If you’ve ever spent five minutes with a group of bloggers, you know that the conversation almost always leads to the issue of building traffic and gaining new readers/followers/fans. From there, the conversation usually turns strange, and suddenly folks are talking about comment logs and blogrolls and analytics and SEO keywords and post meta descriptions—but the intent behind the nerdiness remains the same. Build an audience!
I’m reading Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn by Raymond Wlodkowski these days, for grad school. The book, surprisingly, is a much easier read than its author’s name is to pronounce—and I’ve found countless parallels between the text’s topics and the world of blogging.
Here’s a big one: YOUR BLOG MAY BE RACIST. Yeah, your blog, the really cute one.
Okay, maybe your blog isn’t the electronic equivalent of this guy:
"Is that a KKK hood or are you happy to see me?"
…but your blog is almost certainly more exclusive of others than you realize. Despite our bloviations and complusions to grow an audience, we bloggers really aren’t an inclusive bunch. We write about our niches, to our niche audience. We employ sarcasm, snark, and full-blown rage as our more popular literary tones. We love to use narrow pop culture references and culturally-unique idiomatic phrases that are thicker than Ugly Betty’s glasses. And sometimes, we say downright prejudiced things—like calling a Polish surname a phonetic Sudoku puzzle.
Wait, that last one was me. See what I mean?
“Inclusion fosters involvement,” says Wlodkowski, and “to be free of undue threat and to have our perspective matter in issues of social exchange are critical to our well-being.” When we create blogs that strive toward inclusion, we gain the trust and respect of our readers—and both writer and reader find themselves in a place where they can really open up, share their experiences, and create something, well, wonderful.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I want to expand my audience?
- What may I have done in the past that excludes others?
- What can I do in the future to ensure new visitors feel respected and welcome?
