I blog about reading and writing memoirs, posting a polished essays on my blog every week. My goal for the blog is to develop my voice and material, to gather an online collection of aspiring and accomplished memoir writers, and to build the all powerful "platform."
I am achieving these goals to varying degrees, and have received terrific feedback about how much people appreciate my writing. After about 18 months, though, I am fairly flat at about 50 views a day. Now I'd like to extend my reach to more people, and wonder if I ought to simply copy my blog to a bunch of social sites, like this one, MySpace, Goodreads, or some of the others. However, I resist this path and would like to hear your advice and experiences.
On the positive side, I imagine I might be able to attract more traffic. On the negative side, I worry about watering down the central value of my blog, and sort of "cheapening" myself. I'm ready to admit that my reluctance might be a Freshman Mistake. I want lots of visitors, but don't want to put my writing on lots of sites... Okay, so it's not entirely rational, but it's not entirely irrational either. Is it? For one thing, Google loves me right now. I suspect I would lose a lot of Google placement if I do shotgunning. I'd love to get feedback from other people who use this "shotgun blog" method - is it worth it? Have you lost google ranking? What sites are best? I appreciate your input.
Sincerely,
Jerry Waxler, M.S.
Memory Writers Network