Thoughts on Creating an Audience

Due to some misundstandings with Hylton Joliffe at Corante, I launched this blog a few months ago and no notice was given my Corante audience.

Thus, I started from ground zero.

The result has been an interesting experiment. I have had to rebuild my audience literally from scratch.

It has not been easy. It is much tougher to get attention with a blog in 2006 than it was in 2002, when I started.

In the interests of "science" let me state I have some assets not all bloggers have. I have a newsletter, A-Clue.Com. I belong to some mailing lists which sometimes republish my stuff, and to which many important people belong.

But it’s still tough. As of 4 PM today, for instance, I had 120 site visits. Sounds pitiful, but I’ve gone through days where I posted three-or-four stories I thought were first class, and had just 19. Half of them were me.

Typepad lets you check referrer logs, and see where your users come from, as a standard part of their package (which, at under $12/month, is dirt-cheap). What I have found is most come from Google, from searches. And nearly everyone comes in to a specific item, not to my "home page." This, too, is an important lesson.

More such lessons are to come, no doubt.

Meanwhile, let me offer some lessons I exchanged recently with the great Doc Searls, whose blog is considered among the most popular and erudite in cyberspace. Without quoting from what was a private e-mail correspondence, let me state that Doc responded to a note I sent by stating that his blog is the best-known thing he has ever done, yet he has done many things which drew far more readers.

Following is my reply:

I think you’re on to something here that is of vital importance
to our understanding of Internet Values.

It’s an individual multiplier effect.

You know how economic investments are often explained in terms of their
"multiplier effect." If we put $1 into this we’ll get $10 back.

What I think you’re saying is that, because of its general connectivity, the
multiplier effect of an Internet blog posting is theoretically immense.

What would an equation look like describing this?

AxQxC=IM

A (audience) x Q (quality of audience) x C (credibility with that audience =
IM (Internet Multiplier)

Feel free to use this. You have more credibility than I do. <g>

Or we could conduct an experiment. I could post this and we could wait a
week. Then you post it and we see what happens.

Isn’t science fun?

Comments on this are appreciated.