The Dennis the Peasant Blogging System™: Part Two

Part Two: Know Your Audience

Now that you understand that politics is the ideal subject for the up-and-coming blogger, you need to develop your blog’s theme. However, before you can develop the sort of blog site theme needed to turn you into a blogging powerhouse, you need to have a clear understanding of your audience.

Never forget this: If you don’t properly understand your audience, you will never be able to develop the sort of blog site theme that earns cold, hard cash.

Blog Readers: Common Myths

To ensure that you understand the sort of person who will read your blog, it is important that we dispel the myths about those sorts of folks. Here is a list of the more common myths that, if not recognized as such, could keep you from your goal of high-profit blogging:

1. Blog readers represent the “thought-leading, tipping-point” sector of the public.
2. Blog readers are thoughtful.
3. Blog readers want to learn – to ‘expand their intellectual horizons’.
4. Blog readers want to read sophisticated, fact-based analysis.

Because any one of these myths, in and of themselves, can sabotage your quest for blogging riches, it is important that we examine each in a certain amount of detail.

Myth Number 1: Blog readers represent the “thought-leading, tipping-point” sector of the public.

If you listen to today’s big-time bloggers, guys like Glenn Reynolds, Roger Simon and Markos Moulitsas, you’d come to the conclusion that because you’re a blog reader, you’re pretty much Hot Shit. Glenn says your part of a fearless Army of Davids, banding together to curb the abuses of Goliaths everywhere – be they in government, media, or whatever – through reason, rational discourse and constructive, civic-minded action. Roger tells you you’re a part of the internet’s vanguard elite; one of the folks others recognize as better informed, wiser and better prepared to lead than those stuck in non-blog reading rabble. And Markos tells you that if you volunteer, donate and call all Republicans “motherfuckers” enough, Utopia will arrive on your doorstep tomorrow. Via Berkeley.

This is, of course, complete nonsense.

Remember that Glenn, Roger and Markos represent the first generation of blogosphere hucksters. Telling you that you’re knowledgeable, respected, wise and the sort of person other people admire is all part of their Elmer Gantry routine. These guys are trying to make money off you – and want to continue to do so – hence the flattery; hence the salesman’s stroke.

In reality, though, it’s pretty clear the vast majority of blog readers are neither “thought-leading” nor “tipping-point”. Think about it. The Movers and Shakers of this world are busy closing the big deal that will make the company’s quarter, writing reports for the Chairman of the Board, or having lunch at a five-star with some headhunter that flew in from Brussels. This kind of person doesn’t read blogs because they don’t have time to... They’re busy getting promotions, acquiring multimillion dollar client contracts and developing company-wide growth strategies.

The people who do read blogs, on the other hand, sit in 8-by-6 cubicles waiting for 5 o’clock to arrive.

It’s true. Ask any blogger when they get traffic and they’ll tell you the same thing: 9:30 AM (EST) to 4:30 PM (PST). In other words, during work hours. Site traffic always drops by at least a third on weekends... which is when everyone actually has the time to do fun stuff. Oh sure, you will always get some traffic late at night and on weekends, but that’s basically the 39-years-old-and-still-living-in-the-basement-of-Mom-and-Dad’s-house demographic. Everybody else reads blogs during work hours because it’s the one thing they can actually do in that cubicle that doesn’t suck as bad as work itself.

And always remember that your audience will, in all probability, continue to be in that cubicle until they either die or retire. They’ve chosen to read your blog rather than work, and therefore will not, in all probability, be staring promotions and career advancement in the face anytime soon.

Helpful Hint: Your audience doesn’t move and shake; it waddles and twitches. That’s why you, as the blogger, have to continually flatter your audience. Part of your success will hinge on feeding the self-esteem of your audience. Remember: They’re all 45, making $20,000 a year, and have bosses who are at least a decade younger than they are. They need all the self-esteem and ego-boosting they can get.

Myth Number 2: Blog readers are thoughtful.

No, they aren’t. That’s why they are at your blog in the first place.

If fact, neither are bloggers. That’s why you are blogging in the first place.

You are not now, nor have you been, nor will you ever be, a thinker of great thoughts. People don’t stop you at the water cooler and ask you to explain Iraq, the environment or the economy. You do not Chair the Philosophy Department at the University of Wallamaloo. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Nor would you be mistaken for the Chair of the Philosophy Department of the University of Wallamaloo. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

And it’s important to understand that if you were the Chairman of a Philosophy Department, every one of your readers would be somewhere else, reading someone else’s blog.

Always remember these facts:

1. People who are truly thoughtful take the time and expend the energy to read books.
2. Serious books.
3. Serious books on serious subjects by learned authors.
4. People who aren’t, take in a couple of posts at their favorite blog while the boss is at lunch.

Your audience, in all probability, got through college (if at all) on Cliff’s Notes. They are busy people. They have wives to avoid, children to ignore and bars to visit. They don’t have time to read 500 pages about the History of the Middle East. They want it in 500 words. 500 small words.

Myth Number 3: Blog readers want to learn – to ‘expand their intellectual horizons’.

This is a common misconception, born largely of the fact that some bloggers, such as Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds, have actually started to believe their own bullshit. But be careful, because the truth of the matter is this:

Blog readers want to be entertained.

In part, this goes back to Myth Number 2. If blog readers were actually thoughtful, they probably would want to expand their intellectual horizons. But they’re not; they’re at your site. And besides, expanding intellectual horizons takes hard work, and if your readers were interested in hard work, they’d be working hard at their jobs.

If you don’t believe me on this, ask yourself this one question:

If the company’s server didn’t block porn sites, would you actually bother reading blogs?

Game, set, and match.

Helpful Hint: Always remember that when a commenter at your site says something like:

Gee, I wish I knew more about Howard Dean using the Fizzlewhomper GX in mind-control experiments. Can you help me? Do you know any good sites with more information of the Fizzlewhomper GX?

You either:

1. Ignore the comment, or
2. Claim you’re too busy at the moment, but will put something up later.

And of course, if you know what’s good for you, you don’t.

That’s because your post about Howard Dean and the Fizzlewhomper GX was a complete crock. In reality the Fizzlewhomper GX is used in the food industry to process and package low-carb tunaburgers. You know that, because that’s what your ex-brother-in-law sells in New Jersey. But your readers don’t have an ex-brother-in-law who sells Fizzlewhomper GXs. And as long as you don’t clue them in, they are going to continue to believe that you’ve uncovered – all by yourself – Howard Dean’s diabolical mind-control plot to take over Red State America. Facts are just going to cloud the issue.

So by all means, avoid providing them.

Myth Number Four: Blog readers want to read sophisticated, fact-based analysis.

Do you like reading sophisticated, fact-based analysis?

Is that why you go to blogs?

Enough said.

Now, even though you have no intention of writing sophisticated, fact-based analysis of the important issues of the day, and even though your audience would drop you like a two pound steaming sack of day-old bat guano if you actually gave them sophisticated, fact-based analysis of the important issues of the day, it is important to remember that you must pretend – so your audience can also pretend – that the crummy 250 word post you just put up is the product of research, analysis and deep thinking. There are several benefits to this:

1. It helps your self-esteem challenged audience maintain the illusion they’re Hot Shit.
2. It saves the time and work involved in researching, analyzing, and thinking deeply.
3. It keeps bandwidth usage under control.
4. It paves the way for you to start paring your posts down to 10 or less words.

This is important. If you look at the superstars of the blogosphere, none of them actually write anything. Markos Moulitsas and Duncan Black never write posts of more than 50 words... And if you took out the word “motherfucker”, Markos would be under 25 words per post. Taking it even further, Charles Johnson rarely writes a post of more than 10 words (which is handy... his entire vocabulary only totals 75 words).

This is the neighborhood you want to be in.

If you can write a 10 word post in less than an hour (I’ll show you how in Part 12), then you can give your readers 4 posts a day and still have time for Oprah, Regis and that New Broad, and all the daytime soaps. Or you could start hitting the bars at noon rather than 5. Either way, you win.

Of course, you can always shoot for the Motherload, which is writing what is know in the business as a Glenn Reynolds Post. This is the post every professional blogger dreams of: The one-word post that gets 250,000 hits.

In fact, at the risk of revealing trade secrets here, Glenn’s entire posting vocabulary consists of two words. Two! They are as follows:

1. Heh.
2. Indeed.

That’s it. Every post you’ll ever see at Instapundit consists of:

1. A link to either a news article or someone else’s blog, and
2. Either “Heh” or “Indeed” after the link.

You can write 54 posts a day in less than two hours.

We’re talking serious free time here.

Which is good, because in our next post, we’ll show you how to develop the blog theme that will launch you to riches...

Comments

[joe]

heh.

wow, it works, I can comment waaay more effectively that way. Indeed. motherfucker.

[corporate_fembot]

Damn! I'd trade my college degree AND my $60K salary just to get a luxuriously large 8x6 cubicle. I think my manager's cube might be that big. Maybe her secret of success is being totally ignorant of current events (which she manages to do even WITHOUT reading blogs).
:)
Anyway, seriously, I enjoy your posts, and this new series is turning out to be quite informative (but doesn't that go against your Three Magic Rules???)

corporate_fembot
Chicago

[Timothy]

Here at the Evil Texas Bank my cubicle is probably 8x10 or 8x12. One day I might have an office...maybe.

Why do I read blogs? Because sometimes SQL takes a long time to run on our servers.

[Cameron]

You're a cruel man. A cruel man. If I might quote from a famous blogger - a wiser man than I, and a distinguished academic to boot: "Disturbing if true."

[corporate_fembot]

Timothy-
For me it's SAS, not SQL, but the waiting-around part is the same...

[salvage]

Awsome.

[dsquared]

[You do not Chair the Philosophy Department at the University of Wallamaloo. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Nor would you be mistaken for the Chair of the Philosophy Department of the University of Wallamaloo. Or anywhere else, for that matter. ]

speaking as one of the contributors to a blog which counts something like three separate Chairs of Philosophy, two of Sociology and one of Economics, you would be surprised and disappointed (or heartened I suppose, depending on perspective) how little difference it makes.

[Jane]

Brilliant. Knowing your love of snark, you'll just love reading about Naked Came the Blogger featuring some of your faves.

[richard mcenroe]

Wooloomooloo.

Philistine.

[Lou Minatti]

Dude. That bit about blogger/blog reader demographics is brutal. Yet highly accurate.

[Lou Minatti]

BTW, you forgot something here:

3. A link to a book that is for sale on Amazon.com that Glenn recommends.

[G.Harlan Guesst]

The problem with blogs is that there is no panic button.

[Big Louie Patooti]

Gee,Dennis,dat reel deep,Ill tell da Boss,we got a container load of laptops.

[Peter vE]

Hey! I read books! Lots of books! Books with big words! Words like "the man in the yellow hat" and "the cat in the hat"

Heh, indeed!

Plus, I can look at all the porn I want because I work for myself. And yet, I still come back to DTP to post snarky comments between buying Powerball tickets.

Visit Michael Berube' for long thoughtful posts, the exception that tests the rule.

[Eric Blair]

SAS? SQL? I gotta do both at the same time. I hate mainframes.

[richard mcenroe]

Lou — Heh, indeed.

[richard mcenroe]

I'm saving up. Someday I'll be able to afford a cubicle of my own.

[Tillerman]

Geeze - and I really thought all my readers were smart people looking to expand their intellectual horizons. I'm going to have to seriously rethink this business.

[richard mcenroe]

Briefly OT — We've identified ... we now return you to your infomercial.

[richard mcenroe]

Sorry, that's Another Arab Congress Can't Trust...

Dunno what happened to that last line

[David Thomson]

You mean the world is not waiting breathlessly for my thoughtful analysis of current events? Oh well, I have at least impressed my girlfriend and our nine cats. They think I’m wonderful. Please don’t tell them the truth. It’s our little secret.

[collounsbury]

My Dear Dennis

While I find your analysis brilliant and perfectly capturing the idiotic whanking that is "blogosphere self commentary."

However, you missed one key point on the "thought leader" aspect of the the blog pimpery.

You're naturally translating "thought leader" into its typical business speak meaning (however baseless and inane the biz-speak origins itself) as something akin to bleeding edge elite.

Let me suggest you reread thought leader as "general core of hysteric mob sentiment." Not thought leader, but the loud-mouthed ignoramuses at the core of the mob. See DPW.

[Mork]

This is the best blog post in history.

[sonic]

Great stuff, now we can feel superior to all the other stiffs who read blogs in the ordinary way and don't understand the way we do.

What did you call it again? the salesman's stroke.

;)

[bonnie]

Makes me happy that I just blog for fun & don't have to pander to the LCD.