Should you blog without readers?

Foregoing how to blog, why to blog, and how to gain readers, I'd like to discuss whether blogging without an audience is a good idea. The simple answer is absolutely. The more complicated answer is yes, absolutely, but you should also be making efforts to gain more readers. The difference are subtle, but it remains that you have every incentive to produce compelling content on your blog on a regular basis, with or without subscribers and readers.

The benefit to the user

Have you ever come to a blog that had 3 posts? Did you ever come back? Chances are if you did, those 3 posts were really good, or you know more about the person writing those posts than usual. More likely, you didn't stay long, and you didn't come back. How can a blog expect to obtain and retain readers if there's nothing for them to read!

The benefit to the search engine 

I almost don't have to discuss this given the audience, but I will anyway just in case. Search engines love content. The text on your page is just about all they have to know what you're about. New content creates a sort of trust within the engines' algorithms and gives them something to crawl. Not only will your domain as a whole benefit from it, but also the act of crawling this content accomplishes 2 things:

1. Written word is crawled and indexed. Your site is added to the index of NEW WORDS and Phrases, and in the case of words already indexed, they are repeated and they are connected amongst each other in new ways.
2. Crawl rate. How frequently your site is crawled is very dependent on how often the search engines find new content. Blogging is the best possible way for creating new content for the search engines to crawl, and to begin to expect new content. Hence, Google will visit you more often.

When Google comes knocking, there aught to always be something new. The very act of blogging will eventually gain you some much coveted search engine traffic. This means more readers, and many of them will read what you've said in the past. In fact, many of them ideally will land on the post they aught to read in the first place!

The reason I chose this topic, in case you're wondering, is that I'm currently blogging to an empty hallway full of nobody. I continue to make posts addressed to the "reader," whom does not exist. I simply don't care and this morning I was considering precisely why. And the reason I'm blogging here and not there? Well I'd like for everyone here to read there as well (note: certainly not instead)... and this topic is important enough I'd prefer it get read by all the people who need to see it. I'll let Rand's Whiteboard Friday on how to network your blog pick up the slack herein.

Got some free time? Get your butt into that chair and start blogging! Doesn't matter if there are no readers. If you build it, they will come.

-just "Fred", of justfredworks.com