Blog Comments Don’t Represent the Readers
Comments are my favorite part of blogging – usually. On my photography blog, Found Photography, I just reached a new milestone. I passed the 50 comment mark on one of my entries. If you had to guess, which entry do you think it was on? The logical guess would be the tutorial about the camera I made out of Legos. After all, it was featured on Boing Boing, Metafilter, Engadget, Make, Flickr’s blog, Digg, and over a couple hundred other sites. I am telling you this not to brag (ok, well maybe a little) but because this ISN’T the post with the most comments. That honor goes to an entry I made reviewing a piece of garbage camera called the Philips Keychain Digital Camera. I basically just wrote about how worthless the camera was and urged people to avoid wasting their money on it. So why has this post become so popular? The answer is because a camera this junky isn’t supported by Phillips. Nearly everyone who bought this camera does a Google search and finds my entry near the top of the results. The typical comment goes about like this:
“hey I bought this phillips camera its very good do you know were I can download the software because I lost mine
Please email me back.”
There is a huge temptation for bloggers to tailor their writing to match what they think their audience wants. While this seems logical, it leads you to base the concept of your “reader” on the kind of comments your site is getting. Based on my blog’s comments, I would make the mistake of thinking my readers were inconsiderate fools that blatantly disregard capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and common sense. Since I know that isn’t true and since I have no ambition to write reviews of crappy cameras, there is this conclusion: Blog comments don’t represent the readers.
The vast majority of the people who read blogs don’t leave comments. Unfortunately, that means that there isn’t a reliable way to know what your reader’s want. So how do you know what to write? Easy. Stop writing what you think people want to hear, and write what you care passionately about. Not only will it be easier to write, but it will also be more interesting and attract more readers. Don’t let the loud commenters persuade you to change your style. Don’t get mad if your blog’s comments don’t reflect the kind of reader you want. The readers you want will find your site. They might be silent, but they are there.
