Finding readers in the blogosphere: A project building an audience for a blog at the intersection of mothering and beekeeping http://www.bumblehive.com
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Women publish nearly four million blogs that fall under the genre known as Mommy Blogs: written by women, for women, primarily on the subjects of family life and parenting. Many Mommy Bloggers count readers in the thousands. For my research, I sought to answer the questions: How do Mom Bloggers attract readers? Do bloggers with strong followings actively pursue their readers? How do readers find bloggers? During the Spring of 2013, I researched audience building within the genre and interviewed 10 Mommy Bloggers about their experiences. The theoretical framework I used is the Uses and Gratifications theory, which is conducive to research on blog audience because bloggers are blog readers themselves, and bloggers know a lot about the identity and motivations of their readers because of the interactive nature of the platform. The method I used is interviewing, with open-ended questions, in order to give respondents an opportunity to relay information unprompted. The research reveals six primary tactics used to attract readers: 1. Reading and commenting on other blogs, with the expectation of reciprocity. 2. Promoting their blog on Facebook and Twitter. 3. Posting at least once a week. 4. Writing with a consistent voice. 5. Specializing in a niche topic. 6. Guest posting and publishing widely.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.