Five C’s & Two E’s Towards a Decent Blog Following

A good friend of mine (who has asked to be anonymous) has been blogging almost daily for four years. His writing is good. His posts are well-thought out, and many are meticulously researched. His graphics and layout are very well done. Every post includes an interesting picture. He has had more than 100,000 hits since he started his blog. He also has less than twelve subscribers, including his family and myself. His Alexa ranking is dismal. Even his family doesn’t read his blog every day.

So what’s the problem? Well, if you don’t care how many people read your work, there really isn’t a problem. But if you are looking for a consistent readership, you need to deliver a consistent service. You see, my friend writes about anything and everything: sports, music, movies, television shows, books, his feelings about local newspaper articles, poetry and short stories. His posts are arranged chronologically and his use of tags and categories is inconsistent. So if someone likes one of his poems, for example, it is very hard to find another without doing a lot of searching and scrolling.

Only because I happen to know that he would like a large subscribers list, would I dare call any of these things mistakes. And only because  I’m just damned tired of every list I read being organized into “Top Tens” have I arranged these tips as I have.  So without further ado, here are five C’s and two E’s towards building a blog following.

1. Consistent Content

If you want a consistent readership, be consistent yourself. If someone subscribes to your blog because they love your poetry, each time you roam away from  that topic, you give them a reason to unsubscribe.  The farther you roam, the more likely you are to lose the folks who are trying to follow you. This is why marketers are always talking about niches. You may be interested in Emily Dickinson, the Boston Bruins, Australian beer and stamp collecting, but you have to admit that the number of others interested in each of those subjects is rather limited. You don’t need to limit your niche too much.

2. Consistent Activity

Again, your subscribers need to know what to expect from you. There is a reason magazines and newspapers come out in regular, predictable cycles. Decide on how often you can reasonably set time aside to add to your blog and try to stick to it. Ten days of fervent activity followed by three weeks of silence, or vice versa, is only going to aggravate subscribers. If you find yourself going through a hot writing spell, save some of your drafts and dispense them to your readers later in the week.

3. Comment Friendly

Make it easy for readers to interact with you and each other. There are plenty of tools and plugins from services to choose from, including Disqus, Gravatar, Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

4. Categories over Chronology

Unless you using your blog as a diary, there are few readers who will be wondering what you wrote last month. They are more likely to be interested in what else you wrote on the subject at hand. Don’t make it hard for them to search your website.

5. Create for Others, not for Yourself

If you’re already a celebrity, people will be happy to read about what you had for breakfast, or your true feelings about the dog barking next door. But if you’re not a celebrity, don’t count on it. There are people who can write just about anything and still build a good following.  Ct Kingston is a good example of this. But when you read her work, you’ll see that even when she is writing about herself, she is not writing only for herself.  She is using her own experiences to  (6.) entertain and to (7.) engage her audience.

The first rules many writers are told to learn is to “write for yourself” or to “write what you know”. These may be good rules if your goal is to express yourself and, at the same time, feel you need rules before expressing yourself. However, I would suggest instead that you write what you most like to read. If your end is to engage a large audience, then begin with that end in mind.

Tagged as: Blogging