Excuse Me, Will You Please
Visit My Blog…
No thanks. This is the
tacit response you’ll get invariably for your invite if you’re an
individual blogger. Believe me; nobody is interested to read your blog
posts except you, yourself. As you’re always looking for a few eyeballs,
you’ve to virtually drag and drop visitors to your blog. But it’d be
interesting to see how this new book “The Huffington Post Complete Guide
to Blogging” by the editors (including Arianna Huffington) of the
Huffington Post will help you learn blogging and get some traffic.
By
Rakesh Raman
You’d have heard the term
quite often and many of you would have ventured into the blogging world,
but there’s no new rocket science involved in blogging. Rather, blogging
is just another herd phenomenon on the web like you’ve seen for social
networks. As now you get free blog space, you always had free web space
on services like GeoCities to write anything you want. Blogs are nothing
but small websites in the shared domains.
Though it’s as difficult to
count the number of bloggers on the web as it’s to count the number of
crows in a town, by some ballpark estimates, for every 10 Internet users
in the world, at least one is a blogger. As there are about 1 billion
Internet users, you can expect around 100 million blogs, including
active and sleeping ones. In fact, bloggers are like
stars, stars in the sky – now they exist; now they don’t…when you open
your eyes. And like stars, they keep appearing and disappearing. So
let’s not get into the numbers.
While most of these blogs
are in a state of deep coma, the blog hosting sites will keep counting
them to ostensibly show their own strength. There are others, which
hardly get visitors. You won’t believe, some bloggers would visit their
own blogs a dozen times a day to see their posts that they write at the
rate of one or two per week. If they’re lucky enough they’ll get their
wife’s, son’s, granny’s, or neighbour’s support. And all these
supporters would look at everything on the computer monitor except the
blog write-up to which they’re specially invited. If there’s no other
ray of hope, the bloggers won’t hesitate to tell about their new pursuit
to even their washerman, milkman, or even the housemaid.
Some proponents argue that
blogs give voice to commoners. Yes, agreed; but mostly their own ears
are ready to hear that voice. Don’t think I’m exaggerating, but it’s
easier to conquer the Mount Everest than getting some meaningful
pageviews for your blog.
For most individual bloggers,
it’s extremely difficult to survive in the blogosphere. Nobody is
interested to read them because they lack discipline, their sources are
shady, they don’t have control on language, they’re irregular, and so
on. Writing is an art, and writing for the masses is a scientific art,
which all can’t master – even after reading the books. To succeed, you
need a lot of patience, passion, practice, deep subject knowledge, and
plenty of reading. Only then you can hope to become a good writer to
attract some readers.
After uploading a small
video clip created with your personal camera on a free hosting site like
YouTube, you can’t say that you’re ready to become a Hollywood director.
Similarly, you can’t get the qualities of a professional journalist by
writing a few posts on a free and freewheeling blog.
As this so-called “social
media” has become a kind of “chaos media,” it’s becoming increasingly
difficult for the serious readers to cut through the clutter and get
some genuine information.
So what’s the lesson? The
mass social media in its current form just can’t challenge the
traditional media. There are only a handful of blogs that get regular
visitors. You can call them blogs, but they’re actually full-fledged
websites run by groups of professional journalists or writers.
If people are reading
Reuters’ blogs, for instance, they’re not reading them because they’re
blogs but they’re interested because they’re created by Reuters. That
way, tomorrow if a popular media property like Reuters decides to write
on flying balloons, people will fly in the air to read those reports.
That’s the power of content. If your content is strong, people will come
to read it. Then you don’t need any “social” support to get noticed and
heard.
So by equating the naďve new
media with the respectable traditional media, you can always hoodwink
the gullible “learn blogging” book buyers, but you just can’t teach them
how to create readable content. And that is the whole point.
Rakesh Raman
is the managing
editor of My Techbox Online.
