As I mentioned the other day, Greg Gershman at Blogdigger.com keeps a nice little blog. Recently he wrote a great post on how people find blogs, where he references a short discussion on it between Scoble and Scoble's buddies...
I don't know...I don't quite see myself and Scoble and friends on the same level. Sure, we're both bloggers, but he is far more well-known and people will even search under his name to find him.
Heck, people might even know some of Scoble's friends and search under their names rather than under the subject their blogging about.
So, a discussion by Scoble about how people find other people's blogs is, well, kind of like George Bush I going into J.C. Penney and trying to buy socks...
On the other hand, Greg makes a couple of good comments about Google's dominance of blogsearches. No, people do not find conversations via Google searches. They do, though, search for seriously obscure things and find blogs. Often, my other blog gets hits from people searching the gosh-darndest subjects, some of which actually make me blush! But, as noted in a comment on a post titled
When is a Fetish Not a Fetish?, one of the Googlers actually appreciated what I'd wrote on the subject and left a really great "thank you" comment.
So, apparently, I'm a "trusted voice" on something! ;-)
Greg also comments about use of RSS feeds. Considering yours truly is horrifically tech-inept, I'm still having a devil of a time figuring out a couple of RSS readers I signed up for, so I don't even think of using RSS to find conversation. Rather, I've begun exploring various tags for Recently Posted stuff.
But what about people finding me? With this blog, they come from all sorts of interesting places, including "unknown" and sometimes under a search for Spap-Oop, which is Doo-Dads upsidedown and backwards (Doo-Dads being a Sunshine Biscuit manufactured snack food no longer in existence--so, yes, I'm also an expert on obscure snackfoods.) Although the other day I did receive an email from someone who got a link to this blog via an email from a friend...but I believe that accounts for a very small portion of the people who read this blog.
It seems that, with this blog, I'm in Google searches, and Topix.net searches, and a few other searches on other search engines, including Greg's. Of the other Big Three, MSN and Yahoo searches haven't hit me yet, and that *could* be because this blog neglects a certain rule of Search Engine Optimization: that a website will get more hits when the name and the URL correspond (it certainly makes searching for the site much easier--and makes it easier to remember).
So, I'm curious to know, fellow Average Bloggers...where do some of your readers come from?
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5 comments:
My readers come from other members of AbsoluteWrite and a small group that currently gathers on Live Journal but used to all belong to the forum associated with WilWheatondotNet. And an occasional drop in who found me either in comments on another blog or via weird-o google searches. The last group doesn't comment and I don't think they come back either. :-)
So for me it was being a member of a community with like interests and letting them know about my blog - but more importantly, getting to be a part of their blogisphere by regularly commenting - that gets me readers. And those are the ones I want right now anyway.
Most of my hits come from the big 3 search engines, most of them even looking for topics I've written on. Topix sends me quite a few, and Technorati some.
The biggest generator for me, though, has been participating in the Feminist Carnivals. Both times they have brought me a lot of readers in the first few days after the new issues were released, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that some of the increase in readership stuck around in the weeks afterwards. It's been great exposure for me.
I haven't had much luck with rss readers, either, but I recently started using Bloglines. So far I'm pleased with it, specially since a fair number of people read me that way.
thanks for the great comments D & T...alot of the conversations regarding where readers come from rarely take into consideration the social means by which we find other blogs--like thru forums or other social software. The conversations mostly center around the search engines, but, as you note, there are other avenues for getting readers.
I'm not sure I want readers from search engines - yet. If I ever do get around to becoming a published writer that all changes. I think I'd want to attract readers and searches would probably help that. Right now I'm just interested in conversation with interesting and somewhat like minded folks. Not that I mean 'homogeneous' but people with similar interests even if they have quite a variance in opinion.
The number of Google hits I get goes up and down, was a lot more when I was posting regularly on politics before Katrina, but has been slim lately as I've been posting on things people seem to be not interested in Googling (or searching for anywhere). Funny to me that out of the thousands of search hits I've ever gotten from engines on obscure or popular information, I think I've only gotten a couple of comments and those were from people that hate the ACLU, if I remember. Which says something about ACLU haters. None of the others ever comment and I don't think they even read. Just zap in and see that somehow I'm not at all what they were looking for and back out immediately. In other words, I get no readers at all from the search engines. Hits, but no readers.
The first few months after I came online I spent considerable effort reading around, going deep into links, checking out their blogrolls, sometimes leaving comments, then I became more familiar with certain patterns of blog behavior and am now feeling fairly cynical about it all. Not that I don't think there are some great and good blogs out there and some good writing, because I do.
I am interested in why you call this particular blog "snarkaholic" when there's so little snark involved. You don't snark. I've read you for months and you seem pretty up front and dedicatedly interested in social networking in a non-elitest way.
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