Post or Perish? It Depends

I'd like to post a few thoughts about the ups and downs of blogging, particularly to the new blogger. And I'm not exactly an old-timer at this subject, but I've posted a few hundred times on about two dozen blogs I've started and stopped, amassed a few thousand visits and some interesting comments from fellow bloggers over a three-year period since I began this one, and remain committed primarily to the power of words to entertain, inform, and stimulate the mind and heart every bit as much as the ubiquitous digital photo or video or sound clip does on so-called "blogs" elsewhere. I'm a word blogger. I like the challenge of trying to create pictures and sounds in the imagination, and I leave the digital pictures and sounds to others. I'm a Greek, not a Roman, and I seek thought, not spectacle.

Blogging, in its simplest form, is so easy that anyone can do it. But that's not to say that anyone can attract growing numbers of visitors. It's a maxim for new bloggers that the best way to attract attention is to post readable, topical entries and post them frequently, tagged with keywords on interesting subjects, then follow up by reading other's blogs and commenting on them when you have something to say and inviting those writers to visit your site at their convenience as well. Make links available to your blog and invite subscribers. Then contact the search engines and wait for their spiders to crawl your entries, usually within a few days or weeks.

But even if you do all these things faithfully and begin to build visitors of a few per day or week, then a few more, chances are that if you do not keep posting, your stats will quickly level out and stagnate until they get "fed" again with a new post or three from you. This is because the engines and watchers that are keeping an eye on you as well as nearly countless other new blogs hitting the internet every day are waiting to see how you do, waiting to see if your blog has the power to pull a visitor with increasing frequency, to draw a subscription link without resorting to buying one, in effect, from many sites who will gladly sell you their admiration and promise to splash your blog title all over Google's masthead as Number One in the Universe--for a fee of course.

And if you don't post for a few days or a few weeks, it tells the watchers that you may be among the unwashed multitudes who just like to set up a site then abandon it in a few days. These "been there, done that" bloggers are the curse of every host, wasting bandwidth and refusing to "improve the land" in any way, till they're finally cleaned out of the hosts' servers at no small bother.

So if you don't want the world to think you're another dilettante blogger just passing through the fickle attention span of cyberspace, post regularly. You don't have to post every day or every hour, but post at least every several days to a week, at least once. This applies especially to new blogs. If you do not, if you want to rest on your initial fit of inspiration that filled up a couple of pages, then sit back and see who visits, be prepared to see goose eggs on your statcounters after the initially curious pass by.

However, if you do post regularly, it will trigger the quicker visits of the search engine spiders, the links you need to build your rank, and within a few months you may reach a few hundered to a few thousand visits from all over the world, and that is very satisfying. Then, having reached a certain "critical mass," you may be surprised and gratified to find that you do not really have to post as often to keep growing, and your visitors will continue to increase without daily need for attention on your part.

I think the biggest problem for new bloggers is the unrealistic expectation that the whole world is waiting with bated breath to hear their immortal thoughts via a new blog, and when they don't see a thousand visits the first day, the next day they quit. It needs to be understood that just because the internet is free and open to all readers, and your blog can be read around the globe the instant you hit "publish," it doesn't mean that everyone on the internet knows or cares that your words are there at "ohgolly.myspot.com," or would rush right over to read you even if they did.

Think of it as if there were a book, a hard copy, published tomorrow bearing your same immortal thoughts, and that one copy were sent, somehow, to every bookstore in the world at the same time. Now, who would happen upon it? And if a few did pick it up, who would read it? And if a few did read it, who would discuss it? Comment on it? To whom? Until someone reviewed your book, discussed your book, assigned your book or created some buzz somewhere about your book, chances are it's not bound for the New York Times Bestseller List, right?

The internet is no different when it comes to the need to market your product. But it's done electronically now, through search engines, keywords, comments, and the same hard scrabble work that print marketing requires. You have to be patient, and you have to pay your dues and build up a few readers who want to follow your ideas as you offer them, then if you're lucky, in time there will be some buzz generated, and voila! one day you get the shock of your life that 48 people read something you posted, all at once, and pretty soon you're hearing from the host of your blog nagging you to consider selling ad space and other corruptions so he can cash in on your emerging authorship fame as well!

That happened to me, once, so I know it can. (Didn't sell the adspace, though; I hate ads on blogs. It's so crass.)