I admit it. I want my blog to reach a bigger audience. No shame. It’s not that I’m looking for validation as a person, but I’m looking for validation as a writer. It may look desperate, but I don’t want to fall in the typical artist’s delusion of saying “I do this for myself and not for anybody”. If that were true, why do it publicly?
I have searched for blogging tips and advice. I admit that too. One high ranked site that appears in search results is Problogger. It is a really great site with many tips and advice on blogging. From Blogging Tips for Beginners to How to Write your “About Me” Page. Definitely very helpful and a good resource to bookmark.
One advice that pops up on a lot blogging tips sites, is the ever holy advice of finding a niche. The reasons for this makes sense. If you find that thing out there that nobody is doing, which I seriously doubt that you ever will, you’ll rank high on search results. Another reason for this is that if your not about a specific topic or theme, readers will get confused. This comes from the premise that people like better to receive what they expect. But I don’t think that’s a good advice.
Sites like Boing Boing, Kottke.org and Daring Fireball are not actually sites that you can call niches. I don’t know their numbers, but you can bet they’re pretty popular. There are core themes on the sites, i.e. Kottke deals a lot with photography, Daring Fireball talks about Apple and Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow hates DRM, but there are many other topics and themes and I don’t think their readers have run away. They mostly link though. Maybe their niche is “web curating”.
Right now, the theory of The Long Tail is being contested and has stirred up the blogosphere. I don’t know much about the Long Tail and all I know is that it’s about the rise of niche markets, but I get the basic idea. I think we gotten to analytical, trusting graphs and data and forgotten to use our guts and instincts.
Well, I don’t know what you are doing to get higher number of hits/visits, but I can tell you what I’ve been doing. 3 months and two weeks and closing in on 2500+ visits and an average of 41.25 visits per day in the last 16 days alone. I’m twitting my blog like crazy, added into 10+ feed, rss places. leave URL on message boards, promote it on facebook and myspace and gmail and most importantly…tagging. I give every entry between 10 and 15 tags. and having the tag cloud on the blog helps.
I’m nowhere where I want to be, but I’m barely starting. Also I’m doing mine english/spanish so that helps bring in more diverse public. That and the fact that I talk about plenty of things. Adding movie, music, etc reviews always helps bring people in, and you are already doing so so that works. Lastly…comment on other peoples blog in wordpress. That leaves a link out there directly to your blog. Just like I’m doing now. 😀 hehehe
later yc.
Jaycruz — trying to find that niche. I think it is developing out of what I want to read and write about most.
Good info, Alphamanuel. Trying to get into the Twitter and Feeds things as well, but doing the others.
Thanks!
KJ
http://interminablewriter.wordpress.com
http://nanadiaries.wordpress.com
http://innerbitchchronicles.wordpress.com
Thanks Alpha and K Jayne for the comments.
I guess we are all trying to find it. Consciously or unconsciously. I have many interests, but I know I would probably never blog about politics. So I guess through time we will find that “niche”. Not as as a specific topic, but more like a core theme. What I learned is that the “niche” advice makes more sense for business type bloggers and not to people like us that have a more creative approach and are looking for a ludic readers. 🙂
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