Is anyone reading this blog?
February 7th, 2007 | 
Author: 
I read the other day that there are over a million blogs in the world at the moment which is a pretty staggering number. In practice though, the real number of blogs is much smaller. I don’t think that you can really count a blog that’s not been updated for a few months and many of those blogs counted haven’t been updated for over a year.Why is that though? Simple really: you need something to write about, it takes a fair amount of time to keep it up to date and there’s often little indication that people are reading what you write anyway.
I think a lot of people fall at the first hurdle in that they run out of new things to say. We started writing this way back at the start of 2004 as we were moving to France and had loads to say each week but once we’d been here six months or so the amount of new things dropped dramatically and so too did the blog entries. Will that happen again? Hard to say as the style of the blog is quite different to what it was then so there’s a lot more scope but perhaps that’ll run out in a year or so too.
The time taken can be considerable too. You might think that it would only take 30 minutes to write one of these entries but it can be a lot more than that. Don’t forget that I need to think about a topic first, plan what I’m going to write and then write it. Can’t say that I never just sit down and fire away but hopefully it reads better than that most of the time. Again, in a lot of cases people just find more things to do with their time.
I think that the last point is key though. In the early days there is next to no feedback. Blog sites are unusual in that they rarely give accurate figures as to how many people are actually reading your blog. For instance, our stats on Feedburner are bouncing along at fairly low level but if you compare the stats on the website hits for the blog there are obviously a lot more people reading it than Feedburner is counting.
So, it’s anyones guess as to how many people are reading this.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
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Even if you eliminate 50% for whatever valid reasons, that is still a lot of Blogs. The whole blogging way of doing things online have made doing them much easier. As they say “Keep Blogging”
Hey Arnold,
Eric from FeedBurner here. Just wanted to note that there is a big difference between the feed subscriber numbers we show you and the site stats that you can get through us and other vendors. Our feed stats are simply showing who has subscribed to your feed. They do not show how many people are visiting your site. If you would like more info on this please shoot me a note as I would be happy to elaborate. Take care and thanks for using FeedBurner!
Cheers,
Eric Olson
Publisher Services – FeedBurner
erico@feedburner.com
I know, Arnold, it can be quite disconcerting sitting hammering away at the keyboard, after researching and thinking about a topic and wondering is anyone going to read this? It is time consuming to keep up a blog, I call it the bog slog. For me it is not just considering if people are reading my blog, the aim of the blog is to promote my business. Therefore I am hoping that blog readers will click onto my site and book accommodation, car hire, travel insurance etc.
Hi Arnold,
Just wanted to let you know I’ve been reading your blog since the beginning. Always interesting to hear how a former colleague is getting on out in the “real world”, even though I don’t have any immediate plans to visit France, let alone live there!
Regards,
Jeremy