A writer writes about writing. Right…

I’m wrapping up a series of articles on blogs for writers today, so if you haven’t yet, be sure to check out 6 Reasons Writers Need Blogs (which was apparently actually only five reasons — oops) and How to Write a Readable Writing Blog.  This last post takes a closer look at the numbers game:  blog readership, stats and how much to care about them, and the social networking and SEO (search engine optimization) side of blogging.

Don’t Panic

But don’t worry, it’s a casual look.  You’ll be right at home if you have no idea where people find the time for all their crazy social networking profiles and updates.  I’m not really a networker by nature myself — I don’t actually like sharing my life over Twitter every day, and I still send e-mails instead of Facebook messages.  The networking thing is an option you can play with if you want to start increasing traffic to your blog and reaching out to other people in your field; it’s not a requirement.  Even if you’re only getting five readers a day, your blog is still there when people search for your name, providing the “portfolio” of your work that I talked about on Monday.  So you don’t have to do any of this.  It’s just stuff you can play with if you want to.

First Off, Statistics

WordPress (which this blog is based on) has a bare-bones stat tracker built in, and you can download other ones of varying complexity.  There’s a number of metrics you can look at, but most people are interested in getting the best picture of site traffic possible — how many people, on a given day, are actually visiting the site.  A basic tracker like WordPress’s just bumps the count up by one every time someone comes to your blog or one of its pages, excepting visits from your own connection.  More sophisticated trackers can do things like only count visits that last for more than a certain number of seconds, preventing random redirects from inflating your numbers artificially.

How seriously you want to take those numbers is sort of up to you.  There’s no real benchmark for “good” here, so you may be happier keeping an eye on trends instead.  If you’ve got more views one month than the last, good job!  If you’ve got less, maybe think about what you’ve been doing that’s making people say “meh, why bother.”  And if it’s about the same you’re obviously not doing anything to drive people away, so you can go on as-is or start thinking about some social networking tools to bring more people in (who will then hopefully stay as well).

Why Care

If you hadn’t caught the general theme here yet, I don’t think it’s something to care about all that much about your numbers, as long as you’re consistently putting up good content.  Do that long enough and you’ll have the readership no matter what sort of advertising you do.  Social networking and SEO games are just a jump-start, and they shouldn’t come at the expense of the content itself.

That said, there’s certainly no harm in being well-known, especially among fellow writers and other people in the publishing business.  A wider reader base gives you more chances of hitting paydirt if you drop a request for help or advice on the blog, and it keeps the comments page lively (which is in and of itself a great way of attracting traffic).

Getting the Word Out

So the first thing you can do is self-promote on other platforms.  Your basic breakdown here is social sites like Facebook or Twitter and redirecting sites like Digg or StumbleUpon.  The former are more oriented toward finding people and presenting them with direct links to things (including your blog), while the latter are places to throw your best articles up so that random internet surfers get pointed toward them.

Social sites like Facebook are likely to give you less immediate pageviews than things like StumbleUpon, but are more likely to bring in people who want your content specifically.  They present people with a link, usually with the title of the page or article you’re sharing, so theoretically only people who are at least vaguely interested will be clicking through.  That makes Facebook or Twitter a good way to draw in readers with a good chance of becoming regulars.  The catch is that you have to have a wide audience on Facebook or Twitter to make it work in the first place — and that’s it’s own challenge to build.  You’ll need updates and content and so on that isn’t just links to your own website (otherwise you’re basically an advertising bot, and no one follows those), and that takes time to generate.

Redirect sites like StumbleUpon allow you to “recommend” a site as being of interest to a few preset categories.  Depending on the site you’re using that usually means picking a good article from your blog and recommending it under things like “writing” and perhaps “humor” or “social networking,” or anything else that you feel fits.  The website will then randomly direct people who say they’re looking for writing content to your article.  That means, of course, that you’ll want your best work on these — there’s usually a built-in limit as to how often the site will re-direct to subsets of your URL, so the first things you post will get the most random traffic.  This also tends to throw your statistics off for a while, as there’ll be a lot of “churn” — random visits that click away almost immediately.

Networking Socially

All of that is basically a mechanical function.  The other way to get people interested in your blog (and you) is to actually do the social part of “social networking” — talk to people!  Or type at them, in this case.  Visiting other blogs is a good start, especially if you leave comments.  Don’t tell people to read your blog, and don’t leave comments unless you actually have something to say, but if you’re looking at other people in the writing business it shouldn’t be all that hard to come up with things of common interest.  If you’re a clever and interesting commenter, people are likely to want to take a look at your other writing.

On the flip side of that, you want to encourage comments on your own blog.  The comments are what turn a blog from you shouting into the void into an actual social network in its own right.  So be sure to reply to all your comments — if you have time, clicking through to see the websites of the commenters will give you a little better idea of what to say to them, and you may find some blogs you really like as a side benefit.

I’m terrible at encouraging comments myself, of course, but hey — this is advice for casual bloggers, people who — as the title implies — don’t have all day to work on perfecting their online persona.  It may have even been vaguely useful advice; hard for me to say.  You’ll have to leave a comment and tell me!

(See what I did there?)