On Blogging: Keeping Readers

Ok, so attracting readers is one thing. Keeping them is another.

First: credentials. I don't have stratospheric web stats. Let's face it--only so many people are interested in debuts. However, my monthly web traffic over the life of this blog looks like this:


A nice slow but steady slope up, with a recent hill, and a few dips. The only declines were short-lived. It looks like I'm in a dip now, but February was a short month. In the last three months, I have gained over 150 new feed subscribers, and I know about almost 400 of them.

I aim to post at least one post daily. For the sake of this calculation, let's give myself 28 posting days per month. Let's assume that 50 percent of my feed subscribers read regularly, and the other fifty percent are either defunct subscribers, or they read some of the time, depending on whether my topic looks interesting. So, let's bump it up another ten percent. Multiply that by 350 feed subscribers. That gives me 5880 reads. Add to that a current average of 4000 monthly visits, which gives me almost 10,000 estimated reads a month. Let's take away click-throughs from feed readers, for people who want to leave comments or check out the action on the sidebars. That's been about 20 a day, or about 600 a month. To make the numbers round and keep the estimate conservative, let's call it 9,000 visits a month. Or about a hundred thousand visits a year.

So, why do I think those readers keep coming back? I don't know. I can only guess based on my own behavior. And modify my own behavior accordingly as I realize I'm doing something that annoys me elsewhere. Therefore, I came up with a few rules to blog by.

1) Unless the topic is an article (like this one), keep it to a reasonable length. Even political columnists like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Page keep it to 700 words, and they are professional writers. The reason that they must keep it to 700 words is because that's the lenghth of a typical newspaper column. And that's the length of a typical newspaper column because it really is the perfect length for an opinion piece. And in the blogging world, much of what we are writing are opinion pieces.

I'm guilty of breaking this rule, especially in my reviews. I'm going to try to improve in the future. Just because I have a lot to say, doesn't mean you want to read it all.

2) Don't be boring. It's hard to tell when you're being boring, but you can use word counts as a guide. If you've written 500 words about your cat, some of it is probably boring. If you're going to write about your cat, or playing piano, or anything else that is peripheral to your blog, keep it under 300 words. 200 words would be better. And include a picture, for reasons explained below. (BTW, I love cats and I play piano. I could easily write a thousand words on learning Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major, or on the death of my poor kitty. But you won't read it here.)

3) If you're going to post more than once a day, use a combination of short and long posts, with no more than one long post a day. Kimber An taught me this. You don't want to overwhelm your readers with lots of long posts. Otherwise, we'll be tempted to use the "mark all as read" option in our feed reader. Pace yourself. We're already reading your blog more often than we read Thomas Sowell and Clarance Page. Don't push it.

4) Use pictures, when appropriate. Sandra McDonald taught me this. Pictures make boring posts interesting, and make interesting posts even more so. Especially if you can use your pictures in a clever way. Heather usually does a great job with pictures over at The Galaxy Express.

5) Be cautious about ranting. Give yourself a shorter wordcount when it comes to rants. This will help prevent annoying people who have an opposing viewpoint. Even though they have opposing viewpoints, they are still your readers, and you want to keep it that way. The best rants are short and persuasive.

The exception is when you can be as funny as this.

6) Don't pour out your troubles for the world to see. I'm sorry to say it, but we're not your friends. We find you interesting, and that's why we read your blog. We could possibly become your friends if we start exchanging emails. But if you keep pouring out your troubles, we start wondering if you need therapy. Don't do this.

7) When interviewing, don't tax your interviewees with a slew of questions. Over at Neth Space, Ken has the perfect interview length with his Questions Five. Ok, so maybe that's a little short, but he has the right idea. Long interviews not only tax your interviewee, they tax your readers. Especially if the interviewees get . . . er . . . a bit wordy. You could easily end up with posts well over 2000 words. This is way too long, and you don't want to offend your interviewee with cuts. So keep it short to begin with.

8) Consider publishing your full feed, not just a few paragraphs. If you're trying to monetize your blog, I understand the temptation of using a partial feed, but you're short-changing your regular readers. Make your posts engaging enough, and we'll come over anyway to check out the comments. You're also short-changing yourself, because fewer people will subscribe to partial feeds. And if they don't subscribe, they might not remember to check out your blog.

For more on the full-versus-partial debate, check out this debate at ProBlogger.

9) Don't make up points just so you can get ten of them. I'm done here. I'm not going to try to stretch it out to ten points. Because ten really isn't a magic number.