Blogging and Social Media

I find the whole blogging experience to be a little strange. This blog is a little bit different from that, as I at least have some notion of who's reading it. However, that's almost never the case on my main blog, my Baseball draft blog. So I've been wondering about the effects of popularity in blogging and how much a writer loses control of their readers if a blog explodes in popularity.

Let me start from the beginning. I love baseball. Behind my wife and my faith, baseball is next. It has always been near the top, mainly because it was the first passion I ever knew as a kid. Having found it impossible to play the game at the pro level, as I was 6'1'' and only 140 pounds coming out of high school, I decided the next best thing would be the stay close to the game on the other side of the ball, the men who are responsible for finding the talent. These men are called "scouts," and I'm part of that fraternity. It's been a long time coming, but my draft blog is now increasingly popular, and I've become an expert of sorts, and I'm drawing traffic at about 40,000 visits a month, and it's still four months until the draft itself.

I don't say this to brag. I say this to make a point. I don't know who reads my blog anymore. At the beginning, there were a few core people who made up my readership, maybe 20-30 people that I knew by name. However, by joining Twitter, making a Facebook fan page for my blog, and by using other baseball blogs as promotions for mine, I've essentially lost control of who my readership is. I don't know them at all. This worries me in a way. In other ways it's exciting. I'm in the middle of transitioning to a blog network where I'll be making ad revenue money and I'm also going to be producing a pair of written products expected to gross a fairly large amount of revenue for someone that's officially considered a full-time student.

To the part that worries me, I don't think I'll ever know who my readers are ever again. I might have an IP address and a username, but I don't know who they are. They could be hackers, spammers, trolls (if you're a member of blogs, you might be familiar with this term), or simply an average fan. I'll never know. That's worrying, both for the business side of things, as it's hard to know my customer, and for the personal side of things, where I don't have the luxury of hiding behind a screen name or anonymity, and everyone else gets to.

I've been thinking about this subject a lot lately. The more success you find, the more you're unaware of your circumstances. We've already read about that in class, about how IT can help with these sorts of things, but I guess I'm not sure where to start. The raw information is somewhat available, but I'm not sure how to capture the audience I want to capture, while also meeting their needs through my blog and products. It's so strange that something in class has such direct meaning so soon for me, but this does.

Who are my readers?