Blogging: Why Bother, and Who's The Audience?

I've been blogging for a relatively short time in blog years, and it's a continuous learning experience. Like most folks I spend a lot more time consuming blog content than publishing my own. In the process it's hard to avoid observations about other blogs that make your wonder about your own.

You start asking yourself questions like: "Why do I have a blog in the first place?", "Who's the audience?", "What's interesting or useful to that audience?", etc.

Naturally that's a bit of a moving target, and I know that it will evolve over time, but at this moment in time it boils down to:

1. Primary audience are current associates. It's more likely now that I'll use the blog for topics that used to take the form of long emails or papers - often multiple times for the same topic. Now it's more likely that I can simply point them to a blog post the next time. The topic du jour can vary widely, but posts are most often related to challenges that are relevant to whatever we're dealing with at the moment (plus whatever catches my interest).
2. Other reasons… With blogs as important as they are these days, you're pretty much forced to get to know it from the inside out. As "easy" as it is to publish these days, blogging comes with an endless range of related issues, challenges, and opportunities - and new skill sets to master. I have a long way to go!
3. Last but not least, a blog has become pretty much the modern day equivalent of hanging out a shingle. Used to be that meant having a more "traditional" website: who we are, products, services etc. I'm actually glad that I've been too busy for the last several years to ever around to that. Finally dawned on me that it was probably an obsolete idea anyway.

So, current day reality is that this blog's intended audience is mostly immediate associates. If someone else happens along - great. Seems odd to say this because I can be obsessive when it comes to traffic and stats for client sites - but I check my blog stats once a month (if that), don't spend time trying get "dugg", bookmarked, ranked on Technorati, and all that stuff.  Of course the caveat is that your own stuff can be a great lab for trying stuff, so I may change my tune at some point.