Blogging
June 21st, 2006
One thing I notice about blogs is the vast majority of people get bored of blogging and stop blogging around a month or two after starting. The end of a blog is usually associated with a promise to start again after the exams or after the vacation but I find that most of the time, the blog will just die there. In fact, I’ve almost stopped blogging on several occasions for the same reason - I made a concious effort to keep blogging during my exam period as I knew I’d otherwise never get back in the swing of things.
I’ve probably been blogging for three years now - I started this blog in April 2004; before that I had various other blogs which have now disappeared off the face of the Earth. I’ve made 745 entries since April 2004 - about one entry a day. I’m currently averaging around 12,000 hits a day.
It’s really good fun blogging and you meet loads of great people so it’s well worth maintaining a blog.
Over the last 2 years, I’ve picked up the following blogging tips to try and maintain your blog and allow it to grow:
- Don’t worry about blogging about something which you don’t think will interest your visitors. You’ll find that since you already share many interests the chances are they’ll also share that interest. Don’t blog about what you think your visitors will like; blog about what you enjoy and the visitors will come to you.
- The vast majority of people read blogs through RSS feeds (at least on technology related blogs). RSS makes it really cheap and easy to consume content. You’ll probably find that even if you don’t post for a long time you won’t lose many visitors. This is kind of unique to the blogs; on any other site a lack of content will lose visitors.
- Bad quality content will cause you to lose visitors so it is better not to blog than to spam your blog with low quality content.
- Try to add a bit of original content to each post. If people want a linkdump, they could visit sites such as Digg. Alternatively, consider signing up to a social bookmarking service. If you find that you mainly blog links to other sites with one line descriptions, del.icio.us will allow you to maintain this a lot easier than full blog software. I’m currently using del.icio.us to complement the content of my blog with things I wouldn’t normally post.
- Let a few people know about your blog on forums and through IM screennames and read their blogs too. Actually, this is probably one of my favourite parts about blogging - I’ve discovered so many other fantastic blog posts.
- For blog readers, leaving comments can really encourage the blogger to continue.
Above all, enjoy blogging! Your blog is your space and you can do what you want with it so get creative and involved. Writing your own software or designing your own theme are good for getting involved in blogging a bit more.
If any of you guys have any tips for new bloggers or you have your own blogs, please let me know in the comments!