The Real Reason I Don’t Drop Everything to Visit Your Blog

I met Alister Cameron when I saw his name in my stats . The URL www.alistercameron.com got my attention. I wanted to know who was so bold as to name a blog with a title that had A Lister right there. Naturally when I clicked through I found facts. Actually I found more than that. I found kindred spirit, a relationship blogger after my own heart.

The post where I landed was entitled, The real reason nobody reads your blog. Who could look without reading a post named that? Then he started right out with a question that has been problem in my life.

To those of you who have emailed me lately, asking if I have a moment to have a look over your blog and offer some suggestions for improvements, I have to sadly decline. Unless you’re happy to pull out the checkbook. I don’t want that to sound mean, I just want to keep my priorities in order.

You see, I’m a relationship blogger, I really like to get to know other bloggers and I like to help them out. Apparently the word has gotten around that I’m like that. The reason I think that way is that I get messages daily from bloggers who say something like

I just got to your blog today. Would come you visit my blog to give me some advice?

I’d like to say a few words to everyone who writes me a note like that.

I’m a relationship blogger. If you’d like me come over as a friend and do things that friends might do, I think it would great if we were friends before you invite me first. That just seems to me the way it should work.

I’m a relationship blogger. I only have three kinds of time. I have time I spend with my friends and family; I have time I spend working so that we can eat and enjoy our lives; and I have time that I can give to the folks in the community. That last chunk of time I like to give to people who know a little about me and what I’m about and who give me a chance to know a little about them.

I’m a relationship blogger. I invest in relationships. I know time spent with good people is time I’ve invested well. Picking out good people is easy. They are the ones who take time to figure out that I’m not sitting around waiting for a random email to come asking for my help. It’s my experience that random emails rarely come in search of relatonships.

I’m a relationship blogger. I don’t blog for traffic or stats. I don’t blog for links or ranking either. Yeah I check those things, but I don’t write based on what I find. I blog from ideas that readers give me, or that occur to me when I read my comments. I blog for the people who are reading my blog. My blog reflects my relationships with them.

Relationships are the key to everything I do on my blog. They are what got me here to the Blog Herald. They are what makes me glad to open my blog each day or as Alister said in his post.

See Also

Old Blogging Sites That We Thought were Gone

Here’s the real reason why nobody reads your blog:

• it’s not the content, assuming your writing good meaty stuff;
• it’s not the inbound links, assuming been diligently submitting links back to your blog here and there and everywhere;
• it’s not the consistency, assuming you write a half-decent blog post more or less every 36 hours;
• it’s not the readability, assuming your blog doesn’t have red text on a black background;
• and it’s probably not the SEO, assuming your blog is not extraordinarily badly constructed and promoted…

No, it’s probably none of those things, the things most people blogging about blogging carry on about endlessly.

The real reason why nobody reads your blog is this: massively successful blogging is about establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships. It’s all about who you know. Really!

It’s not a coldly, calculating “who you know.” It’s warmly, welcoming your readers so that they can be folks you know well. Relationships are stronger than links for traffic.

Relationships are everyone’s business and business is relationships.

Liz Strauss writes about relationship blogging and changing the world at Successful-Blog.