I love what you closed with; “I’m a firm believer of writing what you’d want to read first, and if others enjoy it too then that’s a nice bonus. Otherwise, aren’t you just kidding yourself and your readers?”

Gold dust (again) from Mr Brown.

There are too many bloggers that get deep into the numbers. Sure, it’s great to have thousands upon thousands of readers/subscribers, etc, and if you’re “in it” for sponsorship, the numbers help.

But the reason you got those readers in the first place is because of what you wrote, not who you wrote for. It’s a very dangerous fine line and many cross it and regret it later.

I’m a firm believer of writing what you’d want to read first, and if others enjoy it too then that’s a nice bonus. Otherwise, aren’t you just kidding yourself and your readers?

I love your suggestion that as bloggers, we need to be “staying fresh and focused.” Spot on sir. There’s a lot of gold in them 4 words!

Having a focus, a ‘true north’ to guide the direction of the blog is really important. I also believe that as bloggers, we need to get as much valuable information out there to as many interested people as you can.

This blog is just a few weeks old and I am already studying the full range of feedback, in order to ensure I am as relevant as possible, to the people who are kind enough to visit here. Thanks for the valued feedback as always sir!!

There are certain posts that cover a subject, which I know will attract a lot of hits. I blogged recently on my tech news blog about the launch of Windows 7 and got over 5000 page views in less than a day. Equally, the post before it which was about a message the co-founder of Friendfeed sent me only hot a few hundred.

For me it’s less about the number of views a post gets and more about focusing on what I believe is genuinely worth sharing. If you lose track of that as a blogger, you lose the blog’s direction.

While I love getting comments, I actually just go out and ask people what they think. See…if nobody tells you, you pretty much won’t ever know. What makes that post get read 10,000 times from the perspective of this guy or that guy? Do those two match up at certain points? Etc…

I find questions easier to interpret than numbers. My Dad once said that at a certain point, numbers get so high they might as well all be one.

For us, our blog’s goal is to publish useful information for our ecommerce niche, while gaining additional SEO benefits from the topics we publish. It’s tempting to lose sight of this, and start publishing content for our wider Twitter followers, or to try and rise in the ranks of other similar blogs. But this would be a mistake (not that we ignore this area entirely) as our niche is our “bread and butter”, so we must always keep it in the forefront when developing new content.

Rob – LexiConn

Your correct though. Its an easy habit to fall into whereby you continually cater to a few responsive individuals on comments and adapt your writing to suit them, moving you into a comfort zone that can be difficult to get out of and which ultimately stunts your site, and probably your personal growth.

Taking the time to look at the big picture and consider all the different types of response that you can get, from RTs on twitter, bookmarks, references and quotes on another blog or even a phone call to say well done, the extent, range and depth of response can be dramatic.

Its really a matter of staying fresh and focused, most of the time, in my opinion anyway and realising that there’s more than any single thing out there when it comes to measuring response and value to your visitors.