Blogging Tip of the Day: Vol. 5

Today's Blogging Tip: Don't spend too much time questioning your readers. While many will tell you that learning about your audience is the best way to cultivate your audience, trust me when I say it is also the best way to turn away your audience. If I use myself as an example, I read an awful lot of blogs. Many of which are in different languages, and yes sometimes the translations are rough, for example try translating Turkish Romance Novels, sometimes it looks like Klingon Porn, but when you get used to the dialect and the loose translations it is quite charming. Good writers get this, and they are just happy that someone is reading, just like I do. Others have a different agenda, and they immediately want to know why you are commenting, "liking" or "+1ing" their things, and the language translations can come off as rude. Worse yet, the cultural differences can be combative.

As a reader, in this case I will usually just give an answer of some sort. It doesn't matter what the answer is, I just take, yet another moment of my time to explain why I was reading, and then I leave it at that. The next question, comment about how I couldn't possibly understand them, or anything else that equates to an unwelcome feeling, and I don't read anymore. I'm sure if you have made it this far you understand what I am saying. I give my time freely to read, comment, comprehend, and hopefully learn from what you have written, and really I just want thank you or glad to meet you. Sometimes I want a conversation that is polite and thoughtful. I definitely don't want to explain my existence. Remember this when you are dealing with your audience. As I have said in other tips, a thank you goes a long way, a thoughtful joke about your post as a thank you goes even further, but a question of "who invited you?" will probably end the conversation forever.