This weekend I decided to learn how to increase readership on my blog. There is of course a huge bloggy industry in place to teach me exactly how to write a blog so successful I can live on virtual ad revenue for the rest of my days. So clearly the first excellent piece of advice is to write a blog about how to write blog. The appetite for self-exploration of the art of blogging seems to be insatiable. However, the appetite for actual real-world self-exploration, which is my slightly reluctant category admission, is tiny. If indeed a thing. I wouldn’t even register on Ad Words.
I realised this after finding that the first two pieces of advice on all blog-making blogs were no.1: Make it clear what you’re marketing / selling / pushing and no.2: Keep it short and frequent, with daily drops and constant updates. Even I don’t want to give myself that much attention. And if I did, I’d be disregarding handy hint no.3: Make sure your style and content is high quality, interesting and readable.
My problem is well documented and standard dinner-party material for any www.immigrant – I simply don’t get it. Even if I understood how it all worked, I don’t understand how people would know to look for me. It’s Sunday morning, you’ve got your coffee and your papers and the same old familiar faces will be there to entertain you in the same page position, type-face and word count as last weekend. These lucky writers have no need for suggestion no.4: Join a blog circus. What?
Is it possible that I’m the wrong generation, already? When my daughter was little, a colouring book and crayons were the restaurant essentials. Now her four-year-old brothers have a whole different routine: order juice, remove all ice from juice, position bendy straw at perfect angle, unlock the iPhone, choose the most suitable app for mood (ie car racing game or chill-out music video), sit quietly for an hour and a half while parents enjoy an uninterrupted supper and worry obsessively that their children have lost the ancient art of pestering and bickering.
Which I think is now known as Twitter. The constant stream of second-hand information about stuff that other people have done all day while you weren’t looking. A great deal of my time is spent hearing about what my loved ones have been experiencing first-hand while my reality is mainly borrowed. It’s a comfortable position to take. However, it’s getting me nowhere. I’m off to join the circus. Tomorrow.
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Brilliant :)
ReplyDeleteBut I think you missed handy hint no. 5: Pimp your blog.
Or alternatively, be completely uninterested in readership and simply write for the sake of it. The fact that it is out there on the www will ensure that at least one crazy person is reading. Me, for example.