You May Be Sucking The Life Out Of Your Blog…
If you are not careful, you may actually be sucking the life out of your blog. Why do I say this? Well, there are a variety of factors influencing a blog’s success, these include content quality, site design, load time and overall reputation. If one of those is not up to scratch, you may be finding yourself in a situation where your blog does not get visitors and is not very lively. There may be however, other things which are making people steer clear of your domain name.
Basking In The Glory Of Others
I find myself doing it sometimes, and you might do too, it is annoying but you can’t help it. Looking at the A-list bloggers and thinking to yourself, could I be part of that one day? Then I stopped myself and I said, why am I looking at these blogs when I could be writing a post or guest posting?
Turning Point
That was the turning point for me, I made the decision to plod on and continue to write the best content I could and stop blog surfing, and here I am today – much the better for doing so. This relates to sucking the life out of your blog because you spend too much time on other blogs than you do on your own, by doing this you are neglecting the possibility of writing more and attaining a greater readership.
Moments Of Change And Turning Points
There was a time where I was unstoppable, visiting every blog from different corners of the globe – obsessively analysing what they were doing. Despite that being good for their traffic, I was wasting my time. So I stopped doing that, and then I decided to go and become active at the social media sites, this was yet another turning point – and it really helped my blog grow and continues to do so. The third thing I did was to establish a regular maintenance schedule, making sure everything in WordPress was working properly, fixing old posts etc…Stop wasting time, start blogging more, you are sucking the life out of your blog by not focusing on your blog and admiring others which will ultimately – make you feel bad and depressed.
Your Writing Style – Boring Or Conversational
We are humans, we talk to people all the time, we don’t tend to lecture them – we talk about stuff, we sometimes gossip and we may even inspire others. But we don’t present information in a monotonous way. That having been said – some blogs seem like they are trying so hard to dish the facts and have absolutely no sense of persona or humour in their text. Knock! Knock! We are living in the 21st century, no personality equals no audience. People will not return to your blog if you are making them feel like they are back at school reading a boring textbook…they enjoy personal stories, opinions and humour.
What Do Your Blog Posts Lack?
A blog post can never be perfection, but you should still try and make it the best post you can. You can do this by ensuring that your post flows and has substance. This is a point that I try to get across quite often – substance, you can waffle on about a topic for hours (anyone can) but the true attributes of a good blogger is the ability to present a problem or situation and solve it within five or six paragraphs.
Don’t Suck The Life Out Of Your Blog
Be frank, be honest and say what you think. Do not be afraid of disagreeing with something in the news or the recent media, just make sure you have ample reasoning and you can back it up – if you can do this, people will respect you. Of course you may get the ‘haters’ to put it so quaintly, but usually that is a minute percentage of your readership and trust me – they will stay subscribed.
Tags: good-blogger, guest-posting, Social Media, subscribe, traffic, wordpress, writing-style
Posted in Writing
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7 Responses to “You May Be Sucking The Life Out Of Your Blog…”
Hey… thanks for nice article.
This is just what I needed. I’ve started a blog few weeks ago and I’ve just realized that I was paying too much attention to blogs like John Chow, Problogger etc… I should stop wasting my time and instead invest it to my blog, creating more new articles, fixing old ones etc.
Thanks
This site is great for a 16yr old. Nice topic. You are right. I realized this once before and stopped doing that for a while but get back to it later. I guess we are more of a feeder than giver.
I believe that anyone can change Jaklang. The only reason people go to other sites is because they want to be like those sites. But for me, I rarely go to big sites nowadays – partially due to the fact that they are becoming worse as the days go by.
I have decided to stick to blogs that output quality content every couple of days. I have stopped visiting blogs obsessively, I spend my time building my network at sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Mixx. I also build my community at BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. Thanks for your comment.
I can definitely relate to the challenge of getting away from those time-wasting “A-list” bloggers. I have sometimes used up the better part of a day reading and digesting content from other blogs, leaving me little time to write my own posts or do any promotional activities.
Fortunately for us, there is a pretty large group of people out there who do this sort of thing (that is, consume blog content) but who are not very tech savvy, do not own any websites, and are basically clueless about webmaster issues. These folks can be worth attracting as readers because they will sometimes comment on posts in order to register their opinions and ideas and become part of the discussion. This adds content to our sites without us having to worry about what kinds of other sites they are putting in the URL field and linking to us — because they don’t have any!
Thanks I really appreciate this kind of advice! I don’t find myself wasting time checking out other “random” blogs but I do find a lot of time goes to building a network – I know this is good in one way but on the other hand it also sucks up a lot of time! And trying to balance a full time job and blogging and building a network is sometimes (if not always) a big challenge.
Fabien, your post is right on the mark. I used to visit many other popular blogs often- many of us do, and your post is really a timely reminder.