Secrets of the bloggerhood

How do you drive people toward your blog, and how do you gain a regular readership for your website? Well, there are many opinions on how this can be done. I read a very interesting and thought provoking blogpost on popularity earlier today by Ankesh Kothari, who guest writes on the Problogger site under the title of The Secret to Blog Popularity.

Here is an abstract from the post:

Psychologist Antonius Cillessen of the University of Connecticut wondered how kids became popular. So he started researching social behaviors and peer relations of early adolescent kids in American schools. And he found something very interesting. He found that every school had a bunch of very friendly kids who are socially accepted and liked by everyone. But they are never considered popular.

The kids who are considered popular are often just as friendly as these universally liked kids, but with one difference. The popular kids draw a boundary around themselves, and exclude a few “outcasts” from their circle. Professor Antonius found that you can’t become popular unless you learn to exclude. He stumbled onto a truth that Chinese philosopher Confucius had described years earlier:

“Build small community and thousands will want to join.” – Confucius

It’s a truth high-end clubs have realized too. The harsher they are in excluding people from entering their premises, the more popular they get. Facebook grew when Friendster and other social sites didn’t. Why? because of their initial exclusivity—they only allowed folks with a .edu email address to sign up.

Ankesh Kothari goes on to argue that exclusivity is the key to blog success. Exclude some, and you will attract others in great numbers, he suggests. Kothari's post is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, it is written from a commercial perspective, and subscribes to the philosophy that 'big is better.' This in itself is not a good start for many educators, who are more concerned about achieving success for their learners than they are about making money for themselves (who would become a teacher if they wanted to get rich?). But the post also challenges the belief that 'if you build it they will come' which a great number of would-be bloggers cling to when they launch out into the blogosphere for the first time. Katie Hafner recently repurposed a Winston Churchill line when she said: "Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few." Cynical, but probably true for so many who write, and write, and write .... and nobody reads. They give up after a while, and their blogposts hang there in cyberspace like abandoned and dilapidated gas-stations in the desert. Most bloggers do not write because they want to achieve commercial success, but simply to share their ideas. If no-one reads these ideas though, it's a little like whistling into the wind. The article does however provides a clear insight into what drives crowds to certain sites and why they avoid certain other sites.

Secondly, the article is interesting because it highlights the power of content. Content is king, it has been said, but in this instance, Kothari is arguing that it is what you don't include as content that is just as powerful. He is not arguing only that you should exclude certain individuals from your blog (in this case beginners and those who are techno-nomads) but also that you exclude certain content. I can subscribe to the latter, but I find it hard to agree to the idea that we should deliberately exclude certain individuals from reading our blogs. It runs against the ethos of just about everything I value in good teaching. Yet I can concede the point that perhaps this kind of weeding out of readership will happen naturally. My own blog for example attracts mainly teachers, trainers and learning technologists in its readership. I wouldn't expect lawyers or bankers to be reading it too much, because the content is irrelevant to many of them.

Finally, the article is interesting because it is a guest blog post. Kothari may be hung up on exclusivity, and motivated by commercial success but he doesn't seem to mind spreading the love a little by sharing his ideas for free as guest posts on other blogs. He does this because he knows that he will gain a larger audience for his ideas and that what he gives away will be returned to him with interest:

The first thing I did when I started out was to focus on who my ideal readers would be. I zeroed in on people who would take action without making excuses, and who have achieved some success already and are hungry for more. I know that if I can help my readers’ blogs grow, my site will grow automatically. And so I only wanted to focus on readers who are willing and able to put in the work to take action and grow their blogs.

What Kothari does not mention however, is the style and the format in which blogs can be presented. I consider this to be fundamental to the success of good blogging. Find a formula that works and stick to it. You need an aesthetic and conducive setting for your content. You have sweated over it, so it deserves to be presented in the best possible way. This can only be done by trial and error, but ultimately, you have to be able to say something important if you are to draw your readership back time and time again to your blog. There are other factors not mentioned, such as the ability to come up with bite sized blogposts (long tomes can turn people off unless the content is earth shattering) and also snappy titles that attract readers when they see them, for example on Twitter.

Ultimately Kothari is correct when he says that we cannot serve everyone. I am uncomfortable with the exclusivity tag, but can see his point that content must be targeted to those who will benefit best from it. Kothari's post is a very revealing and thought provoking blogpost on all these levels, but most of all it is interesting because it epitomises what blogging is all about, and the underlying processes that make it what Lawrence Lessig calls: "The most important form of unchoreographed public discourse we have."

Image source by Geek and Poke


Secrets of the bloggerhood by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.