The story of a blog, my blog

Almost a year ago I turned off the comments to my blog in order to preserve my attention and focus and positive mental space. Many predicted doom, as I was told that ‘engagement is the key to growing your audience.’

I’ve been tracking my traffic since 2004 in a spreadsheet, which lets me generate some charts. And I marked one of them up real quick.

So here’s 7 years of traffic at TobiasBuckell.com. I’m not the most trafficked blog in the world, but it’s mine and I like it:

I’ve labeled major events:

1- The peak of traffic built up up from 2004 to the point where word spread that I’d sold my first novel (30,000 unique visitors/month)

2- The sharp drop off after my first novel appeared (down to 13,000 uniques a month)

3- The slow rebuilding to the launch of my second novel (slowly back up to 30,000 uniques a month)

4- A jump in traffic when I was announced as the next Halo author (over 40,000 unique visitors)

5- Sly Mongoose and the Halo novel come out (30,000 unique visitors)

6- A slow spiral downwards after my heart defect put me in and out of hospital and I struggled to regain health and didn’t blog much (down 18,000 uniques a month)

7- I blogged about Amazon’s controversial decision to delist Macmillan books (almost 60,000 uniques a month)

8- I turned off comments. Traffic initially spikes to over 60,000 uniques, then again to 90 and 100,000 uniques).

About the first and second labels, it’s a tale about who’s reading you and why. Back then my blog was part of a culture of beginning writers… neo professionals. Young turks, if you will. Most of my readers seemed to be reading me because I offered a narrative about becoming a writer. I talked about word counts, submissions, struggles, and so on. What caught me off guard was that well over half of my readers deserted me the moment I published the novel.

It could be argued that my narrative ended for them.

To some I was no longer interesting because I wasn’t struggling with the same things. My potential audience narrowed. I wasn’t talking to writers trying to sell a novel (large pool), but to writers who had already sold a novel and were trying to figure out what to do (very much smaller pool).

Slowly, over the next 2-3 years, I began to pivot the ‘point’ of the blog a bit (and regrow readership). It wasn’t a blog ‘about writing’ as I’d initially conceived. With readers of my stories and novels being a large part of my readership, I now begin to work on creating a blog that was ‘about’ the sort of stuff I was trying to write about in fiction: technology, futurism, global perspectives.

I see a lot of new writers online. A lot of their blogs obsess about markets, submissions, how to write. That’s great. It’s what they’re focused on. But every other new writer is doing the same thing. Everyone’s trying to position themselves as an expert about writing. Or publishing.

Item six, my downward spiral, demonstrates the importance of regularity. As my blog posts dwindled into a handful here and there, I lost core readers. Almost half of them.

I don’t try to kill myself to post regularly, but I do value it now a lot more than ever before.

I turned off the comments to this blog last year, right around this time. I had little energy as I dealt with recovering my health, and I’d come to realize that I was less interested in spending my energy as a moderator and wanted to spend more of it writing and blogging.

Some predicted doom. Others knowingly said things like “engagement with readers is critical to growing your brand.”

Despite all that, traffic surged as I both increased my blogging here, and also found my voice. My voice is me, and me was always self-censoring posts because he didn’t want to get yelled at by people who spend all their free time online being right all the time no matter what. Or just avoiding posting all together out of a tiredness.

Sure, I know I lost some people, maybe even some friends, who were shocked to find out that I like public transportation, realized I was wrong about high speed trains and became an advocate, not a fan of Linux, like Occupy Wall Street, am not a fan of veganism, and I’m on a fitness journey to lose weight using carbohydrates, and so on. I swear. I post pictures of things I like (though not as much as I should).

Oddly, I’ve also found for every one person that tunes out in disgust, two more show up going ‘oh, kindred soul!’

You might turn some away, but being being bland and trying to please everyone, you’re almost guaranteed to please no one. Heck, just posting about private space programs gets anti-space cadets riled up.

So here’s to topping 100,000 unique visitors in a month for the first time ever. Hopefully I can encourage some of you to be more interesting in your own blogging.

It’s really been a lot more fun since I starting letting myself be myself. All it took was almost dying to figure this out.

Everyone finds their own way to wisdom, I guess!

I’m now going to break accepted web wisdom for timing a blog post and post this at 9:23pm on a Thursday. Which is stupid, because 9am as most people are getting to work drives the best traffic.

It’ll be okay.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on November 3rd 2011 at 9:23 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.