Limits of First Impressions
It's very difficult to get someone's attention or generate interest with a single tweet or blog post.
I have almost 200 posts on here now, and each one is a potential landing page. That means each post is a potential first impression for anyone who is stumbling blindly around the Internet looking for something, and happens to click a link that leads to one of my posts.
Most of them probably won't stick around for long, or ever come back, for that matter. In all fairness, any one of my posts is probably not worth much on its own. But I'd like to think that, taken in aggregate, I might be able to persuade (trick) a person who's reading my posts into looking at the world a slightly different way, or make them approach a problem in their own lives slightly differently.
Perhaps I'd have a lot more success if each of my posts was written outrageously, and hooked in all readers in the first paragraph. But I doubt I'd be able to do that every day, and more importantly, people who aren't looking to read more than one or two paragraphs aren't really part of the audience that I'm writing for.
Of all the people who find this blog, maybe only 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 bother to stick around and spend some time absorbing the essence of my writing. Those are the people for whom I'm writing, and everyone else represents the limit of what I can accomplish by writing on here. I'm okay with this, because I think I'll have a bigger impact on those few people's minds than I would by creating "wow!" content that would captivate everyone else for a few brief seconds.
What that means is that, as a reader, I try to spend some time getting to know a person before I decide whether or not I'm interested in what they have to say. It's easier to quickly jump to conclusions given a small amount of information than it is to aggregate and make sense of lots of stuff.
I have almost 200 posts on here now, and each one is a potential landing page. That means each post is a potential first impression for anyone who is stumbling blindly around the Internet looking for something, and happens to click a link that leads to one of my posts.
Most of them probably won't stick around for long, or ever come back, for that matter. In all fairness, any one of my posts is probably not worth much on its own. But I'd like to think that, taken in aggregate, I might be able to persuade (trick) a person who's reading my posts into looking at the world a slightly different way, or make them approach a problem in their own lives slightly differently.
Perhaps I'd have a lot more success if each of my posts was written outrageously, and hooked in all readers in the first paragraph. But I doubt I'd be able to do that every day, and more importantly, people who aren't looking to read more than one or two paragraphs aren't really part of the audience that I'm writing for.
Of all the people who find this blog, maybe only 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 bother to stick around and spend some time absorbing the essence of my writing. Those are the people for whom I'm writing, and everyone else represents the limit of what I can accomplish by writing on here. I'm okay with this, because I think I'll have a bigger impact on those few people's minds than I would by creating "wow!" content that would captivate everyone else for a few brief seconds.
What that means is that, as a reader, I try to spend some time getting to know a person before I decide whether or not I'm interested in what they have to say. It's easier to quickly jump to conclusions given a small amount of information than it is to aggregate and make sense of lots of stuff.