I have been thinking about changing my approach to blogging on Steemit. The main thing I want to do is increase my reach and the size of my audience. I have read a number of contributions about becoming a widely followed content producer on Steemit and am trying to come up with tactics and a strategy to increase my readership. Aside from the kind of content I am producing, which I am not really interested in changing, I have realized there are three things I should focus on: length, frequency and readability.

One piece of advice I found repeated a lot was that contributions shouldn't be too lengthy. For those of you who read my work, you know length is an issue I rarely reflect on. Things are as long as they need to be to get the message across and I have rarely posted something less than 1000 words in length. Given that most people seem to place the "sweet spot" somewhere between 250-600 words, I am doing it all wrong from that perspective. Fair enough, reducing length is something I can definitely work on.

Frequency was the next issue I had to consider. All of the highest reputation contributors on Steemit post frequently. Some of my favorites post three or four times a day. I'm not sure how they manage that, but with my full time job, my reading addiction and trying to maintain a satisfying social life offline, increasing frequency is a challenge. Given the length of my posts and, in many cases, the amount of research and references they include, increasing frequency seems a tough nut to crack. By reducing the research that goes into each post and reducing length, I hope to be able to post more frequently.

The final thing I considered was readability. As an educator, I am used to rating texts to make sure they are of an appropriate level for my students. So I did something I probably should have done a long time ago, I ran some of my own texts through the Text Readability Consensus Calculator. Maybe I shouldn't have. Apparently my serious stuff, the stuff I really want most people to read, is not that accessible or appealing in terms of readability.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my "best hits" financially, Meeting Athena is ranked at 9th grade level and is "fairly easy to read", being appropriate for 13-15 year olds, and my next best Eternity is a Closed Circuit ranked out almost exactly the same. One of my personal favorites on the other hand, the first installment of Towards Voluntaryism (Part 1), came in at 17th grade as "very difficult to read", appropriate only really for college graduates. Even those who could read it would likely have been hard pressed to say it was fun to read. (What you are reading right now ranks out at grade 10 - see Appendix 1!)

What this means for me is that, to increase my readership, I should focus on my fiction and work on formulating my serious topics to be more readable. How exactly I do the latter is a curious challenge, but definitely something worth working on. I may have an exciting vocabulary and be capable of crafting labyrinthine syntax, but is that really helping me gain readers? Apparently not. See Appendix 1, that means scroll down when you're done reading!

In the future, I will be trying to address the issues of length (this text is already more than 600 words and thus "too long"), frequency and readability in crafting my posts. Doubtless I will not be able to distance myself completely from my overly lengthy and academic style, as there are some topics that deserve that treatment, but to achieve a wider readership on Steemit, it doesn't seem reasonable from a time-invested-to-followers-gained ratio to stubbornly maintain my current approach. I think the change will be worth it if I can reach more people with a message of critical thinking and Voluntaryism. What do you think?

.
.
.
.
.

Thanks for reading!
.
.
.
.
.
Ha ha! You thought you were done reading already, but now comes that academic style appendix with lots of interesting graphs and charts, you don't want to miss it!

The readability issue was such an interesting train of thought for me that I got lost for two days doing research on literacy and readability. That certainly didn't help my frequency :P

With a little snooping around the internet what I found surprised me. Fortunately, what I wanted to research has already been treated in an excellent article by [Shane Snow: "How much does 'reading level' matter?"]. It was a real wake-up call. It turns out, the more widely received an author is or the more widely read a news source is, the more simply they formulate their texts. Look at these charts:

When we compare this with one of the largest studies on Adult Literacy in America by the National Center for Education Statistics, we can see why this is the case. A surprising portion of the adult population is just not able to get much out of prose written above the 12th grade level.

"Prose literacy — the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts that include editorials, news stories, poems, and fiction; for example, finding a piece of information in a newspaper article, interpreting instructions from a warranty, inferring a theme from a poem, or contrasting views expressed in an editorial." (p. 3)

On a 500 point scale, the average prose reading proficiency after 12 years of education is 270 (p. 25), 322 for four year college degrees and 336 for graduate degrees. This is roughly the difference between "being able to identify a piece of information in a short news article and being able to compare and contrast information in lengthy text" (p. 27). "...only 10 to 13 percent of high school graduates reached the two highest levels... Fifty percent (of four-year college graduates) were in Levels 4 or 5."

What this means for me is that my serious posts have been targeting roughly 3% of the population in reading skills and an even smaller subset based on my choice of topics.

Rather than hash out all the data, I will just present another series of charts here for your perusal, starting with a descriptor set of prose levels 1-5:

And, so you can see what my posts are like when processed by the [Text Readability Consensus Calculator] here just two screenshots of my results, Meeting Athena and Towards Voluntaryism (Part 1)

Meeting Athena

Towards Voluntaryism

Okay, now you really are done! Thanks for reading!