The Politburo Diktat

Unified Theory of Blogging

Comrade New Blogger,

So you have new blog. What do you want to do with it? What do you want to be?

Porno star? Good buddy to someone, if only yourself? Maybe you want to get real life? Or perhaps to become Bolshoi Blogger?

1. Hits. Hits. Hits.
Some bloggers want hits, traffic. They don't care how. No surprise, sex sells. As one eloquent commenter put it, "Show us your your rack." Or link to popular topics of the day. Ask Wizbang Kevin about "Paris Hilton download." Or Les Jones about "Janet Jackson." Or the Commissar about his fling with "Alex Polier."

If you want hits, show pictures of undressed pretty women or link to related downloads and topics. You will get hits. Any attractive young female blogger can do it with a digital camera. Others may have to scour the internet to find such pictures. But, whatever the source, you too can be a porno star.

2. Personal/Small Community
Some bloggers derive great satisfaction from involvement in a small community of Commenters and other bloggers. The Commissar is always a little surprised when he visits a blog that measures 50 hits a day, but there are 35 comments on every post. Mamamontezz, a gifted cartoonist blogger, blogs, in her words, "for a small but dedicated following." Why not? The Cheese Stands Alone, Letters of Marque, and Madfish Willie also fit this description.

A very important subset of this category are those who "blog for themselves," and if anyone else wants to leave a comment or a trackback, that's fine with them. In theory, such bloggers do not have, rarely check, or pay little attention to traffic and Sitemeters.

3. Real Life
Or maybe, you just want to get back to real life. Maybe you'll have some fun with blogging for a few weeks or months, and then tire of posts and comments and Sitemeters. That's a perfectly good option, and based on the level of unemployment in the blogosphere, perhaps better than the others. None of the options are bad. There are no value judgements here, at least with respect to blogging goals. (One value judgement: families and employers may genuinely appreciate less frequent blogging, da?)

4. The Big Blogger
Many bloggers want to generate a large readership on their content, on their intellectual merit --- be it humorous, angry, thoughtful, technical, or just plain entertaining. From Curmudgeonly to Drezner, and every aspiring blogger with a style in-between, lots of folks want to attract a large number of visitors. Call it attention, traffic, validation, or whatever you like, that's what most(?) of us are doing here.

How do you pursue that goal? Other than "show us your rack," how do you grow your readership?

A. Do a good job with the mechanics, aesthetics, and content.
Write as well as you can. Clean up your typos. Pick a subject or a focus, so that readers have some sense of what to expect. Use a nice layout. Enable Comments and Trackbacks. Make sure your pages load. Is the damn thing legible? And so on. In this section (A), I include everything about the design, the look-and-feel, the content, the topics, the style, AND the technical aspects of your blog.

Commissar must repeat -- Ninety percent of blogging "how-tos" falls in this category A.

B. Spend a few months at it.
One common denominator of the largest bloggers is that they have almost all been at it for a while. Allah, a genius, only took a few months from startup to 5,000 hits a day. Almost all other well-known, high-traffic bloggers have been at it far longer.

C. Update Frequently.
There's a well-known dichotomy between "thinkers" and "linkers," and you should do what you like. But a guy who only updates five times a week (other things equal) will get less traffic than someone who updates several time per day. I know that Frank J. of IMAO, another genius, has done well with his "once on weekdays" frequency. Nonetheless, many readers are looking for blogs that have been updated within the past few hours.

D. Relate to Other Bloggers.
Comment on other blogs. Exchange Trackbacks. You will almost certainly find occasion to email other bloggers. It IS a communal activity. If it is your style, you can even be abrasive and go around picking "blogfights." Or, engage in "silly memes" like maps, the Deck of Cards, Link-of-the-day, and Blogopoly. Whatever floats your boat. But a little discretion is called for here; too much of this turns people off.

E. Corporate Sponsorship.
Do you work for NRO? Are you Wankette? Read no more, you have some significant advantages with regard to building readership, but have some very different challenges, probably related to making money for your corporate sponsor.

F. The Iraqi Blonde.
Are you a hot blonde? Or do you blog from Iraq? Or maybe both? (Now THAT would be special!) If you have some special attribute, (other things being equal) you will get more readers than some ordinary person in an ordinary location. Good for you!

Everything preceeding, items A - F, are in your control. If you're a bright person, with just a little technical savvy, you can work hard on these. Maybe at risk to your work, family, and real life, but these are in your control. (You really could move to Iraq and bleach your hair.) Now, reluctantly, I get to item G.

G. The Genius Factor.
Maybe you know what I mean already. If not, go read Allah, and then go read (or try to read) Ayn Clouter. See the difference? We all have some immeasurable quality of reader appeal, entertainment genius, or blogging talent. Suppose Ayn Clouter worked very, very hard on items A-F. And Allah did a half-ass job on those. There's still no question; Allah would have the bigger readership.

This is the "big finish," comrade. You can, and should, break your butt to make yours a good, high-traffic blog. But at the end of the day, you (we, including me, The Commissar) will only generate some immeasurable maximum of traffic. Ultimately depending on your amount of "genius," the world will only absorb so much of you. Dowingba pointed this out, in a very entertaining "If Bloggers were Nintendo Games." We each have our own "glass ceiling" here in the blogosphere. Maybe we should all be realistic and accept it.

Me? I am going out to bang my head against it tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that! 80,000 daily hits or bust! Forward the Revolution! To the Top of the Winter Palace!

Posted by Commissar at March 24, 2004 09:34 AM