Blog-o-lutions for 2012 (Sort of)

So, here we are, one week in the books on 2012, 51 more to go. The warm, fuzzy glow of the holidays is behind us, and we’re back at work, back in school, back to the realities of every day life. In my cold corner of the world, people have their heads down, trying not to look too far ahead, as we’ve got the longest, coldest part of the year to get through. Resolutions have been made. Many have been broken.

But not here! Here, I’ve still got to do my Blogolutions, and let me tell you, they’re tougher than I thought.

Last week, I presented my writerly resolutions. They were surprisingly easy to set (and I’ve been able to stick to them so far). Goals for the blog have been surprisingly hard. On the one hand, what’s to know? Increase followers. Increase page views. More comments. There. Wasn’t that easy? And in fact, it might not be that hard to do. Here are two simple strategies for doing this:

1. Post on a regular schedule. Nothing kills momentum like unexplained disappearances. If you’ve got nothing to say, tell everyone. If you disappear for a few weeks, so will your followers.
2. Read – and comment on – other blogs. Easy enough. I do this already. And along those lines, there’s an easy way to try to bring people over. My post dates are Mondays and Fridays. I’ll sneakily wait until after I’ve made my posts on those days to go and drop comments. That way, anyone who decides to see what that guy with the funny mustache is all about will come to fresh material. Did I say I was totally above those sorts of shenanigans? Apparently, I’m not.
3. Participate in the fun stuff! Following 1 and 2, I had a pretty steady increase in numbers from May through August, but the biggest spike came between September (144 pageviews) and October (266 views). What happened? At the end of September, Lisa L. Regan tagged me in the Ten Things  meme (or whatever these things are called - hey! learn the lingo - new blogolution!). My entry appeared on September 26. At the end of October, I participated in the Casting Call bloghop put together by Carrie Butler, Lisa, and Melodie Wright.  The number of comments on those posts was double what I had been seeing before, I got a slew of new readers, and, most importantly to me, I had a lot of fun.

Getting people here is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is keeping you here. A Venus’ Flytrap can snap shut in about a tenth of a second. A Sundew has sticky fluid that entangles an insect. What have I got? Words. Those words have to interest you and stimulate you and make you want to come back. That’s a tough assignment.

If I were the Grammar Guru, or the Query Picker, or the Industry Insider, keeping you here would be a lot easier. But I’m not. I’m the Doubting Writer. And I know that I can easily become like that annoying friend who invites you over for coffee and does nothing but kvetch and moan over how bad life is when it really isn’t. You sit there nodding your head and making sympathetic noises while glancing at your watch and thinking :

Sooner or later, you’ll just stop answering the calls and stop coming in for coffee. And that’s not what I want.

What I don’t know right now is what I’m going to do about it. Blogolutions 1, 2, and 3 are easy. If I were only concerned with driving numbers, I could probably do it without too much trouble. But it's not just about the numbers for me, I don’t want numbers for the sake of numbers. I want you to want to be here.

So, I suppose I'll keep on doing what I do and let things develop naturally. Thanks, as always, for dropping by. See you Friday.