What do real blog numbers look like? This has been an interesting question for me as of over the past few years, something I started to document in Liberation and Heuristics, Thoughts on Blogging and The Stephane Hamel, Susan Bratton, Eric Peterson Convergence and more "Thoughts on Blogging".
What do I mean by real blog numbers? Why, those that interest me, of course. And if you're a blogger, they might interest you as well.
My readership is low and dedicated, something I've known for quite a while. I realized it shortly after I started blogging regularly on BizMediaScience and here on AllBusiness.com. I know part of this is due to my being a Holmes and not a Watson. I also know that part of my Holmesness is going what others have called "link crazy" or "link happy". Why do I include links in so much of my online writing? Same reason I include bibliographies in my offline writing; it's documenting what I do and where the ideas come from.
I got to wondering about others' blogs. I wrote in Thoughts on Blogging that I have about 300 blogs in my reader. About 200 have single authors, the rest have multiple authors. Single authorship is important in the definition of "real" numbers I'm looking at.
I should also offer that people who've attended my presentations over the past few months have been part of my research. You (if you attended) might remember my asking the audience "How many of you have a blog?" followed by "How many of you with blogs have more readers than there are in this room?"
The average blogger doesn't have a very large following. Very dedicated, usually, and not very large. In fact, it turns out you can pretty much determine how often you need to post an entry to maintain an audience based on the size of that audience. Or how to grow an audience. Or establish yourself in a market.
NextStage finished a two year study of 150 blogs. You can read some of the results and findings at NSE Consumer Research Paper - Optimal Blog Post Frequency - NSE Social Media Research Paper #1
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
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