Why Does Nobody Read My Blog?

Recently, I’ve suffered the ignominy of not receiving a single comment on a couple of my blog posts.  The first time it happened, I shamelessly canvassed friends to put it right.  I was not proud of myself, but it made me feel a little bit better.  The second time, I took a more considered approach and decided to try and find out why.

Here is what I found:

I Talk Some Crap

I love words. Words are great. But I use too many.  When ten words would do, you often see fifty or a hundred.    Must do better.  I find rambling fun (not the walking kind.  See? There I go again) but you don’t have enough time to read all my rambling and that of all the other blogs you follow.

Here’s a Wordle of my blog content. As you can see, it’s very random indeed. Maybe I need some more direction, or to split my blog up a bit…?

I Post At The Wrong Time

Google Analytics and Google Reader tell me the hard truth: I post most of my blog entries at about 1pm.  You read blogs between 12 noon and 1pm.  So my post is a day old if you read it.  Also, the automatic thingummydoofer that posts my new blog entry to twitter does it after your lunch hour has finished.

There’s not much I can do about this.  I get a lunch break, during which I write my posts.  By the time I’ve written them, attached and edited photos, corrected my spelling and rubbish html, etc., you’re all back at work.  I just hope you don’t mind reading them late – I need to work out how to remind you to do that at the beginning of your lunch breaks, though.

I Need Help To Get More Subscribers

From the stats I’ve got my hands on, there are 15 subscribers to this blog via Feedburner, 3 from Google Reader and 8 Google Friends.  Now that you’ve realised you’re in such a select group, rather than a crowd of Papal Mass proportions, there are probably even fewer 😉

I need better ways to get my blog in front of people, automatically (but carefully and ethically)and via the people I know.   Or failing that, just tell your friends to read my bloody blog! … please. 🙂

I downloaded the Arkayne plugin recently, with the intention of finding other blogs I could link to automatically and broaden my exposure to other blogs.  This would help me read from a wider pool of writers, but also send my links to other people.  The sad truth though, is that Arkayne doesn’t seem to have enough members who like what I like.  I’m going to stick with it though, for a while at least, to see if I get any interesting new knowledge or visitors.

Can any of you recommend plugins or tools that will be handy?