How to Become an Important Blogger (my plan)

Being heard and having your ideas count for something seems to be a game of influence. To this end, my goal is to increase readership of my blog and encourage people to follow me on twitter. To increase readership of my blog, I need to post more regularly, and more often. To increase my twitter following, I can piggyback on my blog as well as reposting trending topics. I need to earn my readers respect by entertaining them with solid information they can trust and/or starting some legal controversy with a big company as seems to be a very effective method for gaining followers. I must also concentrate on writing well, with as few grammatical errors as possible, solid logic, and topics that appeal to a large audience. The next few paragraphs contain a few examples of what I intend to write about, as well as the logical and psychological mechanisms behind my method that should make it work.

 First of all , this blog is about challenging the status quo, the way people think, and their most dearly held beliefs. My favorite topics are Psychology, Religion, Misconceptions about Science, Really Cool Science, and the Political Misuse of Science. I am a student of Psychology with a Minor in Philosophy, a fan of physics, and a computer science hobbyist. I have a terrible urge to write but not always a clear topic to write about. During my explorations of the mentioned topics above, I will also engage in some introspection and meta-thinking (thinking about my thoughts) to determine the origins and other reason behind them. For example, I'm writing this blog post as a way to motivate myself to write more blog posts by creating a reader expectation of more blog posts as well as to outline for myself what topics I will write about when I don't have one particular thing bugging me. I'll be clear, this is a purely selfish endeavor which I intend to use for gaining more influence in the world around me, as well as more control over myself.

 Regular posts are one of the most important things to having a successful blog. They don't have to adhere to a strict schedule as long as they occur often enough for readers to expect to find something when they check back on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The data I use for this, while not scientific in nature, seems solid enough to support the hypothesis. Every blog I've ever read that has more than a few readers and tons of comments always has new material every time I look as well as a reasonable expectation for there to be more material. At the base of this I can identify an operant conditioning cycle that reinforces both the behaviours of the blogger and the behaviours of the reader. A blogger is reinforced by the blog's statistics to post blogs. The more often and more regularly the blogger posts, the more readers the blog will have. On the other side of it, the readers are interested in reading the blogger's writing, so they return to the site to see if anything new has been posted. If there is new content, the reader is more likely to return to the blog in roughly the same amount of time, favoring faster and faster return rates until the reader is roughly in sync with the blogger's posting pattern.

  Piggybacking on trending topics will help both my blog readership and my twitter following. By checking the trending topics, I can post a tweet with the trending hash-tag and expect to see a rise in viewership of that tweet. If that tweet contains a link to my blog, my blog readership will also increase. The rate at which my blog increases is proportional to the number of people who read my tweet. If the content of the blog is relevant and interesting, I can reasonably expect to see an increase in return readers to my blog, who may become followers of my blog if I continue to hold their attention with my blog content in subsequent posts. Tweeting trending hash-tags also increases my twitter following by increasing the exposure of my tweets. If I increase my twitter following I can reasonably expect a larger audience to be exposed to links to my blog, increasing blog readership and eventually blog following. At the bottom of all this, my posts must still be relevant and interesting or my blog will gain a reputation for being useless reading. I can also reasonably expect that this particular blog post will do nothing to capture new readers. However, I hope that it can serve as a promise to current readers that the blog will improve.

  Creating controversy seems to be highly effective at gaining new readers as exemplified by two recent incidents involving two high school students and the Governor Brownback and Dr. Burzynsky. The first high school student, Emma Sullivan, wrote a tweet about Governor Brownback saying that she said mean things to him in person. It had the hash-tag #heblowsalot attached to it. The governor's office responded inapropriately by contacting her school where the principal proceeded to rip her a new one over the issue, ordering her to write an appology. She refused to write the apology because she was acting within her First Amendment Rights. The second student, Ryhs Morgan, wrote a "scathing post" about Dr. Burzynsky's quack treatment for cancer citing data from actual doctors as well as a few skeptical watchdog sites. His office sent Morgan several e-mails citing Libel laws and threatening to sue. Morgan responded by researching the legality of the claims and finding the legal precedent for actions required for the suit to come before a court. Dr. Burznsky's office met none of the legal requirements and the post is available here. Both of these bloggers now enjoy much increased readership. I may be able to stumble into some controversy of my own just with the political and misconception based posts.

  The plan is laid out, the stage is set, all I need to do now is perform. I look forward to writing about the research ideas I have, ranting about potentially damaging laws, geeking out over new gadgetry, exposing faulty science and con artists, discussing religious brainwashing, and having conversations with my audience. I hope I find lots of readers interested in reading about all those things and participating in constructive ways.