I have a decent amount of experience with blogs having built hundreds of niche sites that are mostly based on blog style sites. Heck, I even got my wife to do some of it. One of the things that you read about is that in order to build a successful blog you need to blog regularly. Otherwise people lose interest in your blog and find someone else to follow in place of you. After all, people only have so much time. By the time you get back to writing new posts, these people have moved on to other equally interesting bloggers who have remained more active. Is this mindset causing you to keep blogging regularly even when you know you are publishing less than awesome posts?
Do you feel slightly guilty about it? Probably so, huh? Yeah. I know how you feel. It is really hard to keep producing great content (or at least stuff we think is great) on a consistent basis. And, it is absolutely true that you will lose some of your audience if you aren’t blogging regularly. Bummer, but true.
I guess that I am a bad blogger then because I don’t have any intention of publishing new posts once I run out of things to say that I think people might find interesting.
My Take On The Whole Concept of Continuous Publishing
Maybe I am some kind of freak or some kind of efficiency Nazi, but I am all about quality. If I can’t produce something that I really like the quality of, then I don’t want to bother with it at all. I don’t like reading on other people’s blogs and being disappointed in the quality of a post. That bums me out because I feel like I have wasted my time spent reading it. Isn’t that bound to happen if you are just pumping out new posts just for the sake of content volume?
Do you like reading about the same blogging topics over and over and over again without anybody adding anything really new to the conversation? Yeah, me either. It gets old, doesn’t it? That is another thing you run into when you are publishing just for the sake of content volume.
The blogs I like the most are the ones where every single article is juicy. One good example is Steve Pavlina’s blog. The first time I came across that blog, years ago, I was instantly hooked. I had to read every article. I downloaded his podcasts when he started doing them. I had to hear it all. I had to read it all. It was all juicy. I don’t know that he ever really published new articles just for the sake of publishing. It seems like he always had something worthwhile to say.
I admit that since I have read everything there at least once already, that I don’t really have an incentive to return very often. I still do return once in a while though. I do it just to re-read something that I remember him saying. Those are the kinds of blogs I really like. Those are the kinds of blogs that I wish I was capable of creating and determined enough to follow through with it.
I like juicy content without the fluff. I am all about maximum efficiency. Obsessive compulsive? Maybe…….
Are you guilty of posting new content that you didn’t really feel good about for some reason other than pleasing your visitors? Be honest…..Are you guilty?
Oh, I guess we’d all have to say we were guilty of it at one time or another. My first hub on Hub Pages, Blogging Lists, although not bad content, had nothing to do with the title except that with my vague understanding of SEO at the time I thought I needed to create a “brand” so I looked for something no one else was using in Google keywords, lol, not knowing that it helped to also pick keywords people were searching for!
Anyway, have learned a little more since then. But I’m always agonizing over what to do with that first article: rewrite to fit the title? It’s one of my best performing Hubs because it is the oldest!
Now I think I might err in the favor of not writing enough hubs so that people might go on to something else. But that’s just how I roll, lol!
Hi Patti,
Just so you know, when you try to link out to hubpages articles using blog comments, I think they automatically get caught by the Akismet spam filter. A lot of people use Akismet. So it is hard to build links to deep pages using that method unless you know the blog doesn’t use Akismet. I am telling you this because your comment was in my Akismet spam bin. I dug you out of there.
I guess if your old Hub is making money then who cares? Right? Sometimes when you step in stuff you come out smelling nicely anyway.
Hello Ted,
I really like your attitude to blogging. I, too get tired of reading the same articles over and over. I do try to make my posts original by adding my personal story and applying the topic to my niche market of environmental sustainability in business. So far, I haven’t run out of things to talk about, only struggle with the time it takes to produce frequent quality content. Thanks.
Hi Rachael,
As long as you are adding your personal story then the post is probably going to be interesting. That is really what people are interested in I think.
One thing that I do when I am writing is to just imagine that I am having a conversation with one other person. I picture them sitting in the room with me. Then I just write what I would say if they were sitting there. I think that helps to inspire you to write and therefore makes the whole process much easier.
I also find that my articles are better if I write them ahead of time and let them ferment for a while in a special folder for new content. Then before I go to publish them, I read each one again. Some end up in the garbage. Some get tweaked ever so slightly. I find the quality is better after a second read with a fresh mind having not thought about the topic of the article for at least a week. It is easy to spot obvious mistakes that way when you otherwise may have overlooked them.