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This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:
ActiveGarage: BLOGTASTIC project
Previous article: Why you can’t afford to ignore blogs today?
A visit to the blogging graveyard
If you started blogging because it seemed cool, you may be struggling or suffering to continue the effort.
- If you are constantly suffering with what to write next, you may not be blogging on the topic that you are passionate about
- If you are not getting enough traffic to your blog, you may not be spending enough time building relationships with your audience.
- If you have ideas but struggling to write, then you are not investing enough in yourself to acquire the skills required to blog
- If you have ideas and are passionate about a topic and are inclined to write but don’t have the time, you have not worked to integrate blogging in your life yet.
In summary, if you are not having fun with blogging, you might want to revisit your decision and see if blogging is really for you. Otherwise, your blog will end up in the blogging graveyard, sooner than later.
There may be other ways you can achieve your career and personal objectives without the blogging effort. It’s better to quit blogging gracefully than waste your readers’ time. Know when to walk away from your blog.
Each day, people add plenty of new noise to the web. Some of the ways people introduce more noise are:
- Maintaining blogs that are well-below average in quality
- Participating in discussions without adding value (users have to sort through what you wrote to get to the meat of those discussions);
- Writing because they have to write something and not because they have something of value to say
- Not having a clear focus and using the blog as a diary or a scratch pad.
- Engage in controversial topics or “topics of the day” just to get traffic
No one has the spare time to sort through the noise. As people grow and become more powerful, they have less time and tolerance for noise. In the long-run, nobody forgives you for lowering the signal-to-noise ratio on or off the web.
Treat your blog with respect. It may take you only ten minutes to post something. You can probably even rationalize a sub-standard post to yourself, but don’t get lured into that trap. Remember that every reader of your blog will probably spend five minutes reading what you wrote. It better be worth their time.
Look at your blogging stats. Multiply the number of readers by the time that it will take them to read it. One poor post can waste hours, days, or months of your total readerships’ time. That’s not the reputation you want to have!
Blogging Tip: On or off the blog, if you are not at your best, revisit your priorities
If you are blogging, why not strive to be the best at it? If you are not the best, you are an also-ran. The best get a premium for what they bring to the table and “also-ran”s typically are just part of statistics.
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow