Everyone who has written a review or provided feedback on the “It’s Your Passion, Not Your Size” session has been very positive. It was not my favourite session, by a long shot. I was hoping the focus would be more on the “passion” part and less the “size” stuff. (You can read the liveblogger’s rendition of it here.)
Before I talk about the negative side of the session (for me), here are some positive things I took away from it.
- I met Kyran and Alana in that session, two very lovely women who have both reached out to me since the session, which meant a lot to me. I look forward to reading more of their writings and keeping in touch with them.
- I met Jen Lemen, whose sunny personality and positive attitude are going a long way for me when, at times, the sea of blogs comes at me as waves of cynicism and sarcasm. Her blog is very much about storytelling and art and family, all things I’m striving to feel closer to lately.
- I realized that I like the fact that my blog readership is growing, that I am discovering my voice for writing, even if it is a very small voice in a whole chorus of them. (Incidentally, I recently read a post in which someone wrote that the internet is elastic, that it has room for an almost infinite number of blogs and I really liked that idea. If it was yours, please send me a message so I can link to your post. I have 58 friggin’ blogs listed in my reader now and I’m too tired tonight to find which one I read today that talked about this.)
Okay, on to the not-so-nice part.
It wasn’t the right session for me to attend, but it was the only one in the time slot that even remotely interested me. At the risk of offending any small bloggers who attended the session (or didn’t), I have to say that for me, this session felt like a big inferiority complex personified.
I felt like everyone was saying, “I like my blog to be small and that’s okay, but here’s my URL! Please read me! I bet we’ll all really like each other’s blogs!” It seemed like many (though not all) of the attendees were talking out of both sides of their mouths.
I agree that it IS okay to have a blog with small readership, absolutely. Everyone starts out as a “small blog”. There are about as many reasons for blogging as there are stars in the sky. And it’s great if you never check your stats, never comment on other people’s blogs, never list your blog in a blogroll or swap links or any of those things. I’m not judging you. It just felt “icky” to me and ironic when the suggestion was made to post everyone’s links somewhere online (and not just because someone suggested we all line up to tell Belinda our URLs at the end of the session…I think I heard her heart leap into her throat in protest at that very moment). I sat squirming in my chair, cringing at times, and when I stood up to point out this irony, I intentionally left my URL out of my introduction. I don’t think I even gave my name.
When I gingerly, apologetically pointed out the irony in putting together some sort of community that would drive traffic, I was immediately rebuked, corrected, even, and told that no, that’s not what we’re doing here, we’re setting up a community, not a place to drive traffic. I should also mention that a couple of people told me later that they admired and appreciated what I said, that it isn’t easy to be the voice of dissent, which I was grateful for, because standing up in that room of people was HARD! I was very scared to make any sort of remotely negative comment in that room that felt like a love-in I had crashed. I was shaking and my voice was wobbling and the adrenaline was running on high. I think maybe I was projecting some of my own feelings about writing on the internet onto this group of well-meaning people.
I left the session with some unanswered questions. If you have any insight, I’d love to hear it.
- How do you differentiate between building blog community and driving traffic? Can the two be separated, or are they permanently intertwined?
- For those of you who keep a blog in order to create a record to be read in the future, what is it about the format of this media, i.e. the public nature of it, that changes the process and outcome for you? Why not simply keep a written journal or scrapbook in your home? Why the blog format? Is it simply for ease of sharing, or is there more to it than that?
From the sounds of things, a lot of the other sessions were all about driving traffic, selling ad space and monetizing your site, so I can see how this session seemed like a haven to some. I hadn’t attended any of those kinds of sessions, so I didn’t have the same comparisons to draw upon.
The bottom line is this. Do what you want with your site. But if you are good at writing, the readers will come. Although I can’t yet fully articulate why, I do want people to read my site. I like that I am contributing to a large body of work that documents individual lives all over the world, and that I’m part of a community of people who share an interest in the written word. So there.
Y’know Amy, I never sat down to consider what I wanted to get out of my blog. Rather, I have always considered my blog something that “does” for me.
I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t want it to generate more money, but it isn’t absolutely necessary b/c my livelihood isn’t centered around my blog and I stay busy enough with it. I WOULD like to make more money with ads, but I’m not going aggressively seeking that out. I just respond when I’m contacted. I didn’t go to any of the monetizing sessions. I went to the fun sessions and a couple of the technical ones.
There is NO WAY I could nail down in a few short words what my blog is about. I have a hard enough time when given a paragraph.
It is a form of interaction for me though. That is the most fun part. I love commenting on comments and the “conversation”. I love all the opinions and the sarcasm. I love the flow of nothingness that rolls into something meaningful and then back to something completely ridiculous.
It just is.
My blog “is”.
I wonder if that is acceptable?
I wonder if I care if you say “no, it isn’t.”
Actually, I probably won’t wonder that for more than about 5 more seconds.
I’m not going to answer the question about why you choose a blog as a format for recording your thoughts for the future, because that’s not why I blog, so I don’t really have an opinion on the matter. But I think I can speak to your other question.
I think there is not only a difference, but a MAJOR difference between traffic and community. A lot of visits to my blog are driven by google searches for random terms and their visit length is sometimes less than ten seconds. I don’t consider those site visitors to be part of my community. Everyone who visits my site is part of the traffic, but it’s the regular readers – the ones who return, the ones who engage and leave comments and email me and sometimes even form a friendship with me – who are part of my community. I don’t care about building traffic. I would love to build community though.
I didn’t got to that session because I was afraid of just what you said. I was afraid that they’d focus on the difference between small vs large as far as stats and such rather than focus on the “passion” part of it. I think it might have been a good discussion if it had actually talked about your passion for blogging. period. Not in relation to size. Not in relation to stats or ads, or money. There were a lot of sessions at blogHer that turned out that way. Women seem to be naturally defensive about stuff like that and there seemed to be a competitive spin on a couple of the sessions I went to as well.
As far as why? I’ve got a post about halfway finished about that now. It’s one of the things blogHer made me think about. I’m doing it to make a record of me. I am unique each day. I’m not who I was yesterday. Every day, the events in my life add to me and change me in subtle ways. I want to capture some of that, so that 20 years from now, I can still see who I used to be. So that my kids can see that their mom was a person, not just a mom. So that I can remember the things that would normally fade into the background. So that I don’t have to overcome my laziness and actually keep a baby book. So that I can keep in touch with my family. So that I can meet people like you that I would have never had the opportunity to meet otherwise. So that I can talk to my friends and listen to them when I have time to, instead of trying to fit in phone calls when our schedules mesh well enough.
And I would love to have lots of readers, but since it’s not my main function, I’m trying to remind myself that it’s not why I started writing. I’m not exactly sure why the idea of random people reading about my life even appeals to me. I think OMSh summed it up pretty well. It’s the interaction that makes it fun.
My blog is small. And I like it that way. I am, however, building a community. 70% of the people who read my online diary (this is what it is), do so anonymously. The other 30% doesn’t normally comment but they do email me. I like that people can pick and choose when to comment. I’ve built a small community that is there to read what I’ve experienced, what I’ve done, or what I’m thinking (good and/or bad). I may do ads and I may not. That’s still up in the air for me.
The simple reason why I blog? I can type faster than I can write, oh and my handwriting is horrible. When I first started blogging it was an experiment. I joined Nabloplomo. I did it. It was like therapy for me. I had forgotten how much I love to write. BlogHer was a way for me to learn more and figure out how to do this thing with a different “voice” for my business. I got home and figured out that I’ve got several ideas for “entertaining” blogs that I could be writing if I stop sleeping. This is fun, I agree with OMSH. It is also very personal (in a strangely exhibitionist way).
I remember you from that session, not your face, but your name and I remember what you said. I thought it was ironic too. But I did like what Jen had to say about it being okay to be small and to just write what you want.
The reason I blog, to me it’s an outlet for my creativity. It lets me write and post my photos and when I’m done I can look at it I feel good. I can stand back and say I created this. It also allows me an outlet for what goes on inside my head as well and because it’s public I feel like a writer.
Okay, I feel dumb, but I have to tell you that I thought that session was about weight loss. It’s your passion! Not your size! What a nice message regarding the unimportance of physical beauty!
Clearly I was very interested in my BlogHer program and read it meticulously. Can you tell?
This will sound weird (as it always does when I tell people this and they say, “HUH? YOU?”) but I don’t consider myself a big blogger and don’t really know what my readership is because I’m shocked when people tell me they’ve been reading me for several months or a few years. It’s because they never comment until one day something strikes them. Then, they feel compelled to write. Or email. Or send me something they think I’ll like.
That is the moment (and there are lots so it should be plural) that I realize that I do this for myself and that when people like it and respond it’s a bonus. My goal isn’t to drive traffic (though I will joke about it occasionally) or else I would be writing more often and visiting 25 blogs a day to leave a comment just to get a return comment! (It was a long time ago and I was young and stupid, ok?)
I didn’t realize it, but I was building a community. Full of thoughtful readers and people looking to laugh or think or just escape for a bit.
Now that I think about it, I’m going to take my name off of this as well as my website (though, as the admin of your blog, you’ll know who I am) because I don’t even want readers that have come HERE to go to my site.
Creating something, whether it’s writing or community, are the reasons I do it. Thanks for letting me think about it aloud here.
Laura’s answer is pretty well in line with mine. “Traffic” is just numbers to me, whereas “community” are the people. I could sit down and write a list of the people I have come to know and care about BECAUSE of my blog. I felt a little bit weird in that session, because when I was hearing people talk about their “six readers a day,” or whatever, it seemed like I didn’t belong (but I was assigned to live-blog it, so it didn’t matter). But then the more Jen spoke, the better I felt, and I came out of it really having enjoyed the session. “More Than Words” was still my favorite, and interestingly, it had a lot of the same vibe about emphasizing authenticity.
I think the bottom line is that, if you are true to yourself, and write in an authentic voice, people will come.
And I’m with you on something else: I did not, at any session (though I talked a lot), introduce myself or say where I blogged. I have no idea why, except that it didn’t feel “right” at the time, even though everyone else was doing it.
I don’t think that the people who are forming a community through Jen’s listserv, or linking their blogs on the session notes (there are only a few) are going to see any appreciable increase in traffic. They might, however, have a lot to gain from the increase in community.
I appreciated your comment and felt it was entirely appropriate. There was a irony to everyone getting their urls out there and I do think the reaction was a little defensive but mainly because people honestly weren’t there to build traffic. I took that at face value which might be a little pollyanna-ish. I do doubt that people would have said where they blogged if they hadn’t been instructed to do so at the beginning of the session, though. And I think most people were thinking of size on a radical scale. Like, thousands or tens of thousands of page views a day as opposed to 60. What difference would a few more make? In general I took away from it what many others did too which is to appreciate the readers that you do have that really care about what you have to say. To be yourself and not worry that you might not be entertaining enough or controversial enough to break out. It was a message I was ready to hear after feeling a little overwhelmed by my own minisculeness. And, it was a great session because I got to meet you! If it hadn’t been for my natural nosiness and your cute twitter wallpaper it may have never been.
It was brave of you to voice what you were feeling! What Alana (above) said.
My perception was that the desire to connect through some kind of list was borne out of the affinity most folks seemed to be experiencing, not as a traffic building exercise. The sense of having found others who put passion and voice and community ahead of branding and traffic. It was such a relief for many of us who had attended some of the more traffic-focussed sessions, that I think there was a kind of urgency about staying in touch with the energy in the room.
However, I do think we run into problems with making size a value statement one way or the other. Are we suggesting that popular bloggers are inaunthetic? If our numbers grow beyond a certain threshold are we out?
I hope if a webring or blogroll or whatever does come out of the session, it will avoid the word “small” and focus on “passion”, for those reasons.
i agree on so many points!
to be totally honest, i was really surprised when so many people stood up to share stories of *wanting* their blogs to stay small. i didn’t expect that theme to keep coming up and wish we had reframed the conversation differently from the beginning. you’re totally right–focusing on the passion part would have helped that conversation considerably. and in retrospect, i also wish i had made more space for your comment–you brought up a valid point, even if i interpreted the link-sharing in the room as a need for community more than a ploy to get more traffic. either way, i think the heyday of high-traffic personal blogs has long passed imho–but that’s a post for another day!
anyway, here’s the breakdown for me on traffic and community, for what it’s worth!
traffic–the number of people who land on your site either by accident, google or by following some random link out there somewhere
community–the people who are interested and participate in the conversation you are hosting; the people who check in daily and who become a part of your everyday online life; the online friends you who offer you support, encouragement and feedback when you want to stop writing or feel stuck or dismissed in one way or another; the people who challenge you and care enough to disagree with you publicly by writing about what you wrote or said; the people you want to support in turn; the people you consider to be your online tribe; the people you’d be delighted to meet in person.
you only need a couple of connections to start creating that kind of community–no matter how much or how little traffic you have, but sometimes it can be hard–especially when you’re having trouble connecting in a meaningful way online. i hope for all its flaws (and mine) the session provided an opportunity for people to discover kindred spirits online who might be willing to offer (and receive) that kind of quality support and interaction in the future. i sensed a longing for that–though i might be naive on this point and people might have cared more about gobbling up new readers than i thought!
thank you SO much for caring enough to write about this and for continuing the conversation in such a positive direction.
ugh!!!!! and i’m SO sorry that comment was so long! feel free to delete and i will post to my own blog–this is what i get for writing this in several two minute sittings!
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to write such thoughtful responses to this post. I really appreciate it, and you’ve given me lots to think about.
I agree that “traffic” is just random people who happen across your blog and “community” consists of the people who rally around your site, read regularly, and contribute to the conversation you’ve built.
I’m so pleased that the conversation extended past the session in this way! BLOGGING ROCKS for this reason.