments, myself. But I think a blog that doesn't at least partly feel like a conversation isn't yet using the medium to its potential.

Even though I try very hard not to think about or worry about or cater to a particular audience when I'm writing, once I have posted something I feel very conscious of the fact that it is out there where real people will read it. I feel delight and wonder and trepidation and anxiety that it will be read by other human beings, whose imaginations, at least for a few moments, will be directed by my words. The potential of an audience is one of many ways that this exercise is different from my stacks of journals. And I get a little thrill when I learn, by an email or a comment or a trackback or a comment made in person by someone I know, that someone out there read my words and thought about something that began in my head.

So how do you find your audience? This is a very big mystery to me, friend. Your audience, for the most part, will find you, and who they are and why they come and whether they'll decide to keep reading will be something you can only guess about. My vague idea about my readers is made up of guesses based on my referrer logs, the sites that link to me, and the email and comments I get. I can see on the referrer logs how someone got here, and so I can often tell if someone's linked to me. And I generally check those guys out, and if it's an interesting blog they might gain a reader by linking to me. Typepad tells me the IP address a comment comes from, and it's possible to translate an IP address to a machine domain, which can sometimes tell me the company a commenter works for or the country he or she is in. I almost never do that, though, and if I do it almost never tells me anything interesting. There are readers who subscribe to this page on Bloglines or another news aggregator and they might read the site via an RSS feed without ever clicking through and giving me any clue about their existence. So I don't know who you guys are, unless you've told me.

But look at that last post. Of the first three commenters, here's how I think they got here: Dave! made his first comment in April. (I can tell that from the Typepad comment editor features.) I'm not sure how he got to be a reader, but I know from his blog that he's just starting law school. I imagine reading up on lawyers and law students and found my blog through a link on someone else's site, or via a particular law-school related Google query. pjm is a friend of a real-life friend, and he found me through her blog and has decided to stick around. Julia, I speculate, found me because I found her, and linked to her website in this post. I knew from my referrer logs that she'd come to investigate my site because of her site referrer logs (is this getting too circular?) but I had no idea until she posted a comment that she'd come back to visit.

So I don't have much to offer here. I think Evan is the shrewdest of the bloggers I read about the way he uses linking and comments to build his readership, and he's enjoyed very good success, which is well-deserved. Maybe he has something to say about it?

Comments

[Evan]

Scheherazade: Thanks much for the compliment. I admit to thinking about the question of audience-building from time to time. Why do I think about it? I suppose because as long as I'm going to write something, I want people to read it. But links and comments only go so far. I think it's largely the subject matter of a weblog that's the most important determiner of audience. For example, consider the political blogs. Politics is a popular topic, and some of the political blogs are huge. A cheese blog wouldn't be so huge. Or a knitting blog. So why not just blog about politics or movies or at least something more interesting than lawyers? Because I don't want to write about politics or movies all the time, even if it might mean a larger audience.

Anyway, in choosing what to write about, you're placing limitations on the size of your audience. But so what? You don't need many readers to make writing a weblog fun and worthwhile. It was just as fun for me in the beginning when I didn't have many readers. However, I soon noticed (and here begins a discussion of linking) that if you linked to other weblogs, the authors of those other weblogs would likely take a look at what you'd written, assuming they weren't one of the "big dogs" who are too busy to read other weblogs. This is, of course, a stupidly obvious point, but it wasn't obvious to me in the beginning.

So then, a weblog author can use links to draw people to the weblog of a type who might be interested in what's being written on the weblog. Of course--here's stupidly obvious point number two--you've also got to be writing something that's interesting to those readers, so that they'll read and return and encourage their own readers to do the same.

As to how to make writing interesting, there are many different approaches, each as different as one's own personality and writing style. Since I've always had an incurable writing habit, this is another issue--how to make the written word interesting--that I'd be thinking about anyway, blog or no blog. I don't suppose this is true of everyone, but it's true of me.

As for comments, I think they make a weblog much more fun for an author to write and readers to read. Reasonable minds might differ, but mine's made up. I'm keeping my comments for now.

[matt]

...write the truth, as simply as you can...

[pjm]

Even though I generally read this in RSS, I periodically come to the site to check the comments, because I like reading what this audience has to say.