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NORA: I should probably start by making sure you’re all in the right place. This is Little Fish in a Big Pond. And it’s good to know that so many people are here. I’m Nora. And we’re going to talk some about some of the benefits of having a small blog, the ways that you might love it a little more at the end and potentially some ways to make change if you decide you don’t want to have a small blog and we’ll hopefully be guided a lot by your thoughts and questions. I wanted to open by saying, My name is Nora and I have a small blog. Now that that’s out of the way our Small Bloggers Anon. meeting can begin. Basically the three of us talked on the phone and over e-mail and I blinked first on who would organize the session, so if I start to say something and start dumb I’ll refer to Catherine and Celeste. I know people start blogs for different reasons but a lot of people start blogs to inform their families about their travel, their children, whatever. You do it to build an audience, to practice your writing, to promote your art, your writing, your photography, etc. You want to change the world. That seems really important. And I know that the first time you get a comment you feel really excited and you think oh, wow. And after a while you think maybe that one isn’t enough maybe I need more readers and more comments. I’m been blogging for five years and some days I love my small blog and some days I hate it. But I wrote down some things I really lie about having a small blog and one of them is, it’s a lot less work. I know that sounds terrible, but I have a five year old and twin one-year olds. And one coming. And I also have a job and I can leave the blog for several days and not worry that my readers will be pounding down the door or will go away and not come back. And I think there’s also a lot of work involved in getting readers that has nothing to do with your blog, it’s commenting and visiting and Twitter.
CATHERINE: to some extent you can get out there and comment, comment, comment, read, post, etc., and it doesn’t always work. There are 10 billion other blogs out there and traffic is spread around a lot. I agree with Nora that the less work aspect is pretty nice. A big reason I started blogging was to be a part of the community. I have a small circle of faithful readers and commenters and I love it. I know I’m going to hear from them and I feel lucky, I consider them my friends. The bigger you get the harder it’d be to know them personally.
CELESTE: It never occurred to me there was such a big community. The first blog I read didn’t have comments for years. He just wrote about anything he felt like, his daughter, his dog, ordering pizza, and I thought well if he can do that, okay. And I’ve never changed my mind about how I feel about my blog since then. It’s whatever I want and that won’t be of interest to everyone in the world so I’m happy with the audience I get for that. You kind of have to decide what your goals are and how much you’re willing to put in. The community part was a huge bonus.
NORA: One of the other things is that, and maybe the audience will have something to say on this, but the idea on the mental track, this is supposed to be a fun thing, I would jokingly say my navel-gazing thing. But sometimes I think, oh, I need to post, and how do I write this in a way to elicit a response. And I don’t know if that ever happens to you or how you get past it?
CATHERINE: It’s happened to me less in the past year. I think since BlogHer. I can’t point to any moment, but I thought, I like the way it is, I like who I’m writing for and I don’t need fame and fortune and since then I’ve never checked my stats and I write when I feel like writing. It was very
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