Welcome, Audience!

   I know that sometimes it must seem as though I spent about twenty minutes writing the blog post you're in the middle of reading but, in actuality, it's a pretty time-consuming sort of undertaking. For me anyway.
   Some of the longer ones were likely written over a day or two and even some of the shorter ones probably took at least a couple of hours.
   At the same time I'm doing all of this, I sometimes find myself wondering who's really reading these things?
   Blogger does a pretty good job of keeping me informed as to how many views each blog post gets and it's quite fun to watch the numbers mount. I also get to find out what different countries people are viewing the blog in and what kinds of operating systems are being used. If, by chance, someone has arrived at the blog by using a search engine, generally Google, I also get to see the words they typed in for their search.
   What I don't get is names and faces.
    This actually doesn't bother me too much, I don't really need to know who's reading but it's kinda nice to know that anybody's reading!
   And, for the most part, not a lot of people are reading. I figure that one way or the other an average of about eighteen people take a gander at "Neanderings" whenever there is a new posting.
   Given the subject matter, obviously, more people will view one blog post than the other. The all-time leader right at the moment is the post I did about the death of Christopher Hitchens. Due to his celebrity status, people were rushing around the internet, trying to find pictures or information on the man. In cases like this, a lot of cross-referencing goes on and people end up on "Neanderings", sometimes even by accident. To date, close to three hundred people have viewed the Hitchens post.
   At the other end of the scale, I wrote a post on "Strides", my other blog, that only two people looked at. This particular post took a long time to write and contained all sorts of info about proper running form. But nobody read it. There are a handful of posts in both blogs that very few people have read.
   Part of the enjoyment in writing a blog is having an audience and the bigger the audience the better. The other part, though, is simply the writing.
   You have to love to write! I would likely still continue to blog even if only four or five people were reading. Back in the mid to late eighties, I was writing poetry. I went through the process of sending poems off to literary magazines in an effort to find publication. If you've ever attempted to get something published, you know how frustrating a process this can be. I did have some mild success, managing to get a handful of poems published. This, however, doesn't mean that anyone actually read them. At least, with blogging, you get to find out if you're reaching an audience. This alone helps justify doing it!
   One of the suggestions to increasing your blog audience is to "target" it. While "Strides" sort of targets people who are interested in running, "Neanderings" targets absolutely no one. I write about whatever pops into my mind that I have more than three consecutive thoughts about. You never really know what you're gonna get when you sit down to read a "Neanderings" post and that is simply the nature of the beast.

   For the fun of it, I went back through the list of blog posts just to see if there were any common threads that might make it easier to direct them at a target audience. It couldn't be done. I have never seen such a mishmash of disconnected thought and inclination. It's hard to even list examples. If you're reading the blog now (and it's fairly safe to assume that you are) just go off to the right, find the blog archive, and start picking years and months and fight out what's in there! It's kind of the definition of eclectic, if I do say so myself. Whether that's a good thing or not, audience-wise, is hard to say.