When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. And it turns out I was right.
One thing that most bloggers crave is recognition. This can be on a very small scale (maybe just a couple of readers and the odd comment every month) or it can be a lot grander. Start a blog today and your name could be on the lips of the world's media by the middle of next week, maybe even with a best selling book to your name by Christmas. It's all just a matter of your raw talent being noticed, your opinions heeded and your creative skill recognised. Because bloggers are the new creative powerhouse, aren't they, and their arguments can bring down governments. Blogging is the beating heart at the epicentre of the 2.0 revolution. Except, as we all know, it doesn't really work like that.
If you want your blog to be recognised, you need to provide original content. It's no good just regurgitating funny stories from the newspapers, or linking to all the same new gadgets as everyone else, or endlessly mouthing off about your journey to work. You need something fresh, something new, something different. This is quite difficult to achieve. Virtually every blogpost that could be written already has been, especially on key topics like climate change, Iraq and kittens. But there's always a new angle if you look hard enough, and originality always shines through. I try hard to keep as much of my blog as original as possible. I like to get out there and explore London for myself. I don't sit around waiting for speculative press releases to arrive in my inbox and then copy them. My voice cannot be bought. Plus I'm not afraid to go wildly off-topic sometimes, or to devote an entire week to a topic of minority interest. I enjoy being experimental, and I love playing around with the conventions of presentation and formatting. I don't think there's another blog on the internet quite like mine (and if there is I'd love to read it, so do tell me where it is).
If you want your blog to be recognised, you need to write regularly. This doesn't necessarily mean several times a day, or even several times a week, but you do need to post new content regularly enough to ensure that potential readers don't walk away. If they're going to make the effort to come and see you, you need the dedication to talk back to them. They'll forgive you a fortnight's holiday incommunicado. They won't desert in droves if you fail to post a 1000 word essay tomorrow morning. They'll even come back after a month of nothing much while you concentrate on having a life. But start apologising for your long breaks, or announcing that you're off on a "hiatus" until the muse returns, and there'll soon be nigh nobody left reading. I try exceptionally hard to blog regularly. I like to post something of substance every day, without fail, and I almost always succeed. It's a ridiculous self-imposed target I know, but I like a challenge. My daily deadline forces me to be both creative and current, and if I've not got something up online by 7am-ish on a weekday morning I feel as though I've somehow failed. Daily blogging isn't for everyone I know, but for me it's the perfect motivational tool.
If you want your blog to be recognised, you need your own niche. It really helps if people can sum up your raison d'être in a single short phrase. That blog about Arsenal, the one by the ambulance driver, the girl who writes about rampant sex, the outpourings of a single-minded political pedant. If you have your own niche, like-minded souls will gravitate towards you. Be distinctive, and you're more likely to get yourself noticed. It's much harder to make a name for yourself if your blog is more of a scattergun affair - a bit of family life one day, a news review the next and then a week of holiday photos. If being popular matters to you, prepare to make a tough decision about which of your diverse interests you should focus on and which can be safely sidelined. My blog isn't easily pigeonholed. Sure I write a lot about London, but actually I write about London for well under half of the time. I love unpredictability, and you lot never quite know what I'll be blogging about here next week (or even, most of the time, tomorrow morning). I'm not afraid to publish a simple list of links one day, followed by a sudden outburst of unlabelled irony the next, and then a whole week of posts on some completely off-the-wall theme. Mine is "the blog that writes quite a bit about London but also about other places and telly and society and music and quizzes and life and stuff". It makes for a fascinating mix, I hope, but it's not a catchy one-line theme. I shall never be a marketable success while I remain unclassifiable. And hurrah for that.
But if you want your blog to have influence, then I'm afraid you are sadly deluded. There were (at the last count) approximately 100 million different blogs out there, each clamouring for recognition in an increasingly crowded electronic arena. Your blog is nothing but an insignificant pebble on the online beach, casting an unnoticed ripple across the face of the internet. No blog ever single-handedly improved teenage behaviour on public transport, or spawned a successful TV series, or brought a government to its knees. Even blogs with ten thousand visitors a day or their own book deal go unnoticed and unregarded by the overwhelming majority of society. My Mum has never read your blog, and my next door neighbour doesn't even know you exist. No matter how original your content, no matter how regular your posting and no matter how well-defined your niche, divide by 100 million and the number of people who give a damn about your blog is as near to zero as makes no odds. Get used to it.
When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. But it turned out to be much more than that.
It took me a month to add a hits counter to my blog. By nightfall I'd recorded 3 visitors to the site, two of whom were me. But who was the other visitor, and why had they come? I was hooked already. And, you'll not be surprised to hear, I've been keeping a careful eye on my daily number of blog visitors ever since. It's yet another method of gauging feedback on what I write (never mind the comments, count the footfall), and I smile so long as the general trend remains slightly upward.
Tracking statistics are also an extremely useful way of discovering where one's visitors are coming from. Maybe a direct hit from another blog that's linked to your latest post. Maybe the occasional arrival from another blog where you've just been added to the sidebar. But most likely a random appearance via a Google search. Ah yes, how we love to see what strange combinations of words have been leading Googlers to our door (always a useful topic for a backup post when all other inspiration fails). But it's not so useful for the Googler. They'd been trying to track down "brit oval to paddington by cab" (or whatever) and they ended up on your blog instead, disgruntled and unsatisfied. Search engines may bring visitors, but they rarely deliver long-term readers.
Stats trackers therefore vastly overestimate the number of readers your blog is getting. And this can be quite depressing. There you are celebrating getting 50 hits on your blog, but it turns out that 40 of them never meant to be there in the first place and didn't hang around when they arrived. Proper readers, ones that keep coming back for more, are like gold dust.
3b) VISITORS < VIEWERS
But there's been a change recently, and I'm left wondering whether stats tracking sites might instead be seriously underestimating the number of viewers that blogs are getting. It's RSS that's to blame - the cunning technology whereby people can read your posts without reading your blog. My viewer numbers almost double if I add in the number of people subscribed to my blogfeed , a total which positively amazes me.
Once subscribed, viewers don't have to keep checking the blog to see if anything new has been written, they can find out remotely. It's very convenient, but it can be a bit annoying for the blogger. Just spent ages tweaking your blog's layout and design? RSS readers won't notice, because they're only reading your individual posts. Just updated your blogroll? They won't spot that either, nor all of the comments that others are making on your posts. Hell, there could even be a photo of a naked vicar in your sidebar and they'd never notice. Which is a shame. RSS brings enormous opportunities, and I've become a keen user of this new functionality. But reliance on blogfeeds also cuts social ties and has started to diminish hard-won feelings of online community.
Blogging is becoming a conveyor belt churning out content, which is then reassembled and reproduced elsewhere. You may have control over what you write, but you no longer have control over how it's read. Your latest post might well reappear inside Facebook or on LiveJournal, or within some other 2.0 portal. It might be shamelessly stolen by a spam blog and reproduced without credit. And it's almost certainly popping up somewhere in an RSS aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader, out of context and stripped of formatting, where it has to fight for attention amid a raging torrent of other very similar looking posts. Much too much to read, far too little time.
3) READERS < VISITORS < VIEWERS
Your blog is almost certainly being viewed, but is it actually being read?
When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. But it turned out to be much more than that.
The first blogs were one-way affairs where the webmaster wrote something and others read it. Sometimes they wrote a little and sometimes they wrote a lot, but it was always just bunged up on screen for others to digest. If you had a blog about, for example, your experiences aboard public transport, then you'd not really have much of a clue about what people thought of it. Neither would your readers get the chance to add their voice to your thoughts. No way to say "ooh, I hate it when the driver says that to me too" or even "those teenagers need to be strung up by their headphones from the top deck". Blogs needed more than just content. There was something missing.
The ability to comment has made a huge difference to blogging. Blogging need not be one-way traffic, it can be a two-way conversation. It's content plus comment.
Every post I publish is, in some way, an experiment in feedback. Will my walk through Bexley get any comments at all? If I ask my readers about Facebook, will they ever shut up? And if I accidentally make a factual error, who will be the first to chip in and point it out? I love the fact that my readers might, or might not, make comments on what I write. Often the comments are the best bit of the blog, adding depth and additional facts that I never knew, and that you probably didn't either.
Of course, just because a blog invites comment doesn't necessarily mean that anybody will. As we discovered in the infamous doughnut experiment two years ago, lack of comments doesn't necessarily equate with lack of interest. Commenting requires effort on behalf of the reader, and readers aren't always known for their effort. Commenting may require reloading the page ("can't be bothered"). It may require typing in some nigh illegible validation script ("can't be bothered"). It may require switching from the RSS feed to the main webpage ("can't be bothered"). It may require registering ("really can't be bothered"). And it always relies on someone being motivated enough to think of something worth commenting about in the first place. Only a tiny proportion of a blog's readership ever get round to commenting, which can be a bit of a problem when readership is low. There's little more dispiriting on a brand new blog than month after month of posts reading 0 comments - because it's the comments that will (one day) tell you what people really think.
I've been lucky - I've managed to build up a veritable army of regular and semi-regular commenters over the years (and only a very few of them have been nutters spouting irrelevant drivel). My commenting community has evolved as readers have arrived, lingered and moved on, and it's very different now to the group it was three or four years ago. But this blog wouldn't be half as interesting without you, so thanks. Because every comment counts.
(And yes, I know, I really ought to comment on your blog more often. We all should.)
When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It was a dull Sunday afternoon, somewhere inbetween ironing shirts for work and watching I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. I thought I'd have a go at starting one of those new-fangled blog things, signed up to Blogger and tried to think of a succinct and relevant blog name. Good choice, as it turned out. I picked an off-the-shelf template design (which is still pretty much what you see today, except it used to be green instead of grey). And I kicked off with a themed week of day-related posts, which may just have been a foretaste of what was to come. Not that I realised what was to come at the time.
I sometimes wonder how different the last five years might have been if I hadn't started a blog that day. I'd have had a heck of a lot more spare time for a start, probably adding up to thousands and thousands of hours by now. I might even have gone out in the evenings more often, and kept in contact with various friends, and involved myself at the heart of London's social whirl. But probably not. I suspect I'd just have just sat at home and watched more telly, and surfed the internet and wondered why there was so much crap on there. But I didn't. I joined in, I got involved.
Blogging, done properly, enhances your life. If there's something you desperately want to tell the world you can get it out of your system, even if nobody's listening. It's a particularly useful tool for us single people. We have nobody to turn to during the news and say "who does that Gordon Brown think he is?" or "wahey, two up for the Arsenal!" or "blimey that Amy Winehouse is looking rough". Blogging gives us an outlet, with the ever-present possibility of feedback. It's also somewhere to show off one's literary talents, such as they are, under-practised since your English teacher used to set you essays for homework many moons ago. And a blog is a useful foothold in cyberspace, an online headquarters from which to reach out to others. If they ever want to communicate with you, now they know where to come.
If there's one thing that blogging has brought me that I really wasn't expecting, it's friends. Some of these are just virtual acquaintances, although it's amazing how well you can come to know these people just by reading what they have to say, snooping on their online witterings and joining in with their discussions. Others I've actually met in real life. Only a select few, you understand, because I'm not overkeen on mass random blogmeets. But these are charming, delightful, witty people, who I'd never have had the pleasure of knowing otherwise. Hell, I've even snogged one of them. Who'd have thought that staying in could actually help me to go out more often?
And there have been a few other unique experiences I'd never have had without blogging. I've had some articles published in Time Out. I've been on local radio for seven minutes. I've written one whole page of a book that's currently ranked 5932nd on Amazon. I've been interviewed for proper academic research. I've successfully campaigned to get the official Olympic Countdown Clock outside Stratford station to display the right date. And I've inspired a double page article in the Evening Standard about Metronet's uselessness at my local tube station (which was discussed in the London Assembly, no less, but then summarily dismissed by the Chairman of Metronet as follows: "Articles which refer to an unnamed passenger's account having travelled through a station quite frankly are not worthy of any detailed examination." Well, who's in administration now then, you smug bastard?). It's amazing where blogging can take you.
I'm glad I started diamond geezer 5 years ago, because my life would have been far less rich if I hadn't. I've been to places I'd never have thought of visiting otherwise. I've met people I'd not otherwise have met. I've constructively filled time that I'd otherwise have frittered away. And I've found a way of being creative online that other people actually appear to appreciate. Blogging's not just publishing words on the internet, oh no. It's so much more than that.
When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. But it turned out to be much more than that.
The first post I ever wrote was 100 words long. I didn't think about it much and I knocked it off in a few minutes. Last Monday's post (about a walk across south Croydon) was 1000 words long. It took an hour and a half to research, and a similar amount of time to travel to the start. The walk itself took four hours, and when I got home I took considerably longer to fiddle around with my photos and to write up my journey. Then I added several pertinent links, as appropriate, and drew a Google map so that you could follow the route of my journey. Oh how times change.
Most people have a blogging style somewhere along the spectrum from shallow to deep. Shallow bloggers have it quick, and they have it easy. They look around for other people's stuff to copy, and then they cut and paste it with a brief comment at the end. A typical shallow blogpost goes like this...
"I just saw this [10 lines quoted from somewhere else] I am . "
Shallow bloggers make the mistake of thinking that we care what they think. Sometimes they're right, and their comment boxes clog up with ranting bile from like-minded souls. But most of the time they're jabbering to an audience of nil. They stick adverts in their sidebar and wonder why nobody clicks on them. They wait for a book deal that never comes. They use their blogs solely to react, and not to interact. They put almost nothing in, and so they get nothing out. I'm not a fan of shallow blogs.
The best blogs are deep, at least in part. They reflect the thoughts and interests of the author. They muse on life's daily struggle and cultivate grand ideas. They're written for the love of it. And they take time and effort to produce. Quite a considerable amount of time, in some cases. Never, under any circumstances, should a deep blogger ever tot up the total amount of time they spend blogging, because it'll be out of all proportion to any returns gained. All those hours, or even days, spent tapping away on the keyboard to produce interesting content. And for what?
Blogging isn't worth it, materially speaking. It might get you noticed in the media, briefly, but it probably won't. It might make you some money, but probably only peanuts. It's something you should always do for yourself, and not for others.
It's a bit like gardening, really. There's no point whatsoever in creating a beautiful landscaped garden, except because you want to. Nobody else is going to stop and admire your garden, apart from friends you specifically invite around and a few random passers by. You'll spend countless afternoons digging and weeding, and you'll spend a fortune on plants and shrubs. Nobody else would care if you concreted over the lawn or let the whole place go to seed, not in the grand scheme of things. But if you put in a bit of effort, over a long period of time, you can create an environment of which you're hugely proud. The outcome should always be measured in contentment, not hard currency. And I'd rather read an exquisitely landscaped garden than a scrap of crazy paving any day.
, a total which positively amazes me.
