Ramit Sethi wants you to know he hate[s] bloggers who waste their time on stats.
I’m not sure he really, truly harbors an intense personal hatred towards specific offending individuals, but his point is a very good one: content is what brings readers, assuming that readers are something a blogger is looking for.
I’ve occasionally fallen into the trap of looking a little too much at website stats myself, and spending maybe a wee bit too much time tweaking design elements of my websites that really don’t matter. (On the other hand, I am a geek, and tweaking HTML and CSS can be fun; sue me.) I’ve also (especially lately) succumbed to the trap of posting Not Very Much New Interesting Content At All.
So despite the simplicity of the information, (nutshell: to Gain Readers, Write Lots of Great Content), it’s completely true. I look over the list of blogs that I read regularly, or even semi-regularly. There is not one site that I read because of the software it uses, the web design prowess it displays, or the graphics which adorn it. I have no sites which I have added to my RSS reader due to their impressive use of Ajax and scriptaculous effects. Nope, not even one.
I realize for a lot of bloggers, getting a worldwide audience isn’t really the goal; they just want to continue sharing the things they think with the audience they have, be it friends, family, other like-minded netizens. In that case “good content” is just to continue doing what you’re doing. My friends may be interested if I just sold a house (no, I didn’t, just an example) or installed a new Linux or a learned about a new programming language — the rest of the world? Not too interested in this.
So for what it’s worth: I concur. If readers are what you’re looking for, content is definitely the only thing that will draw them. Period.
