I blog about tea party stuff 90 percent of the time. I get decent readership with those blogs, and I appreciate my loyal followers. Very much.
But as long as I write about stuff only conservatives and activist libertarians care about, only conservatives and libertarians will read my blog. That means our ideas won’t escape the echo chamber we’ve been yelling in for years.
When I write about the conservative/libertarian perspective on issues of wider interest, though, I bring in people who never otherwise read our views.
Here’s what happened to page views when I blogged about cannabis reform Thursday and Saturday:
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And these were not my usual readers. They came from sites like UrbanSTL.com. And those new visitors from non-conservative sites came away with a more positive view of our movement.
Before you say it, I’m not a link whore. I don’t scan Google Trends to blog about the most searched topics of the day, and I don’t suck up to popular bloggers to get inbound links. I’ve advocated cannabis law reform for years, though not so publicly as I have since January 2012.
The point is this: if you want to attract people to your views, to persuade them to at least take a listen to you, you have to speak their language and interests. Clearly, cannabis reform is more interesting to more people than, say, Great Streets projects or Blue Ways or Agenda 21.
So, to those who want to know why I’d bring up something as controversial as cannabis law reform now, I’ll say this: we won’t attract advocates and voters to our other issues if we don’t talk about their issues first.