Last Updated on April 20, 2020
… you started to see that social bookmarking is not just another way of keeping your bookmarks …
… nobody ever votes for your submissions …
… you don’t have any friends, so you submit your own articles …
… you see the same crap you wrote, twisted a little bit and submitted by a “top authority” gaining a huge momentum, which you’ll never experience …
… you don’t want to write about making money online, because you didn’t make any yet …
… you don’t want to write about iPod, iPhone, iWhatever else, because you think those are just expensive toys for those who want to show off …
… you write about iWhatever, but you still get no attention …
Think twice. There is still hope
Remember that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results (Albert Einstein).
Although blogging is dumb, stupid and successful, bloggers shouldn’t be dumb and stupid, and not all of them will be successful. So, leave insanity behind, and focus on the “wind of change”:
1. Define your blogging goals:
- money
- fun
- sharing expertise
- feeding your ego
- keeping an online diary
- learning how to communicate
- building a community around one of your passions
- showing off
- spreading news
- giving things a fresh perspective
- trendsetting
Think back and remember why you started blogging in the first place. Did you follow your goal, or you forgot about it in the process of daily blogging? It is very tempting to write about a hot topic, but if you describe how to make a bomb on a blog about peace, don’t expect hugs and kisses.
2. Revise your blog:
- how unique is your unique selling proposition (USP)
- how unique is your content
- how do you treat your readers
- is your blog’s usability a priority for you
- is your blog a priority for you
3. Revise your marketing & promotion strategy:
- Try to draw the line where promotion ends and spam begins: don’t wait for others to discover your stuff (they are too busy promoting theirs), but don’t flood the internet with it, either. If you don’t know how to differentiate, before submitting a post, put yourself in readers’ shoes: if you’d enjoy reading it, go ahead.
- Spend some time on the social sites where you’d like to get on the front page. Take the pulse of the community. Don’t waste your energy submitting to Sphinn your post about cheese cauliflower. Although those people eat, too, they won’t give a damn (except if cheese cauliflower was recently mentioned on Matt Cutt’s blog, which, of course, is another story)
- Do some good to 5 bloggers every day: a stumble, a digg, a comment, a link, a Technorati fave… it takes less than 10 minutes to make a few people happy a day. The law of attraction says you’ll get the good back.
4. Set your short term goals:
- 5% traffic increase in one month time
- 10 new feed subscribers
- 2 new Technorati faves
- 20 new friends on two social networking sites
5. Make some changes and evaluate your blog again after one month.
6. Most important of all: never take it personally if people ignore you. It’s not an intention, it’s only the daily rush we are all experiencing.
Think of cars in traffic: if you want to change the lane, just put the signal, slow down a little bit, seek permission from the driver behind, and integrate yourself on the new lane. If you wait for the car behind you to stop and let you pass, you’re lost. You’ll have to wait forever, because if people are willing to make a bit of room for you, they are not willing to stop, in order to wait for you to join the party. Go with the flow and you’ll see how the community will open to embrace you.
To end in a thoughtful note, what do you think would have happened if Edgar Allan Poe had a computer?
Nice post. So many times, because of the popularity of blogs, some blogs get the attention randomly, while others do not. The blogs that do get attention, we love their characteristics and can pinpoint their techniques. Blogs that follow the same path and do not get that successful, we offer them advice. It is the same nature of things that is in the offline world: just because something is successful does not mean it is doing the right things, and just because something is not successful does not mean it is doing the wrong things.
Majority of the blogosphere which revolves around the goal of gaining more traffic defines success based on traffic. How does traffic come to a site? Through a search engine most of the time, and the other channels also revolve around search engines. Search engines help those sites that get more incoming links and have more keyword density in the right places. Thus, the very measure of success is based on things like traffic, search engines and a few other things for many sites. The traffic, in turn, will only go to a few sites that they find easily, resulting in many other sites that are out there, but not high on the visibility radar, to not get much attention even if they are better.
In your view, what if a blogger is following their goal and it is still not working, and also, does not getting comments mean someone is producing the wrong type of content or producing content the wrong in the wrong manner?
Thank you Bes, for taking time to share your thoughts.
Regarding your question: if one of my blogging goals is to get comments, I’d focus on that. There is no such thing as “wrong type of content”, but wrong approach of the readers. You have to discover needs, which then you can fulfill with your content. You could write in such a way that readers feel they are important, and that their thoughts are wanted, appreciated and helpful.
I suppose that the number of comments depends very much on the niche of the blog. Definitely, bloggers and internet marketers are talkative people, while gardners might only read the information on gardening and go away to put it in practice, without thinking to write on other people’s websites.
Speaking from a personal point of view, I don’t see why somebody would seek tons of comments on the site. For me it is more important to see that people are sending my content by email to their friends. This is the most rewarding in my opinion. It means I was memorable and helpful and this makes me happy.
One more thing: no product markets by itself. Good content needs good marketing to come into attention, especially in highly competitive markets.