Addition by Subtraction

“Social Media.” Oh boy. There’s a topic no one else is writing about.

Everybody and their mother is now a blogging expert. There are a few who have been at it for a while, and have built a nice readership. Then there are people like me, who tend to write about things that only I could care about, and since “blog monetization” and “site traffic trends” are two of the things I don’t care about, I tend to do my own thing.

I do have an insight to add to this whole miasma of theory and conjecture. Stats don’t tell the whole story about how one gets to the top of the blog heap.

A successful blog is one that makes the writer happy. But I suppose there are more objective measures of success:

• Page hits: Interesting, and the rawest of the numbers.
• Links in: A measure of how many people liked what you had to say so much they wanted to share it.
• Feed subscribers: A measure of how many people generally like your thoughts enough to be first to see the next one.

What none of these numbers really capture is how those numbers accumulate.

I would posit that the meaningful growth comes through slow accretion, one molecule at a time, like a stalactite. Slow drip, slow growth, steady growth.

A less-meaningful sort of growth involves paring away. Start with the big chunk of potential readers, and chase away the ones you don’t want as obnoxiously as possible. Like the sculptor who begins with the granite cube, and simply “cuts away the parts that aren’t the dolphin,” this method grows readers by playing on prejudices and built-in biases.

Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to start up a hardcore political blog. I could begin with a few simple posts outlining my basic philosophy and core values… or I could shoot for the moon and call my potential rivals any number of disparaging names. Eventually, those of like mind would gravitate to my page, and they would do so more quickly because of the enemies I am making. My ideological opponents would never be open-minded to any arguments I advanced anyway, so why not just alienate them from the outset?

For every slow-accretion success story, there are dozens of people who have made an instant splash by taking pot-shots early and often. We celebrate these bloggers and pundits as fresh faces and up-and-coming opinion makers and agenda setters — even though their strongly voiced opinions have a zero-percent chance of persuasion, and their agenda is based more on “winning” than focusing on process.

In the coming years, such “power bloggers” will be hailed and celebrated as royalty. Some, like Ariana Huffington, Michelle Malkin, and Markos Moulitsas are already there. But be careful emulating them: their path to traffic is paved with narrow intentions – the attraction of the like-minded by the repulsion of the enemy. Don’t steal from their playbooks unless you know for sure which game they are playing.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, blogging, social media, politics, Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas, Michelle Malkin[/tags]