Hitting It Big as a Blogger?

We give the prefix mega to a church with over two thousand regular attendees. Perhaps it would be helpful and objective to consider the epithet megablog as one with two thousand regular readers. I dunno.

But the question of how we measure success as online writers causes me to excavate what’s buried in my own heart, as well as evaluate what we might consider subjective and objective metrics of success. How do you define hitting it big?

J.A. Medders and Chase Replogle both interviewed pastor and author Scott Sauls on their writing podcasts (Home Row and Pastor Writer, respectively). In these interviews, Sauls spoke of publishers who courted him to write a book, but he also spoke of the resistance he felt for years toward this pursuit. I don’t know if the courting happened because of his blogging, his pastoring, his networking, or all of these together. In my anecdote about Sauls, there are no metrics to quantify “big,” but to me this should count as hitting it big. This is not to discount the work he eventually had to do to write proposals and complete manuscripts, but most authors have to court publishers, not the other way around.

I suppose someone from the outside could look at the websites that have published my work and feel that I have made it big—at least with respect to relationships with editors at popular evangelical websites. But every relationship with an editor did not come through my blog, even though at first I suppose having the blog (and a local church pastorate) established a measure of legitimacy. My point is that, to my knowledge, no editors have ever looked at my blog saying, “Man, we need some posts from that guy.”

Objective metrics can be helpful because I fear the dangers of a sliding scale. The fear of thinking to hit it big always means something more than where you currently are, something always just out of reach and around the corner, something like rowing toward Gatsby’s green light. An author hasn’t hit it big until he’s as well-known as, say, Keller. This is silly . . . and sinful. I’m in an online group for Christian writers, and we recently discussed blogging struggles. The most successful blogger among us commented, “One thing I can attest to is that if ‘bigger’ is your goal, nothing will ever be big enough. . . because ‘bigger’ isn’t really a measure of having more readers than you do now, but having more readers than the other guy.” This is the sliding scale I fear and the one that will bleed your joy and devour your contentment.

In that same discussion I told a friend that I had not “hit it big blogging,” and he asked what I meant by that. I guess what I mean is that after blogging weekly for over five and a half years, I have just over three hundred email subscribers. My open rate on emails is around 40 percent, which floats just above industry standards for religious emails (per MailChimp), but it does mean that only about one hundred people open each email I send. I suspect that far less than this go on to read the email they opened. My “click rate” within each email hovers around 1–2 percent, which is tiny. And almost no one except me ever shares my blog posts on social media, and I only share each post once at most. By the way, allow me to break the fourth wall for a moment to interject to say that I’m not crying or upset and hopefully not ranting; I’m just disclosing what’s behind the curtain.

At the end of the year, a number of bloggers shared on social media their blog traffic from 2019. A few friends of mine had tremendous years, which I loved and rejoiced over when I saw the numbers. My friend Chris, who asked me to define hitting it big, had web traffic numbers twice as big as my best year, which was twice as big as all my other years. That’s objective, not subjective. And I’m not complaining. I’m simply saying that over the last year when I wrote more guest posts than ever and appeared on a few podcasts and published several longer projects, my blog subscribers stopped growing. Sure, I occasionally get new subscribers, but every email I send loses subscribers too, often several. All this happens while my friend John Beeson and I work on a book about blogging. A guy writing a book about blogging should be able to grow one.

If we could measure the number of people who read my posts—not measuring “page views” and those who only skimmed a paragraph or two but measuring those who actually read an entire post—I think the number of people reading most of my posts could be counted on two hands, or maybe two hands and two feet. I’d hardly say having seventeen people read each post qualifies as big readership. And over the last six months my blog might even be shrinking. Adding more subheadings, lists, and hot-takes would get more readers to skim my posts, yet I’ll often find myself intentionally writing posts without headings, lists, and hot-takes just to reward readers who read, like putting a candy bar in the bottom of my kids’ laundry baskets to reward them for staying the course until the job is done. (I don’t do that, by the way.)

Perhaps the shrinking of my readers has to do, in part, with my writing and blogging skills. I don’t want to deflect ownership. But my shrinking readership also reflects changes in culture and Internet algorithms. A large number of shares on Facebook, for example, does not happen today except for a few bloggers. Facebook algorithms want you to stay scrolling and liking and reading Facebook, not clicking away. It’s the same with Google. It used to be that when you searched a question, you were given links to go browse. Of course Google still returns links, but more often than not, the top links are simply excerpts that show searchers the answers to their questions. So, if you crush the SEO on a post (which I never worry about) and Google ranks your post near the top or even at the top of all posts, you still might not get many click-overs because searchers only want the bite-sized answer, and Google feeds it to them. Besides all this, the idea that lead magnets generate hundreds of email subscribers has lost the novelty it once had. Who thinks, “What I need is an inbox filled with more subscription emails”?

Blogging also must compete with other platforms for attention. In Tony Reinke’s book Competing Spectacles, he describes attention as a zero-sum commodity. “At some point we must close all our screens and fall asleep” (p. 57). Reinke quotes the CEO of Microsoft who noted, “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention” (p. 57). This certainly affects bloggers and blogging. The streaming services of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video gobble up the precious resource of attention leaving individual online authors and their blogs to compete for the table scraps of attention with large conglomerate blogs, Christian news ministries, podcasts, YouTube channels, and the microblogging of twitter threads and Instagram posts. A friend once told me that when it comes to playing outdoor sports (e.g., skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking, etc.), you have to pick one or at most two because they’re too expensive and time-consuming. The same could be said of excelling at a craft and cultivating an audience. It’s a rare person who can excel across all the platforms available to the dedicated amateur.

For all these reasons—the changing Facebook and Google algorithms, the cultural aversion to trading one’s email address for subscriptions, and the crowded market of ideas vying for attention—the blogging landscape has changed, and so should our expectations for growth. Comparing the success of average bloggers today with the success of average bloggers just five and certainly ten years ago is like comparing baseball stats of today with the stats during the steroid era, which often get flagged with an asterisk.

We Christian bloggers have a strange relationship with metrics. We love them and hate them. We need “page views” to validate our labors and we loathe the magnetism statistics have over us. It’s not unlike the pastor who laments the Monday morning deluge of emails while at the same time knowing each inbox ping supplies a spurt of dopamine reassuring him of his job security and importance: people need me—look how they email. Deep down most Christian bloggers do want to write for the sake of God and his glory, for the sake of truth, for the sake of serving readers with our words. But I also know that for me, the mottos of “art for God’s sake” and “art for ego’s sake“ slosh about in the same heart. 

Professor and author John Koessler recently wrote, “What if, like Emily Dickinson, we die without seeing the bulk of what we have written published?” It’s a good question. Today bloggers can publish whatever we want as fast as we want, but most of us know what it means to self-publish posts long labored over only to hear crickets, which means there are more similarities to Dickinson and her mid-nineteenth century writing in obscurity than we might expect. Koessler continues, “The romantic in me says that it doesn’t matter. I am a writer. Therefore, I must write. But it is often the pragmatist who sits at the keyboard. I am afraid I am wasting my time. I worry that no one is listening.” While Koessler worries about no one listening, I often have the stats to prove no one was. So why keep blogging?

My reflections here about how we measure success as a blogger are too long-winded and probably say more about me and my existential blogging angst than the topic, so please forgive me. But the point I’m trying to meander toward is seeing the goodness of what Laura Lundgren calls being a “village poet.” A village poet views success as faithfully serving a small number of readers with our words, not as a resignation to the state of affairs but as a goal. “When I first arrived,” Lundgren writes, “the internet felt wide open with possibility.” In a world that expects and rewards all things done fast and famously, the biggest challenge for Christian writers might be to find joy in being faithful with the little things. Lundgren goes on to say, “My writing has not turned into a career. It’s mostly a hobby and a privilege. As a village poet I recognize that my writing is only one aspect of a larger ministry. Writing gives me a chance to order my thoughts about Scripture, but the ultimate goal is not to write well about these things but to live them out in obedience and humility.”

I think she gets it. I wish my heart did too.

* Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash