If you blog it, they will come?
Not likely. I think anybody who has tried their hand at blogging would agree unless they were already famous for something else. Personally I’ve been stuck around 25 RSS subscribers for several months and can’t seem to get over that hump.
Lately I’ve been evaluating everything that I’m doing outside of my day job with an eye toward separating the wheat from the chaff. There are only so many hours in the day and I like to spend quite a few of those with my family, so time for outside interests and/or pursuits is at a premium. In my previous post I mentioned my reading habits and I’m happy to report that I’ve unsubscribed from several feeds and now click the “Mark all as read” button with increasing impunity.
Bolstered by this “radical” exertion of control over my time, I’m ready to simplify my life a little more. In addition to freeing up some more family time, I would like to devote more time to blogging on a regular basis. Since blogging in a near vacuum is not terribly rewarding, I need to take some steps to build traffic and attract more regular readers. I plan to use the time-honored problem solving technique known as trial and error in a couple of different ways.
- What do people want to read? I plan to narrow the focus of this blog to just two or three related areas. In making this decision, I will be writing about a lot of different topics in the next several weeks to determine which topics are viable. That’s not to say that I’m going to become like a politician and just write what people want to read, but I do want to know where the audience is within the topics that I already write about.
- How do I find new readers? There are quite a few services and techniques that I can try out in my efforts to grow my readership. One of them already has a widget on this page. Do you see it over there in the right column? Yes, BlogRush is a new service that promises to bring targeted traffic to blogs in proportion to the number of page views their widget gets on each blog. There’s some referral mumbo-jumbo thrown in for good measure, but it sounds like it’s worth a shot. And if it doesn’t work out, then bye-bye widget. Another site I’ve heard great things about lately is StumbleUpon. Many bloggers are reporting large increases in traffic to their blogs after becoming active users of the site, so I’ve decided to give it a shot. Again, if it doesn’t pan out, I’ll stop.
So this should be an interesting few weeks as I give these ideas a spin. Stay tuned for a wider variety of posts as I try different topics and if you’ve landed here from BlogRush or StumbleUpon, welcome! I hope you’ll consider sticking around.
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