Looking for bloggers who went looking for audiences
16Today I got a call from a NYT reporter who is looking to find people who have started weblogs, written for a while, and had a hard time finding an audience. Are you one of those people? Ideally, you should have tried a variety of methods to gain an audience, and after trials and travails, you now have a regular readership. If you’re interested in being interviewed to find out your experiences, leave a comment below describing why you would be right for the article, some of the things you did that didn’t work, and some of the things that worked. Don’t forget to leave a way to contact you, as the reporter will want to follow up with a number of people. No promises that you’ll get a call, but this does sound like an interesting upcoming article.
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Oh yes, come one and all and sign up to be included in an article that will expose how pathetic we are for starting a blog, looking for attention, and then…not getting it. Yes, sign up for your humiliation pill. :^)
nice blog site though, I’m just being snarky…with a dab of truth mixed in.
Yes, finding an audience for my 4 month old blog has been a little challenging, but it’s going alright–if slowly.
Things that worked:
–linking to more people in items who then linked back to me;
–paying for a small ad on popdex
–sending hot items to friends with top traffic blogs and getting picked up
adding my blog URL to my email sig–people who know me are most likely to check it outy
adding an rss feed (still not working right)
others as well–
have quadrupled the traffic in 4 months, but it is still below where I’d like it.
Susan Mernit
OK, I’ll bite.
I wrote an article at my site on “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Webloggers”:
http://www.poochkiss.com/blog.asp?Link=155
I think it’s relevant to the original posting.
This is one of the problems that JournURL is designed to address. You’re creating a stand-alone blog (newbies like http://sydney-t.news.journurl.com/ or http://metalogic.mxblogspace.journurl.com/ ) but you’re doing so within the context of a larger community. If you start a new blog in the News community, for example, Sydney will spot it the next time she signs in to post an entry of her own.
Essentially, your new blog comes with a built-in audience of people interested in the material that interests you. From there, you can use all the existing strategies to build an external audience to supplement the internal one.
There are generally more than 3 techniques in use at the moment. My blog (http://www.freeroller.net/page/shareme/Weblog) uses the cocepts of both being listed with an aggregator for the my defualt subject and style of writing.
What I have foudn in my styles of writing or actually choosing a good headline is that the more sensational the headline and the more that it doesnt match the conclusion of the posting the more reads I get for that post.
I try to not do that to often because I feel that it deadens the story in a long term way into a sound bite or snipit that normal physical media does and I do not want to do things like normal media that abhors choice and thinking!
Wel maybe that is too blunt for NWT? The blogging experience is more than just writers and readers in that there is achoice in wrinting styles to effect an action in either causing readers to think and discuss or become aware of the false information that is floating around pretending to be a story in major media. And of course this centered around the subject or subjects that a particular blog covers.
contact–Fred Grott(badapple@netnitco.net)
Biases–I am a small one person start up building J2ME applications for the Mobile device Market. Yes the real Silicon Valley is no longer in Silicon Valley and is growing has NWT writtne about it yet?
I’ve been writing my weblog for about a year and a half without any success in drawing more than an average of 30 visitors per day. Of course there have been times when this peaked but only for a day.
My main goal is not to have hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, rather find a unique voice with which a core audience can identify.
My weblog, at the moment, is a mixture of politics and photography with a splash of personality.
I can be contacted at ryan@(nospam)irelan.net.
I have somewhat of a different angle. I started blogging after some coaxing from Doc Searls back in 2001. After blogging book reviews and pieces about business and technology my readership seemed to plateau to the same batch of a few hundred readers a day. So I decided to try something new and see if I could build a new base of readers. Beginning in March I began blogging exclusively about Formula One racing, a sport I had covered for an online site last year. Initially my regular readership dropped, but what I found was that very quickly a whole new group of readers began reading my blog. In a sense I feel like I’ve been able to trade horses mid-race, and build a whole new audience segment. The daily readership is back where it used to be, if not higher, and I think I’ve also been able to bring a lot of my older readers along as well.
So how is it you calculate these 18 loyal readers? I am quite curious how you know there are 18 different people reading your weblog.
Oops, I posted on the wrong link. Now I feel Like an IDIOT!
I just launched a new technology-oriented weblog about two weeks ago now. I probably don’t qualify for the article just yet because I have not yet fully “launched” the site (although it is live and being regularly updated). In fact, I still consider it in beta, or perhaps a release candidate, at this point. I have sent a couple of emails out to people I know, and I have to admit, people haven’t flocked to the site like I expected through word-of-mouth. It’s a fairly specialized site, however, so I think the key is getting the word out to the right crowd.
Well, a war helps!
(And so does Technorati.)
I launched my blog less than a month ago, very naive about the whole process. I would cite news feeds that I thought were relevant to my area of interest: medical wireless networks. But, there are other blogs which report on wi-fi and 3g networks, and most assuredly do a better job.
I started taking photos of my tests of wi-fi hotspots in NYC, and this seemed to generate the most traffic. I’ve now become more involved with photo blogs, along with tracking the wireless thing.
With a web site you’re concerned(at least I am) with keeping everything in a logical arrangement, so that it is easy to navigate. With a blog, it’s a narrative, you feel freer to add something that strikes your interest that day (it could be a photo). I’m finding out that a blog doesn’t have to fit strictly into a category (the web site fulfills that function for me), in fact, the more interesting blogs to me are the ones where I can expect the unexpected.
Now, I’d prefer to increase the traffic to my web site, and let the blog connect with whomever is interested.
Bill Koslosky, M.D.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120454/
http://www.wireless-doc.com
hi….
i write 2 weblogs for our civic league that is facing some very serious political, environmental and infrastructure re: rampant development challenges.
educating people about how important communicating thru weblogs and sites in general is quite challenging in this, the largest city in the state of virginia. web pentration must be at least 80%+ yet most people only use email to communicate.
i’ve been trying to make our site as user friendly, professional, unslanted and informative as possible in this affluent chesapeake bayside community.
and obviously i forgot to post the url to the weblogs:
http://www.opcl.org/actnow which is about a proposed development on 70 acres of wetlands and open space which is the ‘final frontier’ here and the more general neighborhood blog http://www.opcl.org/weblog/weblog.htm
sorry about the duplicate comments….
sincerely yours,
tim solanic
While your blog may be well-written, timely, and full of extremely useful information, your audience may not ever find it… unless you:
. add your url to all of the blog tracking sites.
. submit your site to well-known reviewers.
. actively seek your audience by posting in forums which focus on your blog topic.
. look for other sites on your topic and contribute to them as well (with a link back to you).
. always credit information where and when you find it (ie, link back to the originator of the idea you are expanding on)
. give away your sources and resources. I share everything I find useful. I hold nothing back. I don’t care if that helps ‘competitors.’ I view ‘competitors’ as interested readers… heh
I link to other sites, but only when they are relevant to what I’m writing. My subscription list is NOT on my main web page, but a link to it is there for people to explore. This may be a hindrance; most webloggers think you have to link them for them to link to you… oh well… I think that’s silly.
I find that when I write passionately and knowledgeably, I get a big boost in readership. When my energy flags and I become less focused, my readership diminishes.
It is important to make it easy for a reader to find you and to contribute to your blog. That’s my next focus, only I haven’t figured out how to do it yet (and on the cheap, of course). I want to open up my weblog to other writers…
I also avail myself of all of the free services which help my weblog reach the reader. That includes: adding a backup blog, just in case. Make sure your readership can subscribe via email and anonymously. Add feeds from other sources which enrich the site and are related to it. Moreover.com has some good ones. Make your site searchable. Tell your readers all of YOUR cool finds.
Use decent weblogging software, so you don’t end up quiting in disgust when your web pages end up all screwed up by lousy ‘free’ weblogging services.
I’m a heretic
because I won’t add a by-line this time.
(ribeye, you scared me off… heh. )
http://reel.chettz.net
The Electric Reel
http://tomandamy.chettz.net
Tom Conservative versus Amy the Ultra-Liberal Kitty Cat
I actually just started with a new approach to working on my website(s).
Basically, I started off in December of 1999 with a very focused movie review site. I started totally ignoring the fact that I don’t go to the movies. Scratch that then.
So then I switched to a comedy format and started toying more with graphics and visual presentation. The comedy was working out okay because at the time I was hooked up with Brassknuckles Webzine, a now defunct comedy site. I wrote material, it got picked up by BK and I rode on that traffic through the rest of highschool experimenting with several design incarnations in the process. Brassknuckles died and John Hawkins (Brassknuckles Webzine) had started up a political site called Rightwing News (http://www.rightwingnews.com), so now I was left with only my hardcore readers from whom I could surely recruit avid promoters… then I joined the Army. 8 months later I made my next update.
Hardcore fans? Gone.
So over the last year I’ve let the site suffer with my inactivity and I recently came up with a new approach.
I’ve got two rolemodels when it comes to my website, John Hawkins of RWN and my friend Tony who’s a body builder with absolutely no web experience at all. John has a decent amoutn of traffic and his theory is to find a niche and be the best at your area of focus. Then I apply the workout habits Tony shares with me, positivity, schedule, control and motivation.
Now I’m in the process of both diversifying and focusing on my site. How is this possible? I’m creating a multi-site out of The Electric Reel, and then multiple sub-sites using blogging technology. The blogs on my site will let me tap into the blogging community, simplify the update process and give others write access to my sites, and possibly their own sites within mine.
Right now I have two sub-sites with a third in the works. The first is Freakuency and it runs parallel to all the other sites, it contains fan-mail, unfinished or unused articles, staff news, site news and every morning I post my mission goals in the “Daily Primer” (That’s the discipline I learned from working out being applied)
In short I use my subsites to plug into individual niches and then promote everything on my site through intra-site traffic. I used to be restricted to comedy, now I can write whatever I want and I can’t wait to find out how applying myself differently will change the results of my labor.
This right here, self-affirmation. Sounds a little stupid, but it’s true, it’s just another example of goal setting and putting out a mission statement. It doesn’t matter whether I get selected for whatever this is about, because I got something out of posting.