How to Attract Readers to your Blog?

Flora in her bathing suit in Nantucket.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/i-give-myself-permission-to-write-the-worst-first-draft-in-history/

That’s the first and most popular page of this blog, Flo in the City. It sums up what I am trying to do in this blog.

I’ve been writing this Flo in the City Blog now for almost two years, musing about life 100 years ago as compared to now as I deconstruct the Nicholson Family Letters www.tighsolas.ca and write Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

I think it’s about time I took all the posts in hand and edited them, edited them myself,  and sent them to a regular publisher for consideration. 800 posts.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/five-cent-fascinations/

This is a post about the Nickelodeons of the era.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/small-island-montreal-1910-version/

This is a popular post because it is about the famous Black educator, Booker T. Washington, whom Marion Nicholson hears speak in Montreal in 1905. She finds his jokes very funny.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/small-island-montreal-1910-version/

This is a post about the Women’s Political Suffrage Union and their Hunger Strikes, from their era magazine. The suffragettes were good communicators as this shows. I wonder how they would have exploited Facebook and Twitter.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/ice-boxes-wood-stoves-washing-tubs-5th-installment/

This is a popular post, that has an excerpt from my original Flo in the City book, where Flo and Mae visit Sutherland’s drug store and have a Cherry Phosphate.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/lordy-lordy-passing-the-buck-over-a-fatal-fire/

This is an essay about the 1927 Montreal cinema fire in Outremont where many  children died. My grandfather, the Director of Services, testified first at the inquiry.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/shirtwaists-more-than-a-mere-blouse/

This essay is about shirtwaists. I mentioned the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-post.html

My story about my childhood love of horses got a lot of reads this month.

http://thresholdgirl.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/eugenics-and-iq/

Here’s a bit on eugenics and IQ. People today, most educators even, hold the IQ test sacred, yet it is a remnant of the Eugenics movement.

Anyway, this “Best of” exercise is an experiment, to see if it attracts more people to this Threshold Girl blog or my mirror Flo in the City blog on Blogger.com.

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/

But is that the point, anyway.

WordPress is always advising bloggers on how to get more readers.  “How to attract visitors to your blog.”  Their advice: Link to Twitter,Facebook or visit other blogs.

Hmm. The easiest way to get readers is write about sex, use sexy tags. But that attracts the wrong readers…this is a thoughtful blog, meant to educate and, from what I see, students come to it often.

On my www.tighsolas.ca social studies website I once put up a picture of my grandmother and wrote about her humungous boobs. She was fat, which was in fashion in 1900. Boy, I got a lot of visitors, but none of them interested in suffragettes or child labour in textiles, or the purity movement.

Students are often looking for a quick fix, easy answers to exam questions and such. And no one has any attention span nowadays. And we’re all suffering from information overload.

So, What can you do?

Paper and Highlighter

Words on a page.

So, today, I know what I have to do to get cracking on this second draft of Flo in the City. I have to buy more INK.

Because I have to print out 1) the letters 2)the blog and 3)the first draft (which is within the blog.

I have to print them out in at least 12 point, probably 14 and punch holes in the sheets if I can find the three hole punch and arrange them in a 3 separate binders, for the easy flipping through of.

The old fashioned way.

And I will buy highlighters, but not from the dollar store. Good ones.

And coloured Post Its.

My husband says that I should use multiple windows. And that seems sensible, considering the cost of printer ink.

But no good will come of that.

The other day I visited a friend who writes text books and she has this giant high res lcd screen and an Apple system and she writes and edits all day right on the screen.

All very futuristic.

But I’m old fashioned. Just look at my topic.

And here I am thinking that I might also print out important pdfs that I have downloaded: the papers on the 1910 Census, the 1910 Canada Book, Emmeline Pankhurst’s biography; that book on 1904 millinery; that book on 1910 sex-hygiene; those books on family, from 1883 and 1914; that Wellesley Magazine with the report on women and journalism written by an ambitious new woman with the interview with the city editor who said that the newsroom was no place for a woman…all the books I hope to use to write my own book, Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in 1910.

But that will take sooooooo much ink.

I feel like Mark Twain deciding to use a quill pen instead of his trusty typewriter. (I have a quill pen, belonging to the Nicholsons. All I need is an ink bowl or whatever they called it, ink trough, what is the term?

None of the ball point pens in my house ever seem to work. Even the high end ones.

Maybe if I use an old fashioned pen, I’ll get into the mood to write. My thoughts would collect themselves, magically.

The Nicholson letters are not written in ink, there are no blotches. Ink WELL! That’s it.

I remember going to buy my first ‘word processor’ in the 80′s. It was the tiny window in time where they actually were selling stand-alone word processors. PC’s were only for scientists and nerds. Indeed, a scientist I knew told me, at a party, that a PC was an invention in search of a use.

They sure found a use, the INTERNET.

Oh, as well as wordprocessing.

The young man at the computer shop back then treated me and my husband like idiots, so we didn’t buy a word processing machine which was a technological dead-end, anyway. So thank God.

We bought something more silly. A fancy electric typewriter. At the local stationers. For 500.00. (I assumed I was going to have a thriving freelance business while I raised my babies.)

I had worked on an IBM selectric as a radio copywriter, but this typewriter was as useless a machine as can be. For me anyway. (This was 1983 and I recall two of the guys in the office were into computers and talking about it all the time. Seemed boring. Many of my friends were academics and were using some form of Internet email to communicate. That seemed fun.)

And soon, very soon, we bought our own first computer, an AT or something and I got a word processing program. One of the defunct ones. I think this computer had the same amount of memory as one of those fancy Christmas cards you can get today.

I never really used that antique word processing program, not to its full capacity, so it is no surprise that, today, I don’t use this Word 2007 program to its full capacity. Not even close.

Which is why I am printing out all the pages related to Flo in the City and putting them in fat binders to flip through at my leisure, for inspiration. More inspiration. (Maybe some idea will leap up off the page.) Before I get down to writing Flo in the City.

Oh, let’s face it.Writers write. It doesn’t really matter what form of tool they use. If I could chisel this story on a cuneiform tablet, I’d be happy. If I could paint it in charcoal or watercolours or storyboard it in a scrapbook. I’d be thrilled.

The fact is The Story of Flo is already written, and has been there for 1910 years,in the letters. I’m just editing, or annotating or contextualizing.