Friday, September 21, 2007

4 Ways My Blog Has Failed and 4 Ways to Correct it

Hello again. Remember me? It's your favorite blogger. It's sure been a while since my last post. Such is life...and a fate that befalls many blogs. So where did I go wrong? Here's an exciting list:

How My Blog Failed:
  1. Scope - My scope was way too narrow. I wanted to blog about a topic almost as if I were writing a weekly column. In a marketing magazine. For young professionals. That are early-adopters of new media. The segmentation could go on and on...
  2. Not holding my end of the bargain - A blog is a relationship between the blogger and the reader. The reader agrees to visit the blog (or add it to a blog-roll using RSS) as long as the blogger publishes content that's relevant to the reader and with a regularity that meets the reader's expectations. I dropped the ball by letting my blog's frequency slowly degrade from daily to weekly to leaving a number of months since my last post.
  3. Being overwhelmed by what I wanted to say -- I had so much to write in my blog, I just didn't know where to start. I would start writing a post and then decide that I wanted to write about a new topic. The marketer in me has coined a nifty term: BADD: Blogger Attention Deficit Disorder (I wonder if people will post comments contesting the existence of this documented disorder too...:) )
  4. Thinking that every post has to be a dissertation - Somewhere I lost sight of the fact that a blog is simply a place for me to post cool ideas, nifty links, and various thoughts. I don't have to write five paragraphs every single time I want to post.

How I Will Correct My Mistakes:
  1. Scope - While I can't escape the fact that I'm drawn to particular subjects, there's no reason that I shouldn't post something that falls outside of them. From now on I won't limit myself to the narrow subject that I thought of originally. All marketing, promotion, advertising, interactive, etc etc is fair game.
  2. Uphold my promises - I value any readership that my blog gets and I'm going to make sure I don't lose it by not posting with the regularity that a reader expects. From now on, I will post once a day -- even if it's just a cool link I found.
  3. Just come out and say it - While there's so much to talk about in blogs, I'm not going to let it overwhelm me any longer. From now on, I'll accept and act on the importance of producing content for the online community instead of simply being happy consuming it.
  4. Short Posts are Okay - Let's be honest. You don't want to spend 20 minutes reading a blog post of mine anyway. From now on I'm only going to make a post as long as necessary.

In the spirit of #4, I'll end my "Return to Blogging" post now by inviting you to list any lessons that you've learned after blogging for a while. That's if anyone still reads my blog after months of abandonment. :)

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