Who Are You?

The always-provocative daughter, Gillian, put the question to me recently: Who is your intended audience for the Nobby Works? It shouldn’t have been as provocative as it was because I’ve been a writer for publication for most of my life, and one of the first things you learn is that to get good at it you really have to know who your audience is. And that’s not a thing to be settled on your first publication. Your audience is constantly in flux…and if you write in the corporate world as I did for many years your audience can change multiple times in the course of a day…customers, vendors, investors, board members. With my more personal and intimate writing, I often settle on someone in my life as the ideal audience…someone who might have particular interest in the subject of my writing…or authority on it…or whose taste in writing is so good that I want to try and satisfy it. I imagine there have probably been a half-dozen individuals who have played the role of secret reader in my writing career. One of them became the early muse of The Nobby Works when after a year or more of listening to my life stories she suggested I write a memoir. That was at the peak of the vogue in memoir…so not a bad idea commercially. But it also just was when my curiosity about the world of blogging peaked, and so the suggested memoir became a realized blog. Although my friend, Angela, would be the personification of The Nob audience, I increasingly tried to project her qualities onto a larger audience. So in its ideal state I imagined my readers were like her—placing a higher value on substance rather than snark (the lingua franca of the blog world), possessed of a catholic (small c) curiosity about the world and a shared sense of irony-infused humor about human existence.That has been the image of my audience that I’ve carried around in my head over the nearly 10 years of the blog’s run, and I’ve been pretty comfortable writing for such an esteemed group…regardless of how small it may be in reality. But that’s not what Gillian was getting at with her question. She was trying to help get me more focused on what my audience was actually like rather than what I imagined it was like so I could target appeals for more readers more purposefully. A Google or Twitter search for “people like Angela” was unlikely to get me far in this regard. So in an attempt to answer Gillian, I decided to work backward…instead of my ideal audience, I decided to assess my real audience…the audience that I know for a fact actually reads the blog. 

Thanks to Google Analytics, here are some of the things I know: Traffic to the blog usually spikes on Thursdays whether I’ve posted anything or not…no surprise there since I generally try to post on Thursdays People on average spend about a minute-and-a-half at the blog, which makes sense since that should be about the time it takes to read my typical posts of about a thousand wordsReaders come mostly from the US, but I have an international audience as well, with two disturbing data points: 1. most number of readers outside the US, as I’ve noted before, come from Russia 2. despite my obsession with Italy and large number of posts that are Italian related, my readership out of my ancestral homeland is 1%“Likes” tell me nothing about my audience. I can post for months on end without attracting a single “like”, and then out of the blue a post such as last week’s on Connecticut tobacco work attracts nearly a hundred “likes”. What’s behind that? Subject matter? Link placement? A quirk in the universe? If I knew, I would definitely replicate it week after week, but I haven’t a clue.On the other hand I can clearly see how I just got a spike on a post from 2012. Someone on Twitter had asked people to list a line from a movie that had particular personal resonance, and I responded with “The fall alone will kill us” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with the link to the post. As the title of that post says, Nobody Knows Anything.I know I have a loyal following of readers who regularly let me know that they’re keeping up and engaged with my posts despite how difficult Google's Blogger comment function makes that. No one of them is more engaged than dear old friend Samantha who quite often emails me long, beautifully written responses to my posts that deserve a blog of their own. Then there’s Lorna, my most prized reader, who tries to make a point of reading each post before Sunday breakfast, so we can talk about them. She pays me the highest compliment one can get from a partner of more than 50 years when she says, “Every time I read your blog, I learn something new about you.”Which brings me to my audience of one: me. I admit it. I write The Nob mostly for myself, but not out of some hungry ego. Trust me, you can’t keep an ego properly fed on a week when you attract just 50 readers and no “likes”.  My motivation week after week is to apply my research and reason to a neatly crafted short essay on a matter that concerns or amuses me. I look forward to midweek when I take an inventory of all that I’ve read and heard and seen in the past few days and begin selecting the topic that’s compelled me the most. Then I take that topic and see what I can do about communicating its meaning to me to unseen others with words and music and graphic and links. It’s an invaluable creative and intellectual exercise...a truly regenerative one...and I couldn’t imagine living through this stage of my life without it. So there you have it. Who are you? Who is my audience? Random Russians, loyal old friends, passing strangers, the hip, the thoughtful, the patient and passionate, my wife and me. Pass it on. We're here every week.