| A friend recently suggested that I might be wasting my time writing this journal. The reasoning was straightforward. Some of the articles take quite a bit of time and thought to put together, yet they attract relatively few likes and comments are often practically non-existent. If people were genuinely reading, surely there would be more evidence of them? Perhaps nobody was really bothering, and if nobody was reading, why was I spending so much time writing? I didn’t agree. I’d always suspected that the visible WordPress audience represented only a small part of the journal’s actual readership. People can arrive via Google and other search engines, read something, and disappear again without ever having a WordPress account, pressing a Like button, or leaving a comment. Nevertheless, my friend had raised a perfectly reasonable question. I believed people were reading, but had I ever actually looked closely enough to know that, or was I simply assuming I was right? There was really only one way to find out. |
| A Little Journal Searching What followed was a bit of what I’ve decided to call journal searching. Not soul-searching, because I wasn’t wondering whether I should stop writing. Quite the opposite. Finding things to write about has never been particularly difficult for me. One idea usually leads to another, and occasionally an innocent question turns into ten articles before I’ve quite worked out what happened. In fact, I’d already made quite a significant change about six weeks earlier. I decided that the blog and the Earthly Comforts business website should no longer be connected. They had originally sat much closer together, which made sense since much of what I was writing concerned gardening and the business. Still, over time the writing had wandered considerably further afield. So I separated them. Earthly Comforts is the business, and The Gardener’s Curious Journal is something entirely separate. One has a practical job to do — explaining who we are, what we do and the gardening services we provide. The other doesn’t really have a job at all. It’s simply somewhere for all the other stuff. That mattered to me because by then I’d accumulated a considerable body of writing. I didn’t want to throw it away simply because it no longer belonged alongside a business website, and I certainly didn’t want to stop writing. I wanted somewhere those articles could remain, and somewhere new ones could continue to appear without having to ask whether they had anything whatsoever to do with running a gardening business. That’s really what The Gardener’s Curious Journal has become. Gardening naturally comes up because I’m a working gardener, and it’s part of my everyday life. Still, the gardener is the person doing the observing rather than a restriction on the subject. Wildlife, insects, history, science, memories, environmental change, strange discoveries, things I’ve experienced over the years and the occasional “what if?” are all equally at home here. My friend’s challenge therefore came at an interesting point. I’d already decided what I wanted the journal to be; what I hadn’t really examined was how it was actually performing. For some time, I’d generally published at one of two times, 7.45 am or 4.45 pm, sometimes once a day and occasionally twice. Maybe I was publishing too much, maybe I wasn’t. Perhaps the times mattered, perhaps they didn’t. Maybe individual articles were disappearing too quickly beneath whatever came next. The truth was that I hadn’t looked closely enough to know. So I tightened the introduction and settled on a description that seemed to capture the journal rather well: A personal journal by a working gardener, following curiosity wherever it leads. That explained what it was. But my friend’s challenge had left me with another question: Was anybody actually reading it aside from me? Then I Looked at the Numbers I opened the statistics and looked properly at the previous seven days. There had been around 1,200 views from 864 visitors. I wasn’t expecting that. I’d always believed that more people were reading than the handful of likes and comments suggested. Still, until my friend challenged my reasons for continuing to write, I’d never really stopped to examine the figures closely enough to prove it one way or the other. The numbers were reassuring. Obviously, they aren’t enormous in the wider world of the internet, and I’m certainly not about to trouble any of the world’s great publishing empires. Still, neither are they insignificant for one bloke’s personal journal. More importantly, 864 visitors is certainly nobody. What interested me even more was where those visitors were coming from. Only a relatively small amount of the traffic was arriving through the WordPress Reader. Considerably more was coming through search engines and other routes. People had visited from Britain and the United States, as well as China, France, Pakistan, India, Australia, Malta, Italy, Ghana, and elsewhere. Most of them weren’t making any noise. They arrived, looked at something and disappeared again without leaving a like, comment or any other obvious indication that they’d ever been there. So the figures themselves hadn’t really surprised me. What they had done was confirm something I’d suspected for quite a while: the journal was considerably busier than it looked. WordPress Busy and Reader Busy Aren’t the Same Thing Spend any time around WordPress, and you’ll find personal blogs with wonderfully active communities. Someone publishes something, and familiar names begin to appear underneath. There are likes, comments, replies and conversations, sometimes between people who have been following one another’s lives and writing for years. Look at that from the outside and naturally you think, that’s a busy blog. Then look at an article with two likes and no comments, and it can feel as though nobody came through the door. But perhaps I’d been comparing two slightly different things. One is community activity, and the other is readership. They’re certainly connected, but they’re not the same thing. A blog can have a relatively small but highly interactive group of regular WordPress followers. At the same time, another can receive considerably more visits from people who arrive through search engines and never interact at all. There’s also something I have to acknowledge if I’m going to write about this honestly: I’m not a particularly social blogger. I don’t spend much time travelling around WordPress, visiting other blogs, leaving comments, and getting involved in the conversations surrounding them. That inevitably affects the amount of visible interaction I receive in return. Someone could ask how I can claim not to have time to visit other blogs when I apparently have enough time to produce all these articles. It’s a fair question, and the truthful answer is that it isn’t entirely about time. It’s about how I choose to spend it. If I have a spare hour for the journal, my instinct is usually to create something. Perhaps something happened while I was working in a garden, I’ve remembered something from years ago, or I’ve encountered a plant, animal or insect I want to know more about. Sometimes one of those irritating little questions enters my head and refuses to leave until I’ve followed it somewhere. I could spend that same hour reading other blogs and joining conversations, and I should sometimes. There are some excellent writers on WordPress, and genuine friendships and communities have developed between people who regularly read and comment on one another’s work. But that’s not how I’ve generally chosen to use my blogging time, and inevitably there are consequences. If I rarely knock on somebody else’s door, I can hardly complain that fewer people knock on mine. That doesn’t mean nobody is passing by. The Quiet Reader Looking properly at the statistics made me realise how easily comments and likes can influence our perception of readership. A like or a comment tells me somebody interacted with something I wrote. The absence of either doesn’t tell me that nobody read it. Those are two very different conclusions. Think about how most of us behave online ourselves. We read articles without commenting, find answers on websites without thanking the person who wrote them, admire photographs without clicking Like and enjoy stories before simply closing the page and carrying on with our day. We do it hundreds or thousands of times. Yet when we’re the ones creating something, it’s surprisingly easy to expect the audience to announce its presence. That’s perhaps what I find most interesting about the people I’ll probably never meet. Somebody thousands of miles away can type a question into a search engine and somehow end up here. Someone in Australia might find one of my insect articles, somebody in America might arrive looking for something about gardening, or someone searching for information about a particular plant might discover an article I wrote months or even years ago. I’ll probably never know who most of them were, and they’ll know very little about me. Yet for a few minutes, something that began as an observation, memory or question in my head occupies a little space in theirs. I rather like that. There doesn’t necessarily have to be applause afterwards. One Article, One Time All this journal searching has still prompted me to make a few changes. Until now, I’ve generally used the two publishing times of 7.45 am and 4.45 pm, sometimes publishing once a day and sometimes twice a day. Maybe that was perfectly fine, and maybe it wasn’t. The statistics don’t suddenly provide an answer to every question, and I don’t want to pretend that they do. I’ve therefore decided to simplify things and try one new article each day at 10.30 am UK time. There’s no grand scientific theory behind 10.30. I haven’t discovered a magical moment when people around the world suddenly stop what they’re doing and think, I wonder what that gardener in Kent has been pondering today? It simply seems a sensible middle ground, and one article a day gives each piece a little more space before the next curiosity arrives. Whether it makes the slightest difference remains to be seen, and that’s part of the experiment. I’ve also started putting a simple invitation at the end of articles to visit the Article Directory. That may ultimately prove more useful than changing the publishing time. If someone arrives via a search engine looking for one particular thing, they might wander into the directory and discover something completely different. That’s how curiosity tends to work for me, after all, so it seems reasonable to give readers the same opportunity. So Was My Friend Wrong? Yes and no. If the argument was that hardly anybody was reading because hardly anybody was commenting, then the figures suggest that wasn’t right. The journal was receiving considerably more visitors than its visible WordPress activity suggested, which confirmed what I’d believed all along: much of the audience existed outside WordPress. But my friend’s challenge also exposed something useful. If I wanted a much more active WordPress community around this journal, I’d have to participate more actively in that community myself. I can’t reasonably expect dozens of bloggers to read and comment on my work if I rarely do the same for them. Perhaps I’ll change that a little, although I’ve also realised that I’m quite comfortable with a readership that doesn’t necessarily announce itself. After all, creating a lively WordPress community wasn’t why I separated the journal from the business website six weeks ago. I wanted Earthly Comforts to be Earthly Comforts — the gardening business — while still having somewhere for the substantial body of writing I’d accumulated over the years. I also wanted somewhere I could continue writing without every subject having to pass the test of whether it belonged on a gardening business website. That’s the distinction I was looking for. The business is the business. The journal is the other stuff. And “the other stuff” can be almost anything that interests me. The person who finds one of those articles through a search engine matters just as much to me as the person who leaves a comment underneath it. One announces that they’ve been here and the other may never do so, but that doesn’t make the quiet visitor somehow less important. Quiet Isn’t Empty This may apply to more than blogging. We’ve become accustomed to measuring whether something matters by the reaction it produces — likes, comments, shares, followers, hearts and thumbs. They’re reassuring because they’re visible, but they aren’t the only evidence that something has reached another person. A photograph without likes may still have been admired, an article without comments may still have answered somebody’s question, and a story without applause may still have made somebody think. Something written today may also sit quietly for months or years before the right person happens to find it. That’s particularly relevant to the sort of journal I’m now building because I don’t regard these articles as disposable posts that cease to matter once tomorrow’s article appears. They’re gradually becoming a body of work, which was one of the reasons I wanted the journal to exist separately in the first place. So am I wasting my time? I don’t think so. I enjoy writing the journal, which was always reason enough to do it. I wanted somewhere for the things I’ve already written to live, and somewhere I could continue adding to them. It doesn’t need to sell gardening services, generate enquiries or justify its existence as part of a business website. It can just be the other stuff. But it’s also rather nice to have my suspicion confirmed: while relatively few people were saying anything, quite a few were apparently reading. Until now, I kept a rather quiet little journal. Perhaps I still do. But quiet and empty, I’ve discovered, aren’t quite the same thing. And somewhere, somebody may be reading this now without ever telling me they were here. Considering what this article is about, that seems entirely appropriate. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles reflect our real gardening experience and reflection. Some use AI in drafting or research, but never for voice or authority. Featured images may show our photos, original AI-generated visuals, or, where stated, images credited to others. All content is shaped and edited by Earthly Comforts, expressing our own views. |
The Gardener's Curious Journal 