"What the heck...
...is a blog?"
That's not the actual question I hear when I mention my blog to people but it's certainly the background thought of most people when the subject comes up. Blog is a contraction of the two words "web log" and is well short of being self explanatory. A blog is really a public diary or journal published on the Internet.
By most accounts there are somewhere between 20 and 30 million blogs on the internet although a good many are dormant. Of the dormant ones, my guess is that they were, for the most part, started by people who abandoned them shortly after the novelty of publishing their own writing wore off.
I like
blogs, I really do and I think I pretty well understand the basic mechanics of
blogging.
When I
began to write my blog in the summer of 2004 I wrote to clear my head. A
relationship gone bad left me with more stressed out consciousness than I could
handle without an outlet. The effort served its purpose and in the process I received a fair amount
of positive feedback which I suspect was driven more by sympathy from friends
than by the quality of my writing.
Once
into this blogging thing I found myself reading other blogs and I became
fascinated by the phenomenon and the more I learned the more questions I had.
Very near the top of the list of questions was how to increase readership. How
do I get what I write in front of more eyes?
Aside from all of the
web based methods like syndication, RSS feeds, and the ever evolving world of
Google it seems to me that the simplest and most reliable methods are the hardest
ones to achieve and maintain: content and regularity. If I put things in my blog that people
enjoy reading or that they learn something from then they will read it,
bookmark it and they will tell others. The rest of the methods are really little more than marketing short cuts.
If I write stuff here that you like then you'll continue to read this blog. If not you'll find other ways to spend your time. As for attracting new readers, although there are several ways to accomplish that the most reliable is when you tell someone else about it and they take a look and so on.
If you don't like what's here then feel free to tell me with a comment posted via the comment function or send me an e-mail. I would really appreciate the feedback. I'm not fishing for compliments here by any means. I want to make this site better and your help is invaluable.
Hoping you will pass the word.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it...
Well, you have hit the readership key, sort of on the head. The other key is to visit others and leave your link in their comments, thus enlarging your scope of notority. I think.
Posted by: Susan | 29 January 2006 at 03:09 PM