There was a running joke about blogs in “How I Met Your Mother”, a TV comedy from a few years back. Neil Patrick Harris’ character, Barney Stinson, was always shocked that none of his friends ever, ever, read his blog.
Which is weird, since his blog was pretty much entirely about his friends, so you think they’d at least be curious. A little.
But nah, people don’t read blogs. My family knows I blog. None of them have ever read it. My gaming friends know I blog and even blog themselves. They hardly ever read my blog. According to Google Analytics, the vast majority of people who read my blog get there by searching for keywords. The other major portion are people who just come to the home page and then spend about forty-fifty seconds and then leave without clicking on any posts.
But I learned a long time ago how to get people to read my blog; I’ll talk about that in a second. For me; I just stopped caring. Blogging is hard and is not how people social media these days. The main reader I care about, for my blog, is Future Me. I love looking back in time and see what I was playing and what else was going on a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I’m always disappointed in those times I didn’t blog about what was going on.
So lesson learned: blog for your own self.
There was a time when blogging was cool, but then as now, it was hard for people to find your blog, it was hard for people to come back to your blog, and it was hard for people to find reason to comment on your blog.
This leads into a bunch of lessons learned. The first one is to find your audience.
Who reads your blog? Google Analytics or other trackers can give you that answer. For my particular blog, the perennially popular posts are those that answer the question “How do I…?”.
Second lesson is to build your expertise. If people are coming to your blog to talk about, say, painting Warhammer 40K minis, then make sure when they come, they have new articles about painting WH40K minis. Having a blog that talks about “whatever” doesn’t build reader engagement.
Back in the old days, I tuned my blog to talk mostly about indie MMORPGs and summarizing what other bloggers were talking about. That second had the twin benefit of people coming to my blog first before heading elsewhere, and other bloggers following those referral links backward to see what I was saying about their posts.
That worked wonderfully — at one point, I had over a thousand visits a day. A small drop in the bucket back then and today, but it meant a lot to me and helped get me a real writing gig with Massively. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep up the pace of that and my main job.
Next lesson? Shamelessly self promote.
You can’t just spam links. People will filter those out, they won’t ever see them. You have to go to other places your audience lives, like Reddit, and if you can find a topic where something you posted is relevant — feel free to drop a link along with some info as to why they should go there. Reddit and other sources really hate people who just parachute in and drop links, but if you can build expertise on some other social media platform, you can transition these people to blog readers.
Last lesson: Own your content.
This is a tough one. Here’s the facts. Anything you write on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, WordPress, any place you use for free — is not your content. They have no obligation to let people see what you wrote, to use a link to leave their platform, to even not just simply delete it at their whim. They might ban you. You gave your hard work to them in the form of your content. And no matter what sort of agreement, real or implied, you think you might have with them, they own what you wrote and they will do with it what they will.
If you want your blog to remain YOUR BLOG, you need to pay to host it somewhere, where you have an actual legal agreement with the hosting company that what you post is yours and yours alone. You should also make backups so that if they decide to take your content away anyway, you still have it.
Your work is valuable and nobody else should be able to claim it as theirs.
We’ve worked hard this Blaugust. Some of our posts came easy, some came hard. Look at the ones you really enjoyed writing, and do more of those, and fewer of the ones you didn’t enjoy so much. Build your expertise in those. And then shop that expertise around. You are worth it and you will find your audience.
Slow claps. Well said. I am going to just post “what she said” and be fine with it.
Thanks 🙂
I’m not going to argue with any of that. I’ll just say it doesn’t really match my experience. I’ve never found blogging to be hard. I’ve never found writing to be hard and blogging is just writing. I’ve there and thereabouts written at least a few hundred words most days of my life since the age of about ten. Blogging is just the latest outlet for something I’d be doing anyway.
As for promoting what I write to attract readers, it’s not something that ever really seemed necessary. For a start, as you rightly say, the reader that really maters is me. So long as I can enjoy what I’ve written it was time well spent. But feedback to let me know someone out there is also reading has never really been that much of an issue. If I look back at my blog from 2011, when I began, I got a comment on the first post, a couple on the third, a couple more on the sixth… it’s pretty much carried on like that ever since.
As for how many or who they might be, other than people who leave comments, I really have no idea. I used to look at the stats Blogger produces and later the ones I got from Google Analytics but there are loads of them and they’re often directly contradictory so after a while I just stopped looking at them. I don’t really have any idea how many people read my blog these days. Blogger says I have 19 followers; Feedly says I have 291. So long as I get a little feedback every few posts, I just trust someone’s out there.
On subject matter, having spent years as a one-topic blog (MMORPGs) I have to say that opening out to become an “everything” blog was the best change I could have made. I find blogging much more entertaining now I can write about anything at all. The only sense i get of whether anyone has gone along with me on that is from comments and generally it seems those people who bother to express an opinion also prefer a wider range of topics.
As for owning the content, I do think it’s important to keep a back-up (Must do that again – it’s been a few months…) but other than that it’s a moot point. Everything else I’ve ever written has vanished into the ether – I can guarantee having committed it to physical print hasn’t made it any more long-lasting or available – so I can’t see it matters. As you rightly say, writing for yourself is the key; so as long as I can still see the old stuff, that’s the important thing.
I think my attitude is slightly different from some long-time bloggers because I never realised blogging had ever been popular or had a moment. When blogs were big, I was spending all my time on forums and writing thousands of words there instead and if blogs are ephemeral then god knows what that makes replies to forum posts. By the time I decided to start a blog I think the form must already have been in decline but I didn’t kow that.
I think it might be making a bit of a comeback now, though. It’s perhaps a bit soon but it will definitely happen. Everything comes back around. Then it’ll go away again, of course… In the meantime, though, I’m very happy with things as they are. There are already more blogs than I can comfortably read anyway.
I probably should have made this into a reply post not a comment… Maybe I’ll do that.
Thanks for the reply!
Me, I don’t find writing to be hard, but there are people for whom it is, and there are harder days than others. I don’t write down everything that comes to mind, but on the other hand, I don’t stick to one specific topic. I respond well to positive feedback, and I imagine everyone does, so if a lot of people tell me they like a post I made, I want to do more like that.
I have more or less stopped playing MMOs, and the games I like don’t tend to be the popular ones. The ones that are popular, like FFXVI, I don’t do enough posts on.
There are plenty of people on the Blaugust Discord whose every post gets hundreds or thousands of readers, and I am envious of that and try to understand what they do. What they do is… get out there. Hit people with video content, streaming, blogging and so on.
I’m not looking for another job, so I don’t try to compete. I am looking for a comfortable little niche I can move into. That might be strategy tactics games, but that would be too limiting. I play a lot of Pokemon games, but really have very little to say about them, since the interwebs has millions of blog posts about the series — and I don’t play the card game or watch the anime, so missing important context all around.
But in the end, still, my main reader remains me 🙂 BUT!!!! I very much value you and anyone else who comes by! I find your blog fascinating!
“The main reader I care about, for my blog, is Future Me. I love looking back in time and see what I was playing and what else was going on a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago.”
100% this. I finally gave in to owning that a year or two ago, and it felt freeing. I no longer bother with excerpts and I don’t add alt tags to my images or anything like that. I manage to add a category now and then but tags are too much work.
My posts average, I dunno, 4 or 5 views? 3 or 4 of which are me!! I am also comfortable going weeks without posting, or posting 3 times in a day (well in theory, I’ve never actually done that). But whatever feels good.
I used to find writing easy but my brain has changed over the years and now it is a real struggle to write, y’know, ‘fit for public consumption’ content. I can and do spew out pages and pages of emails and comments but writing a blog post and getting it to read really well is a lot of effort so now I just don’t bother. I’ll understand what I meant when I come back in a couple years.
I think what you do is amazing. Your adventures with VR make me want to get my PSVR2 and actually use the thing until I no longer get sick when I do.
I don’t know why I feel I should get serious with my blog. For sure, I don’t feel like doing anything with it that would make it a going concern. I guess in the end I really do just do it for myself.
If you ever want tips on getting your “VR legs” let me know. Not that I have any unique insight but I’ve stored up what the pundits tell us in my brain. 🙂