evolution

This subject has to be the last refuge of the blogger who is tired from his day job (you know, the one where they pay you), but it’s one in which I’ve become interested over the last few months. You see, I’ve been at this blogging thing for over two years now, and my regular readership numbers less than twenty.

I don’t know how bloggers who “make it big” do it. Is it sheer volume, like Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit; or by posting utter trash backed up by an army of advertisers and publicity machines, like that one chick. It so happens that Reynolds is a law professor, and thus incredibly intelligent — and he’s a good writer with interesting things to say. I’m fairly intelligent (although hardly in Reynolds’ league), and I think I’m interesting, anyway.

But, it may be that I’m not interesting. For some reason, I’d never considered that — I thought all bloggers were content to wile away the time, getting a few dozen visits a month. I remember how excited I was — and this was after my two-year “blogiversary” — that my SiteMeter was crawling close to 1,000. Then I discovered Reynolds — whose SiteMeter reveals that he now gets nearly two million hits per week. When I signed up with Bloghosts (which helped me purchase a domain name and submitted my site to various search engines) back in June, I remember being flabbergasted that my first month’s traffic numbered over a thousand hits.

It couldn’t have helped that I was without an internet connection for the entire month of August, and thus could not post as often as I usually do. That really did wonders for my readership: 195 visits for a single week in June (after having 990 visits in the two years prior to that), and 962 visits for the month of July, and then 362 for the month of August. That hurt bad. Since I’ve been back, though, traffic has recovered. I even started getting commenters, and I have a link from someone I don’t even know and as far as I know have never corresponded with or spoken to (and they get a link back, as well).

So, if you’re thinking of starting a blog, here’s my advice: make sure you have something to say. Many of my first entries (check the archives from 2002) are about my petty complaints or contain a great deal of unfocused rambling. Take my kid brother as an example. He is living in Japan now, teaching English to Japanese middle-school children and blogging about Japanese culture and life. That’s interesting stuff, folks. And, like Reynolds, he’s both an excellent writer and very intelligent (more so than big brother, I’m afraid). He learned about blogs from me (so he is my first and only “blogchild” — and he has spawned seven or eight “blog-grandchildren” as well) in July before he moved away, and his readership is greater than mine. My own mother doesn’t even read my blog, but she reads his.

Another blogger has compiled a great deal of advice: the Commissar over at the Politburo Diktat has some advice for new bloggers. This author is also someone who crawled up through the ranks to average several thousand hits a week and retain quite a number of readers as well. The Soviet Communist schtick he affects also works for him as a hook.

All in all, I’d have to say that blogging — unless your name happens to be Glenn Reynolds or you turn tricks for Senators — is a pretty thankless job. However, there’s nothing like it. I have become more informed and engaged in American life by blogs than I ever was by any news media — in fact, through blogs, I have become engaged both by and with the news media. I would still maintain evolution even if no one read it. I might occasionally be frustrated, but I’d still do it.