Billy asks:
Would you stop writing your blog if your stats told you there were 0 readers?
Of course I would.
When I began writing the blog, five and a half years ago now, I didn't have any readers. I don't think anyone was looking in for months and if they were it was from Google. It's a shame because I still think that was when the blog was its best, when I seemed to have much more to write about and the cynicism hadn't really set in yet.
I was a much more promiscuous linker back then, with a feature in which I highlighted another blog each day, the backlinks for which I'm sure drew some readers and I think you just gain them through search engines because people find you and like what you're doing. But I don't think that at any point have I really gone after a particular audience. Primarily this is like a textual scrapbook, a place to keep a record of who I am each day or week and I'm not sure I could give it up even if no one was reading.
I love that I can look at some random week, say in mid-July 2003, when I was mostly kvetching about Big Brother and the government, both subjects I've given up worrying about. I wish I was able to do that with my whole life, seeing what the version of me at fourteen really had on his mind. I would have probably been talking about Kylie Minogue, getting annoyed with the sheer badness of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and complaining about how poor the films were that year. Things haven't changed that much then.
That said, although I'd like to say that none of this was about you, plainly it is. I do wonder who is reading and find it quite bizarre that I'm not sure exactly what my circulation is. Although site meter says that this week the blog had over a thousand hits, all the referrer logs seems to list are google searches. Bloglines shows thirty-one subscribers but how many of them read the blog and just haven't gotten around to deleting it? Just how many readers do I have?
Nope.
ReplyDeleteI've been blogging for six months now. I've written about 150,000 words. I began the blog when I returned to writing a novel I'd initially begun twenty years ago; it was to be my 'testament' to the renewed effort. (And the blood. And the sweat. And the- You get the picture.)
It's a private blog; there are only about four regular readers out of just less than a dozen invited. So really, I'm writing for myself, anyway.
Frankly...anyone who 'needs' to know there's an audience...I question their motives.
But that's just me.
I read it via Bloglines. It says theres only 7 subscribers for me.
ReplyDeleteThere are at least two feeds that I know of -- yours which I think is the feedreader one and the blogger generated atom feed.
ReplyDeleteI just started reading your blog, having followed an email link in your footer on JP. I rather like coming across established blogs, personally.
ReplyDeleteEh...happy New Year!