Building an audience for your blog

Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Building an audience for your blog

Ed Yong

“If you build it, they will come” might apply to a baseball field, but probably not to your blog. If you want people to see your work, you will need to find and reach out to them in creative, thoughtful ways. Ed Yong, an award-winning blogger with National Geographic, will teach you how to reach your intended audience.

If you Google “top tips for blogging,” chances are you’ll get a list of sites that tell you similar things: write short, punchy posts, and the shorter the better; try and post every day; be personal; and so on. Feel free to ignore these tips. The great joy of blogs is their diversity. Some flit between topics; others have a sniper’s focus. Some offer a nearly constant fire hose of updates; others offer monthly drips. Some are intensely personal; others subtly so. Some offer canapésized snippets; others go for meaty long-form fare. There are few consistent factors that make blogs successful or enjoyable, and assuming that such factors exist ascribes a special mystique to blogs that they don’t deserve. A blog is just a container. It’s a channel for communication, much like email, or radio, or talking. The rules for running a good blog are exactly the same as those for acing any form of communication: you have to have something worth writing about, and you have to write it well. Le fin.

Playing the long game

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Unless you happen to launch a new blog under the umbrella of an established media brand, or you already have a substantial following online, you will probably spend a lot of time without many readers. When I started Not Exactly Rocket Science as an independent WordPress site, I had just a few hundred page views a day for at least eighteen months, or until I joined the ScienceBlogs network. That was a bit dispiriting, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to write. I had an itch that needed to be scratched. And the fact that some people were reading—regardless of how few they were—was valuable, rewarding, motivating. Small audiences matter; they’re a necessary stepping-stone toward big audiences. And it takes time—months, maybe years, of effort—to build a big audience. There’s no way of shortcutting your path to greater traffic.

Actually, I lie. It is possible to cheat your way to page views. You could sacrifice quality for quantity, and post an incessant stream of YouTube videos, funny images, and clips from other people’s work. With more posts, a small amount of traffic for each one translates to a bigger total. You could take a leaf out of the Buzzfeed and Upworthy book and go for “linkbait” headlines like “This One Freaky Fish Crawled Out of the Water 400 Million Years Ago; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next” or “16 Genetic Diseases You Need To Know About.”

But all of these tactics will probably seem annoyingly obvious to your readers and to other bloggers. So let me revise my earlier statement: there’s no way of shortcutting your path to greater traffic, because page views aren’t the same as an audience. Page views are a short-term reward and one that’s easy to game. An audience is a long-term reward—a growing cadre of readers who know and follow your work because of its quality, not because of cheap tactics. The latter is immensely more valuable but takes longer to get.

In the meantime, you’ll need to keep yourself motivated. First and foremost, have fun with it. Write for yourself, so that the act of crafting a post is rewarding in itself. You will need some form of self-contained feedback that’s independent of page views, comments, and other external metrics to keep you going during those early months when you’re finding your feet. For me, it was the process of writing. Coming up with a good metaphor, finding a sharp intro, and breaking something complex down into accessible morsels were rewarding acts in themselves. They kept me going until other rewards manifested.

Remember: blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Also remember: the more you write, the better you will get at it. New writers who suddenly join big networks often complain of stage fright. There’s a lot to be said for quietly getting better, faster, and more confident at putting your thoughts into words so that when the limelight falls on you, you are ready to perform. If you worry that you’re not good enough, or that no one would want to read what you write, bear in mind that everyone thinks that at first. But it’s also true that you may well be right about that, and if so, you’ll continue being right until you get enough practice in.

Finding your niche

The world of science blogging is a crowded one and it can be hard to make yourself stand out. First, a caveat: you may not want to stand out. It is fine to blog whenever you feel like it as a chance to scratch a writing itch, and with no expectations of reaching wide readerships. If that is the case, you may want to consider writing occasionally for sites that take guest contributions, rather than starting your own blog. Scientific American’s Guest Blog, The Conversation, and Medium are all good options.

For those who are starting their own blog, let your curiosity and your passions guide you. Blogging isn’t a job. You won’t get assignments from a boss. The drive to write has to come from you, and it will come more easily if you write about things that you love.

Some bloggers, myself included, cover a wide range of different topics. I was, and still am, led by my curiosity. I write about things that interest me and let my own visceral reactions guide my choice of topics, with the constraint that I avoid topics where my foundations are weak, like physics. Others stick to specific topics and have become indispensable resources for people interested in the same—Maryn McKenna covers germs and food production on her Superbug blog, while Vaughan Bell and Tom Stafford at Mind Hacks cover all things brain-related. Neither a narrow focus nor a broad one is inherently better. Going narrow might help you to focus on what you want to write about, and to find stories that no one else is doing; it might also hamstring you. Going broad gives you more material to draw from; you also risk drowning in so many possibilities that you get stage fright, or getting burned if you write about something way outside your expertise without doing your due diligence. Some people thrive in total freedom; others like constraints. Choose your path based on your temperament.

You could focus on explaining new research. My fellow Phenomena bloggers Carl Zimmer, Nadia Drake, Virginia Hughes, and Brian Switek are masters of this form. Or, like the collected bloggers of the Scientopia network, you could talk about issues in academia and life as a scientist. If you’re a scientist, you could blog about your own research—John Hutchinson’s What’s in John’s Freezer is a favorite. If writing critiques is your thing, you could specialize in busting pseudoscience, like Ben Goldacre does in his blog Bad Science.

The type of posts you write can vary too. Some people focus on creating their own compelling posts. Others also point their readers to everyone else’s compelling posts. Sites like io9 and Boing Boing do this exceptionally well, by redirecting their own readers to interesting material curated from across the Internet. People visit these sites for their own excellent content, but also because they trust the authors on these sites to show them where to find more excellent content. This is why, on my own blog, every Saturday I compile a list of links to good reads.

Regularity is important, although because many readers find blogs through social media and aggregators, perhaps not as important as it used to be. There are bloggers who write daily, weekly, or monthly. Some write for multiple outlets, and use their blogs as a roundup, or to place the pieces for which they can’t find a home elsewhere. Really, the only bad move is to not write at all. Months of silence aren’t ideal for building an audience. Aatish Bhatia, now at Wired, turned Empirical Zeal into a well-regarded science blog by writing consistently eye-opening explainers that got people talking, but doing so only once a month.

Some people go it alone. Others find like-minded colleagues to start a group blog like Deep Sea News (marine biologists) and Last Word on Nothing (journalists). The group strategy can provide safety and strength in numbers, if you don’t have the energy to blog often enough on your own.

Regardless of your predilections, what matters is carving out a niche. That could be an unusual topic that no one else is covering. Ivan Oransky very quickly turned Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch into big hits by focusing on two areas that no one else had their eye on. Alternatively, your niche could be a knack for deep critical analysis; humor; illustrations or videos; an insider’s perspective on a particular field; or just wondrous storytelling acumen.

Find something that makes you stand out. If you write yet another collection of short posts about new science, you are competing against the hundreds of news sites that already exist. If you write a screed about homeopathy or creationism, you are competing against the hundreds of such screeds that have already been published.

Remember that readers will keep coming back not just for what you say, but how you say it. They are not just interested in the things you write about, but in you as a writer. Your voice and your personality are what form the essence of your blog, so do not be afraid to let those show. Don’t feel the need to define these from the start. You don’t need a mission statement to blog; you need only an Internet connection.

Thinking about readers

The classic mistake that people make when they start blogging is to casually type away as if anointing the world with their Very Important Thoughts, rather than to consider the people for whom they are writing. Who are they? What do they care about? How much do they already know or understand? Heed the words of famed British science writer Tim Radford:

When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life. This is someone you will never meet, called a reader. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance. So the first sentence you write will be the most important sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you—an employee, an apostle or an apologist—may feel obliged to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.

Different bloggers target very different audiences. Some, like me, are aiming for intelligent but nonspecialist readers. Others are writing for kids. Still others are addressing scientists within a specific field. If you’re not sure who your readers are, ask them—every year, I create an open thread on my blog where I invite readers to de-lurk and say something about themselves, their background, and their interests. Your choice of audience will determine the language you use in your writing, the level of detail you go into, and the choices you cover. This is something you should probably consider in the infancy of your blog. Picture your ideal readers in your head: who are they?

If you’re writing for a layperson, technical jargon is immediately off-putting (and linking to a definition is a lazy, inefficient solution; most people will not click on that link). A good guide is to assume that your readers last encountered science when they were in high school, and to use terms and concepts that you yourself were familiar with at that point in your life. Everything else gets explained. That’s how newspapers operate.

If you’re a scientist writing for peers, you can probably get away with including some jargon or lofty assumptions about background knowledge. But even then, remember that doing so can alienate other scientists who aren’t in your field (and who might benefit from your post). If you’re a quantum physicist, your writing may sound like Dothraki to a geneticist, even if she’s a professor. Pop culture references have a similar effect. When I wrote “Dothraki,” to some of you I may as well have been speaking Romulan.

In my view, regardless of your imagined readership, it always pays to make your blog as accessible as possible. This is particularly true when you start, because you are heavily reliant on word of mouth and on people stumbling across your blog via social media, search engines, or incoming links. One of the most important ways of building an audience is a passive one: avoid alienating incoming readers.

Language will help. So will structure—the way you arrange your thoughts and ideas into sentences, paragraphs, and posts. You could use the standard inverted pyramid of news stories, where the key details appear at the top. You could use storytelling techniques to describe a quest, or a specific experiment, or a moment in a scientist’s life. You could do a straight Q&A. Blogs give you all the freedom you need to find your own voice, without the constraints of word counts or editors. They allow you to experiment with different styles and structures and write in the way that feels most natural to you, without falling into the stylistic monoculture that plagues most of the mainstream media. (The blogs that I named in the previous section are all tremendously diverse in terms of their writing style.)

But the freedom of blogging also has its perils: it lets you get away with publishing bloated, meandering, self-indulgent, narcissistic posts that would never see ink in a magazine. Good blogging, then, is a perverse and fiddly act of balancing the freedom to express yourself with the restraint that will make you readable. It’s about remembering that the rules of good writing are relevant whether you are writing for a layperson or a scientist, and that once you know those rules, you can work out how to break them effectively. It’s about writing for you, while also writing for a reader. It’s about exploiting the new niches created by this Cambrian explosion of science writing opportunities while acting as your own strict editor. But ultimately, there is no secret recipe for a successful blog. What works for one person may not work for another. The only constant—the only tip that always applies—is to have something to write, and to write it well.

Ed Yong is an award-winning freelance science writer. His blog Not Exactly Rocket Science is hosted by National Geographic. His work has also appeared in many publications, including Wired, Nature, the BBC, New Scientist, the Guardian, the Times, Aeon, Discover, and Scientific American.

Ed is based in London. Find him on his website at http://edyong.flavors.me or follow him on Twitter, @edyong209.