What To Do When No One Reads Your Blog

Posted by Jozzua on Apr 14, 2009 in Random Blabber | 5 comments

Last week I was uninspired.

I was on vacation – with plenty of time to write an article. The hot weather, however, was too distracting. Also – my regular sources of newsworthy topics seemed irrelevant. I peeked amidst the noise of my blog feeds. After the first 20 or so titles, I didn’t even bother anymore. The noise, it seems, has simply gotten louder. Those few noteworthy links were just retweeted and replurked.

Over beers one weekend, a friend asked me. “How do your write? You’re like a Hemingway for blogs.”

Hemingway? He’d disown his name if he read my articles. No, that’s blasphemy. My friend was just being that – a friend. Small talk tastes better with alcohol.

Still, I couldn’t help but think maybe I had enough experience to know what people love to read about.

Quietly I recalled blog posts that really grabbed my attention and reflected – “Why did I read that?”

I concluded that there are two generally “interesting” types of blogs – the kinds that get followers:

1. Latest Trends/News Blogs – These are your regular sources of updates like Engadget, Technogra.ph, Yugatech. They offer tidbits of information that keep us informed.

2. Personal-Experience Blogs – Those that share stories of people – funny, tragic and sometimes controversial. Examples would be MikeVillar.com, Laurganism.com.

My blog was once a “trends/news” blog. I’d re-post quick links to other websites and briefly comment on the issues. Often, I’d include a block quote from the original website. However, with the proliferation of twitter and other social networking sites, micro-blogging has pretty much killed blog-reposting.

I became another ant in a colony of “tech-related” bloggers. A lazy one – who grew tired of writing.

Flashback:

I was in front of the computer.

The air conditioner couldn’t compete with the boredom and the summer’s heat as I browsed the web. Between twits, I’d flick the TV to ignore the weather.

I wanted to write something.

It was there that an old movie caught my eye.

“Up Close & Personal” was a movie classic with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. In the opening scene Pfeiffer says:

“What we in the news business can never forget is that we are only as good as the stories we tell.”

In another subtle yet critical scene Redford asks Pfeiffer as she struggled to deliver the news on live TV:

“What’s the story?”

That thought kept me up and I failed to write anything that night.

A few days later I laughed my butt off reading Mikey’s latest future-prediction blog post.

Mikey tells hilarious stories.

“Really.” My beer-buddy again caught my attention.

“How do you write interesting blogs posts?”

I gulped down my drink and thought –

Tell an interesting story dude – the kind that will make people love, laugh or cry.

Or drink beer and die trying.