Thursday, September 5, 2013

Crossroads: The Future of this Blog

Dear readers and contributors:

We need your input.

Throughout the blogosphere, blogs are seeing less traffic. Unless they are very popular blogs, usually by famous people or well-known experts in their fields, blogs are not attracting readers like they used to. It's partly a matter of over-saturation. The number of blogs has sky-rocketed, and people only have so much time to read them, so smaller blogs don't get as much attention as they once did. It's also due to things like Twitter and Facebook, which have become popular places to look for information.

Here at Utah Children's Writers, we've seen a reduction in readership and comments over the past few months, and a similar drop in the frequency of posts. It might be a summer slump, or we might be following the current trends in the blogging world, or maybe it's a combination of both.

Let us hear from you. How much value do you get from this blog? How could we make it better? What topics are interesting to you? What will keep you coming back and commenting?

How can we make this a more vibrant part of the Utah writing community? Do you like reading blogs, or would you prefer to see us make our Facebook page (yes, we have one--look for Utah Children's Writers) a more active center for our community?

We don't plan to go away anytime soon. We enjoy providing what we hope is interesting and useful information for writers of all levels. But we want to make sure we are providing a useful service, and that there's not a better way to build and support our community of writers. If there's a better way to support the community these days, we're open to change.

Let us know how best to serve you.

Thanks for your input,

The blog admins

4 comments:

Yamile said...

I'm guilty of not posting on my own blog and here, not reading blog posts, and sometimes, not commenting. My excuse is that I do a lot of reading on my phone, and with blogger captcha it's really hard to comment sometimes.
I love it when we have specific events, like the 30 Days 30 Stories. I'd love more Contest (without a reward, just participating is fun), word wars, maybe guest posts by Utah authors whose books are coming out. I'd like to see more news, like author events and even recaps of the different writing conferences in Utah. I do comment more on FB, again, because it's more phone friendly.

Anonymous said...

I love connecting through this blog, although I am a reluctant commenter and have been accused of lurking. Summer is a hard time to keep up with things, so it may be a summer slump. My favorite blogs have started posting their blog posts on facebook, it helps me keep up and makes it easier to comment. I would hate to see this blog disappear.

Unknown said...

Love the blog. I only have time for a couple that I follow regularly and this one is on the list.

Julie Daines said...

I know I missed a few posts because of summer travels. But I think there are more people who read and benefit from this blog that don't comment.