Loneliness of the long-distance blogger

Sometimes, I refer to my new website as “The Loneliest Place on the Internet.”

And my blog? 

“Pissing into the Wind.”

I launched both a few months back and since then my search for an online audience has been sobering. As a friend says, “The Internet can be a pretty cruel place.”

Indeed, self-publishing is an often-bitter, brave new world. A recent New York Times piece estimated that some 95% of blogs fail from lack of readership.

Hacks get discouraged when they realize that, post after post, their tree falls in a busy cluttered forest and nobody hears it, nobody pays attention.

Nobody clicks.

For the author, self-doubt foments like bacteria. Am I posting too often? Should I write longer, or shorter? Do I post on weekdays or on weekends, and, honestly, do I really have anything to say that’s worth reading?

Friends advise me to give it time. My wife wanted more pictures. Her sister suggested pornographic images to lure in the lonely and disengaged. Others exhorted more topical posts to draw in a wider, younger audience.

I’ve mulled this, and decided that if I didn’t write what fulminated in my brain, about the things I wanted to write about, rather than catering my message to attract an audience, this process would feel too much like work.

A friend once wrote for a news website that paid by the click, so he found a way to include the phrase Keith Richards in every piece, knowing search analytics would snare unsuspecting Rolling Stones fans into stories about sewer upgrades.

My wife recently bought a t-shirt that captured my raging insecurity.

“You post too much,” it read.

And so I blunder forth, posting too much, or too little.

And, to be frank, to have created this thing, that is yours and yours alone, with its warts and daily typos, not to mention occasional moments of elation, is intimidating.

Because I’m a klutz. I’ve never been any good at putting things together. I failed in all of my Cub Scout activities, from tying knots to making balsa wood models. My 11th grade chemistry lab partner insisted that I didn’t know my ass from a beaker.

I don’t operate mechanic equipment that relies on me to ensure its safety and viability.

And operating a blog is like building an engine from the ground up.

There are a dizzying array of analytics gauging everything from number of sessions, new users to page views. Right now, I know how many people are on my site, what country they’re from, what they ate for breakfast.

I both love and despise the concept of the bounce rate. 

For the uninitiated, readers come to your website through online portals: social media, regular subscribers and organic searches.

But once they get there, to the page that’s their landing site, do they go anywhere else? Or do they immediately leave? That’s known as bounce. If readers stick around, go to other pages, explore what other ideas the site has to offer, you have a low bounce rate. If they quickly flee, that’s high.

The average bounce rate, I’ve learned, is about 50%.

Mine hovers at 90%.

Ouch.

My website feels like a small asteroid, devoid of atmosphere to hold any visitors. They land but quickly bound away, like flitting celestial bees searching for pollen.

Another depressing measure is the time spent on the site. 

One would like to see readers linger for a few minutes or even longer, enough time to read and digest, (say, three minutes). 

My average reading time has sometimes, depressingly, dropped to 30 seconds. That means many readers won’t even get this far into this post; they’ll already have bolted.

Sigh.

But you can’t get too swept up by analytics, the bells and whistles of reader preference. At this point, without a book to sell, I have little to peddle on my site. There’s nothing financial at stake.

But you’d like to be read. Isn’t that the point of writing anything?

The other day, I noticed that some of my original followers had — gasp! — unsubscribed. There it was on one of my analytics pages, a list of the unsatisfied.

And the names included journalists, old friends, people I respected, people who had signed up to receive in their email box links to my twice-weekly posts.

I can imagine them now, opening another Glionna email (or not), thinking, “I just cannot do this anymore! Does this character even have a life? Has he ever had an unexpressed thought? I’m outta here!” 

I called a friend in Colorado whom I consider my website guru. He has successfully published numerous sites over the decades.

I told him of my plan to email my defectors, asking what precisely it was that drove them off, asking for a bit of feedback, if you will.

My sensei disapproved.

He said he too had lost subscribers, but the way he figured it, he was just happy for the time he had them as followers, like a man who’s philosophical about his lost loves.

And then it hit me.

My God man, the last thing you want to do is badger people who have already decided they no longer want to hear from you.

It would be like cyber stalking, like a neurotic, jilted boyfriend continually calling the woman who just dumped him, begging for reasons why the relationship didn’t work.

Because sometimes it just is, dude. 

Or isn’t.

Come to think of it, I was teetering toward a trap often set in the world of commerce.

I am so tired of hearing from every company with whom I’ve ever done the slightest bit of business. These people send constant emails, call my cell, pander for some feedback, some kind of response. 

Yes, 7-Eleven, I did rush into your store to use your bathroom the other day.

No, I will not rate your service or the ply of your toilet paper.

Everyone is rating one another these days, from dating sites and college professors to the woman who helps you book your plane tickets over the phone.

It’s all become a sick beauty pageant.

Look at me! How did I do?

So I will forge ahead on the rutted, pot-holed celestial superhighway without feedback. 

I will keep posting, writing the words and thoughts and emotions that sustain me. 

Because I like the sensation of having an experience and anxiously rushing to the keyboard to ponder, to figure out what it all meant.

I guess, in the end, that is why I write.

For me.

That sole inhabitant of the loneliest planet in cyberspace.