New Bloggers

I read over on the blog for Collin's class, and interesting entry by Krista at Arete in which she lays out some nice guidelines for new bloggers.  They are very sound and worth reading.  The one that jumped out at me was this one:

Mine the network. Work your blogroll, link within your posts, and keep up on your comments and trackbacks. Put a site meter on there so you know who’s coming to see you. Your blog will be better, your life will be richer, and your social circle will be wider. Eventually.

3a. Don’t worry if you’re writing to an audience of six people, four of whom are related to you. Do a good job for those six people. Keep linking out to others, keep commenting elsewhere. Eventually, they will come. But for most of us, building traffic takes time.

This has been the most interesting part about blogging for me.  I had a conversation a while back on Chuck's blog (and I'm not sure where the entries are, but if he happens to know when he reads this, I'll adjust the link accordingly) about the role that the audience plays in a blog's character.  This blog, back in the Blogger days, was fairly fluid and unconnected in tone.  Not much has changed, some might say.  What I found, in those first few months was that, once I began to gain some audience (small, to say the least) was that my writing style was affected. Suddenly, I wasn't just writing to myself, but to people who might be reading it.  I began writing specifically for these people.

I've journaled off and on over the past 10 years or so, but I wasn't always able to consistently do so, mostly from losing interest or losing patience.  I remember, in one entry from my early twenties in which I expounded on the meaninglessness of my life and the desire to create something that would capture the attention and imagination of the world (this was a fairly dark time for me, apparently) I wrote that I wanted to create something that would get me on Charlie Rose. 

In looking back, it is apparent to me what I wanted was an audience.  Blogging provided the mix of those two things: A chance to write what I want, and the ability to bounce it off of other people.  There are very few posts that go by that SOMEONE doesn't comment on, now, and in the six months I've been blogging, I still never fail to get excited when I hear the email sound go off and I look at the "Recent Comment on Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane" in the subject line. 

And it is because the audience, once first achieved, doesn't remain an audience: it becomes a community.  The communal aspect of the blogs are what make them go.  If I could tell new bloggers just one thing, it would be write for your audience, and pretty soon you'll be a part of a community in which writing becomes so much easier and ideas come so much more quickly.

 

 

Comments

[ms.quilty]

Yay! I'm first!

This is an awesome post, Dyl! I was partly inspired by your blog to open my own little outpost in the blogosphere and thanks to you I've gotten more lurkers than I thought I ever would.

I am so excited to have 4 or 5 readers and, even though I feel a little more pressure to be interesting, it also motivates me to try to post everyday. Otherwise, I probably would've gotten bored by it already.