2. Most of your susbcribers are apparently drawn from the WordPress.com community and perhaps mainly from those who have the time to hang out in the Showcase and Off-Topic Forums.

3. The title of this thread is Followers, you fickle bunch
Was it your intent to attempt to pressure your WordPress.com subscribers, who aren't behaving as you wish them to behave into reading and commenting by creating this thread?

If so then what made you think praising the WordPress.com subscribers you do have and who are reading your posts would not be a better tactic?

Was your intent when creating this thread to vent and seek shoulders to cry on?

P.S. I immediately unsubscribe from any blog wherein the blogger makes any demands on their subscribers regarding frequency of reading and commenting. I do likewise if the blogger bitches about their subscribers at all. If a blogger lacks the kind of passion for their subject matter and the self-confidence to blog on, despite a low readership, and/or if they lack the grace to treasure the readers and comments they do have, my experience is that they won't be around 6 months or a year from now.

With that said, I doubt there has been a writer in history that wrote without wanting an audience. Writing is after all the dissemination of ideas, which is worthless if nobody hears that idea and its ability to communicate and connect with the public. The larger the audience, the better to share those ideas, be they silly or serious. I believe even diary writers believe one day their diary will eventually surface and be held aloft as a work of brilliance.

Any writer, and I was guilty of this not long ago out of bravado, who says they don't care who reads their work is very good at fooling themselves, or not very good at fooling others.

With that said, I'm not writing to please, as I've mentioned, but everyone seems to want to move away from the topic I raised.

The point is that I have x 'followers', which translates into very little. It is a false indicator of audience in my opinion. I think you can almost ignore it altogether, and just look at your visit stats to see if your writing is resonates over time.

Write about things that inspire you and you will in turn inspire others to read you.

Yes, I'll keep typing away. If it's quality, maybe they will come, maybe not.

I'm pretty much done with marketing though. I can't write, be a family man and hold a job while I'm busy shamelessly plugging myself. They'll have to come to me or nothing, somehow.

I guess my point at the start of the thread is that your follower count counts for very little, and I was getting hopeful over nothing. My second day is another of decline, lost one follower, down dramatically on visits.

Thankfully I have a small core who do enjoy it, so press on.

I could get in today, and register, so things looked up.

I took a look at their forums which is a good sign of life, and there's about a post a week which is lucky to get a response. I believe I get more traffic than they do.

One of the post headers was quite telling, 'Is this site dead' the poster asks. I clicked on that post and the site spun its wheels until the it died. Try again, same thing.

You might want to consider removing that one from your list.

I did look at the writercafe.org, as that seemed a good place to start, but none of the links are working. Wonder if that's still up and running.

900,000 blogs are created every day. Yes, every 1.5 seconds a new blog is created! And 6 months to 1 year from now I'll wager that most of them will be either deleted or dormant.

If you want to have a healthy blog with a decent pagerank a year from now then:
1. Don't get hung up on stats.
2. Don't waste valuable time on idle chat and seeking encouragement from other bloggers.
3. Become a content creation machine and for 6 months consistenely work you butt off to create fresh content frequently and promote it beyong this garden wall at WordPress.com.

To be very blunt, it isn't all about you! Stats go up and down and many people do pop by and read but not comment or give any other indication they have been.

Some days are just slow days, too.

I do have a small steady group that almost always pop by to view my posts, and some people clearly enjoy them, but about 90% of those followers are no shows.

Today I finally fell off a cliff in terms of views. I can't blame it on today's post, as hardly anyone has viewed it, and I can't blame it on yesterday's post, as plenty of people viewed it and apparently enjoyed it.

So even though I enjoy writing for the sake of it, it's discouraging to think you had a steady growing audience only to find it was just a mirage.

Very sad, Woe is me. Maybe it's just a weird, off day. Maybe I need to stop worrying and just keep writing, but it's tempting just to switch the follow widget off.