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Where are the huddled masses, yearning to read my blog?

By Michael Tefft • on July 27, 2008

I have a question. Where are the huddled masses yearning to read my blog? The wretched refuse of the teeming Internet? Send these, the homeless, without a blog to call their own. I lift my lamp beside my shining WordPress blog. My apologies to Emma Lazarus for paraphrasing her famous poem “The New Colossus.” It is just that sometimes I wonder where the millions that surf the web every day are spending their time. It certainly doesn’t seen to be at my blog, “The Mind of Tefft.” In the movie “Field of Dreams”, Kevin Costner is told that if he builds his ball field, they will come. Well, I have build my WordPress blog and have been waiting patiently for a couple years now but they are not coming. OK, some people are coming but my blog seems to be in the AAA league instead of the big league. I have no illusions of attracting the number of readers that blogs from A listers attract, but it seems that on a good day a wino on a park bench attracts a bigger crowd than my blog does.

I think that at least some of the things I write about are pretty good and on a level with some of the stuff that I see posted on blogs with a much wider audience than mine. My WordPress installation is optimized so that all the search engines can crawl it easily. I have plugins to build my sitemap and notify all the major search engines. I try to use tags effectively and follow all the tips that I have read about on how to put your blog on the map. I don’t have too many flagrant spelling and grammar errors, at least as far as I can determine. Yet in a year and a half of writing and almost 400 posts I think only one article I posted was Dugg. On a good day I may get ten to twenty readers. Maybe that is average for a blog today. I know there is a lot of competition out there, some of the statistics I have read quote millions of blogs. Maybe that is the problem, everyone has their own blog now and is too busy maintaining it to read anyone else’s blog.

I am not really complaining so much as I am wondering what I can do to attract more people to my blog. Even though I would probably continue to blog even if no one read it it would still be nice to know that others were enjoying what I have created.So if anybody stumbles across this post and has any ideas for me, please leave me a comment. I promise I will comment on your blog in return. Honest. Are you out there huddled masses? Can you see my lamp?

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Comments

By Scott on July 27th, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Well I don’t know. But I’ve added you to Blog Net News / Hampton Roads. I had the older version of your blog in there but just added the new version.

Sometimes a blog needs a “nitch”. And it takes a while to find it. Keep going, don’t give up. Comment on as many other blogs as you can, send your new posts out on as many social networks as you can stomach. It will get there.

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By gregorylent on July 28th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

this is easy ./.. because your mind is made up about everything that you write about, there is no conversation possible when there is no openess, no willigness to say “i don’t know” what do you think.. you are a kind of fundamentalist, and it doesn’t take long to figure out that you don’t want to learn anything that would stretch your certainty.

if a novelist told you the whole story right up front, you would not read it. engaging writing needs mystery, something left unsaid, a place for the reader to enter into and discover something for himself and in his own language.

preachers are over, discoverers are happening now.

enjoy, gregory lent

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By mtefft on July 29th, 2008 at 8:43 am

Thanks for the comment Gregory, but I don’ agree with anything you say. I am not writing a novel here. I am just commenting on things. As for your comment on me not wanting to learn anything that would stretch my certainty, I say you don’t know what you are talking about. As for preachers, I would say from your comment that you certainly are one. Constructive criticism is one thing but your whole comment is nothing but crap in my opinion. You are a total asshole. I saw your comment about the Huffington Post so I know where you are coming from.

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By gregorylent on July 29th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

i wondered how you would handle this, from reading your work i though it would be like this, name calling. ego reaction. that is ok, and the nice thing for you is that it helps you in answering your initial question in the title of this post.

yes, i also have this problem of preaching, and it drives people away.

people are only interested in themselves, or if they are more evolved, in ideas, which is all about the personal expansion that comes from understanding.

enjoy, gregory lent

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By mtefft on July 30th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Good one Gregory. Let’s see, who started the name calling. I posted onFriendfeed that I thought the Huffington Post was not worth the electrons it was written on. Your reply was to call me a red neck. Or maybe you forgot that. So you are right. You are not only arrogant but don’t know how to carry on a civil conversation. You resorted to the name calling first. So you can take your self-righteousness and use it somewhere else. BTW, I will bet you never even read any of my work.

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