About writing and audience

Would you still write if you had a single reader? And do you appreciate the readers you do have?

Richard Griffiths asked these questions in his post Why niche blogs and Small Rooms still win - even in the age of technofeudalism. I read the post when it came out as it appeared in my RSS feed and was reminded about it again when Daniel Miller responded to it in Why Write Online?

I love having discussions about the audience we write for. Because I think we worry too much about it.

To answer Richard’s original question: 100%. For most of the time I’ve had a blog, I’ve written to a basically non-existent audience. These days, my readership is way bigger than I can comprehend. I even have a second blog out there that I haven’t shared with anyone yet but I still enjoy using it as a creative outlet.

The readers of this blog are people who like to read my stuff. Plain and simple. I don’t have a prescribed audience that I analyse and write what I think they want to read. I write what I have to share and people who like those things, join to read.

Writing about professional topics

Earlier in my blogging journey, I did worry about it a bit. I knew that if I had written for a specific niche, I would have had a higher chance of attracting a larger audience, faster. A couple of articles that helped me realise it was a silly worry are Rach Smith’s To be whole is the goal and Nat Eliason’s Be Yourself, Not a Niche. More recently, I’ve been introduced to Roy Tang’s You Can Write About Anything that discusses similar topics.

I have recently been talking about blogging to developer audiences in a bunch of events and I often get questions about my thoughts on the audience. One of my key messages is that you don’t necessarily need an audience for your blog posts to be powerful. If you document what you’ve learned and share what you know, you’ll have access to those posts when you need them.

You can share a link to such post when someone asks for help or when you apply to a job. Building such body of work can be very powerful in building credibility and trust as an expert, if you blog about your professional interests. I have expanded these thoughts in Why developers should blog? with links and quotes to other’s thoughts.

Writing for yourself first

In Notes are a tool for …, I wrote about different ways writing notes help me in daily life. Similarly, writing itself is a powerful tool to process and communicate ideas.

Even if nobody reads your posts, your writing improves your skills as a writer.

You don’t have to dream about becoming an author to benefit from writing skills. In this day and age, communication is one of the key skills in many industries. Not only will you spend a larger share of your work day communicating when the higher up you are on the career ladder but becoming a great communicator can help you ascend the ladder faster, if that’s something you’d like to do.

As a software developer, most of my technical posts are written for myself. I document what I learn so that I can find it later — sharing it with the world is a nice bonus benefit. If one person reads a post of mine and gets inspired by it or learns something new from it, it’s a massive upside. It makes me genuinely happy.