There was a running joke about blogs in “How I Met Your Mother”, a TV comedy from a few years back. Neil Patrick Harris’ character, Barney Stinson, was always shocked that none of his friends ever, ever, read his blog.

Which is weird, since his blog was pretty much entirely about his friends, so you think they’d at least be curious. A little.

But nah, people don’t read blogs. My family knows I blog. None of them have ever read it. My gaming friends know I blog and even blog themselves. They hardly ever read my blog. According to Google Analytics, the vast majority of people who read my blog get there by searching for keywords. The other major portion are people who just come to the home page and then spend about forty-fifty seconds and then leave without clicking on any posts.

But I learned a long time ago how to get people to read my blog; I’ll talk about that in a second. For me; I just stopped caring. Blogging is hard and is not how people social media these days. The main reader I care about, for my blog, is Future Me. I love looking back in time and see what I was playing and what else was going on a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I’m always disappointed in those times I didn’t blog about what was going on.

So lesson learned: blog for your own self.

There was a time when blogging was cool, but then as now, it was hard for people to find your blog, it was hard for people to come back to your blog, and it was hard for people to find reason to comment on your blog.

This leads into a bunch of lessons learned. The first one is to find your audience.

Who reads your blog? Google Analytics or other trackers can give you that answer. For my particular blog, the perennially popular posts are those that answer the question “How do I…?”.

Second lesson is to build your expertise. If people are coming to your blog to talk about, say, painting Warhammer 40K minis, then make sure when they come, they have new articles about painting WH40K minis. Having a blog that talks about “whatever” doesn’t build reader engagement.

Back in the old days, I tuned my blog to talk mostly about indie MMORPGs and summarizing what other bloggers were talking about. That second had the twin benefit of people coming to my blog first before heading elsewhere, and other bloggers following those referral links backward to see what I was saying about their posts.

That worked wonderfully – at one point, I had over a thousand visits a day. A small drop in the bucket back then and today, but it meant a lot to me and helped get me a real writing gig with Massively. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep up the pace of that and my main job.

Next lesson? Shamelessly self promote.

You can’t just spam links. People will filter those out, they won’t ever see them. You have to go to other places your audience lives, like Reddit, and if you can find a topic where something you posted is relevant – feel free to drop a link along with some info as to why they should go there. Reddit and other sources really hate people who just parachute in and drop links, but if you can build expertise on some other social media platform, you can transition these people to blog readers.

Last lesson: Own your content.

This is a tough one. Here’s the facts. Anything you write on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, WordPress, any place you use for free – is not your content. They have no obligation to let people see what you wrote, to use a link to leave their platform, to even not just simply delete it at their whim. They might ban you. You gave your hard work to them in the form of your content. And no matter what sort of agreement, real or implied, you think you might have with them, they own what you wrote and they will do with it what they will.

If you want your blog to remain YOUR BLOG, you need to pay to host it somewhere, where you have an actual legal agreement with the hosting company that what you post is yours and yours alone. You should also make backups so that if they decide to take your content away anyway, you still have it.

Your work is valuable and nobody else should be able to claim it as theirs.

We’ve worked hard this Blaugust. Some of our posts came easy, some came hard. Look at the ones you really enjoyed writing, and do more of those, and fewer of the ones you didn’t enjoy so much. Build your expertise in those. And then shop that expertise around. You are worth it and you will find your audience.