Who Reads Blogs? Is It Other Bloggers?
Blogs have been a rising phenomenon for several years now and have really started to hit the mainstream in the last year and started to be embraced by individuals and businesses alike. Despite the figures showing that there are now over 200 million blogs worldwide one of the questions I often get asked by clients is simply “Who reads blogs?”. Before I get the chance to answer most people already have the second part of their question out which is “Is it other bloggers who read blogs?”. These are very important questions if you are aiming to perhaps reach out and engage with bloggers or thinking of starting one yourself and I have tried to break down the different areas that show what blogs are, who reads blogs and what sort of reach and influence blogs have….
Who Reads Blogs?
In my experience other bloggers are certainly very active in engaging with blogs and there is certainly a strong community element within the blogosphere but they are part of the audience and not the entire audience. Some of the key areas that show who reads blogs are…
Commenting
You only have to look through the comments on this blog and click on any of the names to see that most of the people leaving a comment have a blog of their own. If you are inclined to have your opinion heard and write a blog the chances are you are going to take time to write comments and express your opinion around the blogosphere. I also know there are 100s of people reading this blog who have no blog but they rarely comment so perhaps bloggers are just more visible.
The Niche
If you are talking about something like this blog that talks about social media and blogging then you are going to have a huge amount of bloggers hanging around and engaging as it relates to what they do. Now lets look at something like fashion blog Beaut.ie which has over 300,000 montly visitors. Not many people reading that blog are going to have blogs themselves and are there simply for the fashion advice and reviews. Blogs in different niches will attract different audiences.
The RSS Factor
One of the smartest ways of reading the web is RSS as it delivers the content directly to you without you having to go surfing the web. This is a technology that has however been largely embraced by bloggers and techies and if you were to ask an ordinary office worker what it was they would probably struggle. Blogs with a large amount of RSS readers are likely to have a more blog/tech audience than others. The best way of illustrating this is something like football blogs that have a huge amount of traffic but relatively small amount of RSS readers in comparison.
Search
Blogs rank incredibly well for search mostly due to the fact that they have constantly updating content and plenty of incoming links (two things that Google really likes) and as a result a huge amount of traffic to blog comes from people searching for information. It is not uncommon for a blog to rank especially well for brands’ own search terms as for example the case with Jason Roe and Ryanair illustrates. Type in Ryanair to Google and see where Jason’s blog shows up. Not all of these readers are going to come back day after day but they are looking for information and resources so blogs certainly have a crucial function to play when it comes to search traffic and results.
Influence
This really is a huge problem when discussing blogs. People will always ask questions like “how much traffic do they get?” and that is to be expected as people engaging with blogs will often have come from a background where very exact numbers like circulation for newspapers or listening figures for radio stations would have been par for the course. The major problem is that blogs don’t publish their traffic figures openly (some do of course) as most blogs were not set up with the aim of monetizing them as a newspaper would be. You can use tools like Technorati or Website Grader to get a general picture but to be honest that only really works for blogs of a certain size and the vast majority barely register. The one thing that is worth keeping in mind is that no matter how big or small a blog their influence can spread far and wide as the web is fluid and works in real time at the moment so a story on the smallest blog with no authority has the potential to be retweeted and passed all over the world in a matter of minutes so perhaps influence and the size of blogs is starting to matter less and a broader approach should be taken to getting coverage in the “long tail” of blogs.
Early Adaptor Phase Over?
I think if you asked the question at the top of this post maybe 2 years ago you would have had a very different answer and I would have said to you that indeed it was mostly bloggers who read blogs and interacted with them but those days have changed. Blogs have entered the mainstream and everybody from CEOs of large corporations to corner shops now have blogs and all sorts of people actively read them. The early adaptors were certainly people with a more techie background because blogs were seriously hard to get set up and needed some decent knowledge of HTML but as technology has evolved anybody with very basic computer knowledge can have a blog up and running within a couple of minutes. If anything I would predict a rise in the number of blogs as people from all walks of life get familiar with the technology and embrace it.
Will I get Traffic from blogs?
Will I get traffic from blogs?
In a word…no. You’ll certainly get some traffic if a blogger links to you but you only have to look at our coverage on Techcrunch which has over 4 million RSS readers and the amount of traffic to see that coverage on a normal blog is not going to crash your servers. What it will do is send you a link from a very reputable source and most blogs have very engaged readers so if the blogger is talking positively about you or your company it will have a far greater long term effect than a tiny amount of traffic ever will.
The Knock On Effect
The web is becoming a lot more social and people able to share blog posts and content they find in a matter of seconds and spread it far and wide. You shouldn’t just think of a blog post as the words that are written on that web page but also the possibility for it to be Retweeted, shared on Facebook, submitted on Digg, talked about in Forums and the list goes on and on. Where is the author themselves syndicating their content to? Is it appearing automatically on their Facebook page? Do they publish to small local newspapers as well? Think of the bigger picture.
Summary
There are certainly a lot of bloggers reading other blogs and commenting but they make up a small but active fraction of people reading blogs. Search results are favorably weighted towards blogs because of the way they are set up and a large amount of the traffic arriving at blogs will come from search engines and probably be looking for very specific information. It can be very hard to establish how much influence blogs have and for that reason you shouldn’t just target the big hitters but reach out to smaller niche blogs who make up part of “the long tail”.
You are never going to get a ton of traffic out of getting covered by a blog but they do hold influence and the authors often have the key element of trust with their readers and will have a longstanding relationship. Bloggers are more often than not thought leaders in their field and can shape opinions around your product.
So a bit of a long winded answer but as you can see it is clearly not just other bloggers who read blogs.
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