White Noise: Why Nobody is Reading This

Did you hear that?  That’s the sound of your blog post dying a sad death.  Not sad as in tragic—sad as in uninteresting.

One article posted in 2009 estimated that there are about one million blog posts made every day.  That was three years ago, before the real advent of macroblogging platforms that are causing “blogging” as we know it to become obsolete.

Nevertheless, you are a writer, and as a writer, you want to be read.  Here are some tricks up your sleeve that you’re going to need if you’re as egotistical as I am, in order of decreasing difficulty.

1.  Be legitimately interesting.

It’s hard to do things.  That’s why most people don’t do it.  It’s really, really difficult when you spend more than a week obsessing over every minute detail in a song that few people have ended up listening to, and even fewer people have downloaded, even though it’s free.  But that’s okay.  I know that that song is legitimately interesting, and a handful of people do too.

But it requires an exceptional, consistant level of interestingness and work in order to get other people to share your work.  This is going to come from a lot of things—mostly them seeing your “brand” over and over—but bam! even by talking in these terms, you’re becoming very uninteresting to most readers.

The point here is that you can’t just write for the sake of writing.  I know many people would like to fight me on this point, but unless you’re writing when you have something to say, people are going to recognize that you’re just writing fluff.

This is why it upsets me way more than it should when people talk about media that is widely popular and has been available for public consumption for more than a month.

2.  Trick people into liking you.

This one’s hard too.  There are tricks to making yourself seem likable.  Most of them involve cats.  But if you’re not legitimately interesting, you’re going to have to fight for it.  You’re going to have to learn to use smoke and mirrors to make it seem like you know what you’re talking about—I certainly don’t.  You’re going to have to work on one thing or one aspect of one thing over and over.

This means no more trying to be a jack of all trades.  Very, very few people can survive bouncing around from medium to medium, and even these people have a particular pigeon-hole that they’re going to be put in.  Choose one thing and become that guy.  People are going to like you for it, because you’re going to be that guy with the thing.

3.  Establish an audience. 


If neither of those things are going to work for you, you’re going to have to fall upon repetition.  Marketing your work is hard, especially when you don’t have a lot of resources at your disposal.  If you want to be taken seriously, you’re going to have to achieve a delicate balance between spam and satisfaction, which is going to require you to pursue a lot of different outlets, and not just the same ones over and over again.

The truth is, with anything you have, you’re going to get more viewers over time.  However quickly you get these viewers, however, is going to depend entirely upon how well you market yourself, and how well you apply your creativity to the marketing process.

What I find helps a lot is to find a place that already has a large, established readership, and start to slip your way into their content.  This will work great if other blogs (or bands, or whatever) exist that are extremely similar to yours—but again, there’s another balance to be had in not being a carbon copy of what already exists.

4.  Trick people into hating you.  

If you’re legitimately considering this, I hate you.  It is worth mentioning, however, how many blogs (or artists or whatever) get their audience through being “controversial”.  Don’t be that guy.

5.  Spend a lot of money.


The bitter truth is that the vast majority of the things we experience have been marketed to us the “traditional” way: that is, someone spent a lot of money to have somebody else throw their work in our face at a few specific moments in order to make it stick.

If you’re able to go that route, fine.  You probably don’t need to be reading this article.

For the rest of us, however, it’s a bitter reminder of what we’re up against amongst the rest of the noise.

Joe Woods is a human that hopes he didn’t offend any of his fellow RSC writers with this post.  He can be found on tumblr where he posts mostly cat pictures, and twitter where he rarely posts at all.