Pondering Blogging

I have been doing some pondering.....thinking about blogging and the state of blogging and come to some conclusions. Let me warn you though, these are my own conclusions and based more on my feeling than facts...which of course is a common occurance in the blogosphere. There are more opinions and loose facts thrown around than anything else.

But here is what I have been thinking about. It seems to me that many of the blogs that are doing well, that is, big readership, and the bloggers making money, seem to be blogs about three or four things, high tech stuff, political opinion, celebrities and making money from blogs. Oh, and of course a the fifth, sex blogs.

Horny Readers
So besides drawing a conclusion that blog readers are a horny bunch, we can also figure out that many blog readers are either computer / internet geeks and other bloggers, or people intent on making money. Those are the very things that make blogs bad. For the time being, forget about the sex blog business, that is a discussion for another time, and has issues all of it's own. Instead, let's consider the other two, high tech and make money bloggging blogs.

Techie Readers
The success of these two niche's is an indication of the readership of a good many blogs, which indicates readers who are educated, technical, and probably entrepenurial in nature. That explains why they gravitate toward the techie blogs and sites devoted to money like this one. The technical blogs are about new high tech stuff that appeals to people who find that stuff important. The money blogs are the similar, especially when you consider that many of the techie's are interested in trying to make money from their blog or website.

Despite the growing popularity of blogging, and it's impact on society, there are still millions of folks who really don't know what a blog is, or read them. It's pretty well known that many blogs are read by other bloggers, including sex blogs.

I think if blogs are to prosper, we need to start thinking out of the box a little more. As much as I enjoy a blog about making money, or the latest high tech gadget, or, gazooks! sex...I also enjoy many other interests, interests that are not being very well served by bloggers. There are thousands of other things going on besides high tech, money and sex, although that may be hard to believe.

Going Mainstream
I think if bloggers are to really go mainstream, we need to get out of the blogger box, off the one way train, and start to cater to others, to people with other interests and develop strong, interesting, well written blogs about topics of interest to folks who are not interested in high tech sex blogs about making money. We need to think of all that can be said and done through blogging, and I am not talking about diary blogs, as interesting as they may be in a voyeuristic way.

Blogs need to be about other things as well, we need to think about what other folks are interested in, produce good content about it, and let the world know it is out there. Sure, some of these blogs can be of the diary type, but they need to improve and provide the readers with either entertaining writing, or informative writing, otherwise it is mostly babble, (something I am guilty of occasionally) and won't hold readers. Unless of course you lead a hell of an exciting life.

As frequent readers know, I have several blogs, many of them niche blogs, and some do better than others. Much of the reason for that is the niche. Some niches don't have the readership yet, at least not online. But they are out there. Some niches don't have the blogs yet. That's why bookstores have various sections and topics besides high tech, blogging, money, and sex. There are things like humor, mystery fiction, self help, occult, religious, art, biographies, short stories, western novels, romance novels and more. Bloggers need to be thinking about these other genres and start writing and producing blogs for those readers. Then we need to get the word out, let people know about them, educate and inform the non-blogging public that blogging has something for everyone.

Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming stale, and closed shops. Let's face it, there is only so much you can say about making money from a blog, or high tech stuff, and if it is already being done to death, who is going to read it? I know in my little corner of the world there is a population of people who, despite the recent hype about blogging, have never read one, or if they did, didn't find anything of interest and haven't come back.

I have a couple blogs that are very niche oriented, but they have nothing to do with the high tech stuff, sex, celebrities etc, they are blogs about my interests, written to either help inform or at least entertain like minded people. A little opinion thrown in for good measure, but mostly information. I do better financially on these two blogs than any of my others. My readership on both is not that high, not because there aren't interested people to read them, they just haven't found them yet, and in the case of one in particular, the potential readers haven't really found the internet yet. But when they do, I will be there waiting....and ready......