Noise

The problem with getting an engaging, responsive audience when you’re blogging for fun is the shear volume of blogs and other user generated content fighting for attention online. If we look at Technorati’s data the are currently about 112.8 million blogs online, and over 250 million items of tagged media.

Dig a bit further into this data and it’s revealed that there are over 175,000 new blogs every day with over 1.6 million posts per day (over 18 posts every second).

There is a lot of noise out there. Chances are that there are a lot people out there saying similar things to you.

Signal

The fun part of blogging is when you get feedback, it makes you feel like the effort you have put into your post has bee recognized, and generally leaves you with a nice warm feeling. It’s also nice to know that something you have done may have helped someone in some way.

To increase the likelihood of generating feedback for you work, it is important to have something concrete to speak about. Without a clear and defined topic of conversation it’s more difficult to get a response from people, especially complete strangers you have never conversed with before.

It’s for this reason that I’m very aware of what I’m talking about, and how focused I am when I write a post. I generally try to pick a topic and stick with for however long it takes me to get my feeling or opinion across (which is why some of posts are so damn long!).

Propagation

The next important thing in trying to get a conversation going is propagation, the further you spread your message the better chances are it will be heard.

I import my blog posts into facebook for example, I also often digg my posts, I tweet about them, if I use flickr I post back to my blog (and vice versa). The golden rule I adhere to is “the more places, the better”. What I mean by this is the more visibility my blog / posts get, the happier I am.

A nice side affect of this is that I will generally be propagating my link to an audience of like-minded fellows who are more likely to engage with it.

Nonchalance

Although I try to get as much interaction out of my blog as possible, the thing keeps me from getting down when I get no comments (because lets face it, we all like to get comments, especially nice ones!) is one simple thing: i don’t care.

That’s right. I don’t care. If I get no reaction to my posts, so what? The bottom line is that this blog is for me first. If along the way I help someone out with some code or inspire someone to explore creative programming then I’m happy, but it’s not the reason I do it. I write this blog for me.

So to my fellow small time bloggers I say this: Have fun, Worry Not & Keep Blogging, Keep Linking.