What Else Do You Do With Your Readers?

20. May, 2008 4 Comments - Leave your comment

  

If you started blogging more than 5 minutes ago, chances are that you already have a few readers, and you probably know some of them (if not all) by their names.

Now you know who your customer is, you start writing with him in mind, you start polishing your articles more, because you know that Bill, or Jane or Cheap Blue Contact Lenses will have their say on that next article of yours.

But what else do you do with your readers, when you don’t write for them and you don’t answer their comments?

1. Do you share links on social networking sites?

2. Do you read their blogs?

3. Do you chat with them on Skype, or other instant messenger services?

4. Do you meet them at blogging conferences?

5. Do you exchange emails with them?

6. What else?

If you shut down your computer and close your eyes, how many of your readers you can list by their names? If you have less than 10 readers-commenters, you’d probably remember all of them. If you have 100 readers who comment, you’d be lucky if you remembered 50% of them. What if you had 11874 readers? How can you have so many readers and still write with them in mind? Or are you still writing only for the core readers who were the first to discover your blog and enjoyed it ever since? Or for those people you are doing also other things with?

Or are you just writing for the Google bots, hoping that people would follow?

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4 Comments on “What Else Do You Do With Your Readers?” - Add yours!

  1. Ronald Huereca Reply 20. May, 2008 at 10:22 pm

    Very thought-provoking post Simonne.

    I don’t think I’m quite as capable of answering your question as Liz Strauss, so I’m going to include a quote from her WordCamp transcript.

    And people wonder, and they say to me, beginners and experts, “Who do I write for? There’s all these people out there and I don’t know how to write.”

    You write for somebody who looks exactly like you.

    You know why?

    Because you’re writing for the people who are going to love what you write. And we always think that people who look just like us and who think just like us are really, really smart.

    [laughter]

    So who’s going to love you? People who think just like you do.

    So you write for someone who’s just like you, only who doesn’t know what you know.

    You don’t have to worry about them being dumber, smarter, less experienced, more experienced…

    [They're] Just like you are, but they just don’t know what you know.

    Easy as pie?

  2. Simonne Reply 21. May, 2008 at 3:54 am

    Great answer, Ronald. I’ve always liked Liz a lot. I wish I were closer to you, so I could attend events such as Wordcamp.

  3. inspirationbit Reply 21. May, 2008 at 9:40 pm

    That was a great answer indeed. Even though it sounds simple enough, in reality it’s something that I myself should give lots of thoughts and follow. Sometimes I think of writing a post, and then wondering whether my readers will like it, then doubts crawl in and I end up leaving my post ideas in the draft, or simply forget about them and move on.

    Simonne, once again you’ve provoked a thought process in my brain, that I think will evolve into a post ;) Thank you. To answer your questions — I do them all, but only with a number of my readers, not all of them. Of course, I don’t know them all until they comment, but even then I don’t read all their blogs. I wish I had that much time to check them all on a regular basis.

  4. Simonne Reply 27. May, 2008 at 3:05 pm

    Vivien, this question occurred to me after some 6-7 months of blogging, when I discovered RSS (until then I was unable to understand what it was and why did I need to have one) and I saw I has 14 or 16 readers. After that, many times I wrote for the readers, not only for the Google bot, as I usually did previously.

    Thank you for your answer. I also wish I had more time for interactions with all of you, but this is it, some periods are really crazy, and it seems I’m now crossing one of them in full speed. I’m heading for vacation in about one week and I’m trying to leave all things in good order.

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