A while ago Merlin Mann gave a pretty neat definition of what makes blogs good:
” 1. Good blogs have a voice.
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions.
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest”
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs.
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation.
6. Good blogs are weird.
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.
8. Good blogs try.
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. ”
My list would have been very similar, and I am pretty sure deadprogrammer.com is a good blog. God knows I try :)
On the other hand, I seem to have about the same thousand readers I had 4 years ago. I was kind of hoping that my writing and photography would work on their own, bringing me a steady stream of new readers. It does not seem to be working. Every time I try to put some extra effort into a post, my hopes of somebody linking to it, digging it, twittering about it, or even just leaving me a thoughtful comment are dashed. After a few years of this, it gets harder and harder for me to write. My posting frequency is not what it used to be.
Several hundred readers still subscribe to my blog from Livejournal. The majority of the rest resulted from a single Boing Boing post. I don’t really think it’s the most interesting post I ever wrote, but to this day it brings in about 25% of my search engine traffic, and the majority of outside links.
Back then I actively tried submitting my posts to Boing Boing. Boing Boing submission form can rival magazine publisher’s black hole. I finally practically begged Cory Doctorow in a personal email to take a look at at the Starbucks post (which the submission form vaporized previously), and I did get that link.
I tried to get Jason Kottke interested in my blog, especially since it seems to me that a lot of the stuff that I write about is very much up his alley, but after a chat or two I got tired of pitching. It just does not fell right for me to buttonhole busy A-list bloggers – hey, look, I wrote this, you might like it.
Anyhoo, what’s the point of all this? Apparently I suck at PR and self-promotion, and I would really like some help here from the audience. Do you know somebody who’d enjoy reading Deadprogramemer.com? Please, tell them, especially if it’s an A, B, C, D or E list blogger. Please?
Hey, at least you get a regular thousand readers! Think about it, there are a thousand people in the world who care enough about what you write to the point of not unsubscribing. That’s got to be at least mildly rewarding.
I don’t think there is a good answer to the question of: how do I get famous? You just have to keep plugging away with your best material and it will either work or it won’t.
Several times I’ve been cited in prominent places and have had a huge spike as a result. But the audience has been entirely transitory, and mere days after the spike it’s back to normal. So, well, don’t do that.
What do you want out of your blog anyway? Speaking for myself, I mainly write for myself. I admit it, I am shamelessly narcissistic. I love to read my old stuff. I amuse me, particularly when I read myself years later. Anyone else who reads me (and manages not to leave idiotic comments) is a bonus.
I write because I like to write about topic near and dear to me, but not for myself. I write so that other people will read it. It’s not that acquiring new readers has been slow – it was glacial! 100 new readers or so in 4 years? One link from Cory back then brought me 500 new readers, hundreds of links, and hundreds of thousands of page views.
I am not going to start to write digg-optimized “10 ways to foo the baz” or “Obama rules, McCain drools” articles, but you know, I feel like I deserve more readers.
As far as getting Internet-famous – Julia Allison figured it out already. I just don’t have the figure for it :)
Really like your blog, but rarely comment. I’m sure it’s the same with the other 999 readers. I’ll try to stroke your ego a bit in the future :-).
I’ll base my next “hey, guys, how about a link or a digg” on a New York City subway beggar’s rant.