Here is another quote from Dr Tanya at Salted Caramel about blogging. Please follow the link to read her thoughts. My remarks follow.
TODAY’S QUOTE
” The first thing you learn when you’re blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So, you’ve got to get to the point, you can’t waste people’s time, you’ve got to give them some value for their limited attention span. ~ Alex Tabarrok
My first thought was that this comment is a sad reflection on people’s attention spans these days if writing has become like advertising. You have to grab readers attention in the first few seconds.
However, I do agree that if you write long rambling posts and take ages to get to the point your readers are probably going to lose interest and move on. Even I do that sometimes and I have a bit more patience. I can’t read every post in my Reader every day so I usually pick the ones that look the most interesting to read first.
I wouldn’t say that the above quote was the first thing that I learned as a blogger though. I was too busy working out what to say to think much about that.
Dr Tanya makes some good points in her response but then goes on to say that perhaps it’s not really a good quote for hobby bloggers as we tend to write what we want to write rather than writing specifically to get readers attention. Of course, we do want people to read our stuff though so we edit to make our work more readable and may choose a title or photo that will grab the reader’s attention. It always seems to come back to editing, doesn’t it?
Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View 
I think the quote applies to hobby bloggers as well—or all writers, in fact. Because the main reason we share our work is because we want others to read them. Otherwise, we’d have kept a journal, lol. So yeah, I’m totally behind making the best out of your audience’s time. Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
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Yes, that’s true. If we didn’t want people to read our work there is little point in blogging, therefore we do need to make our work interesting and readable.
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I think we absolutely want people to read, but we as we mature as bloggers, we may not be willing to write what our readers want. I no longer pay a lot of attention to what might be “popular.” I write what I find interesting and what I hope others will also find interesting. AND I’m willing to keep running a piece until I’m sure it has had a chance to be seen.
I no longer change all my posts every day. I try to run and rerun pieces I think are good until they’ve been seen. I think we hurry too much, publish too many pieces until we can’t even remember what and when we published things. I know I hurried too much.
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I think that’s the difference between the hobby bloggers and the for profit crowd. They are mainly interested in their target audience where we are willing to let the people come to us. I didn’t start to blog with a specific audience in mind. I like dolls and I know many others do as well. I figured some of them would find me.
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I have always resisted having a “theme” because I’m so eclectic personally. I’m not sure what I expected. I didn’t expect to still be doing this 10 years later, that’s for sure! I just love writing so I figured maybe someone will like it. I didn’t expect it to take off as fast as it did, either. It was a bit dizzying, that first two years when I went from zero to WHOA NELLIE in less than six months. I think I was probably in the right place at the right time. I started writing about dolls, but I eventually decided to just include them with all the rest of the stuff I write about rather than making it a separate entity.
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I kind of went the other way. I started with dolls but when I realised that I wanted to write about other things too I just decided to have a separate blog for that. The free ones were good in those days and I didn’t know I’d be around ten years later either. I’m probably writing more of the other stuff lately because setting up dolls to photograph is quite time consuming as you know.
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