Blogs and audiences

Recently Mark Morton asked "what is the audience of this blog?" This is the wrong question to be asking. I believe that the right question to be asking is "what do I want the audience of this blog to be?"

A number of readers will come from the ranks the educause blogging community and your immediate peers, but this is where your audience starts, not where is finishes. Anyone who can compose a google search can find your blog entries, anyone who has a use for an entry will link to it (getting it more readers) and when a reader likes enough of your entries to create an expectation of liking future entries, they'll bookmark, subscribe or otherwise create a return mechanism.

Once you have a community of people interested in your blog, of course, it starts getting repurposed. My blog, for example, is repurposed at http://planet.wlug.org.nz/ and http://planet.eduforge.org/, reflecting the geek and educational sides of my job respectively. It may be repurposed in other places too, because anything than reads RSS can repurpose a blog.

It all comes down to what you want the blog to be about. The narrower the topic the smaller the potential audience, but the greater their loyalty.

There are specific things you can do to aid this process: use highly descriptive content words (these are the things that people are going to google for and find you); move those keywords to the top of the message (because these are the bits people see in news feeds); link to sources (which will increase you authority); link to like-minded blogs (because they will link back); and include the full, exact text of quotes, especially quotes of computer messages (because this again is something people search for).