My Blogging Mistakes At The Start Of 2007.
- I regret buying blogs that have potential but are related to topics that I have no knowledge of interest in.
- I’ve spent too much time worrying about grammar nazis and what they’ll make of my writing. This has stopped me from writing entries in the past. It’s my aim to write in a way that I’m comfortable and that can be understood by the majority of my readers. A few spelling/grammar mistakes aren’t that important.
- As I mentioned yesterday, I should have started postdating entries much earlier!
- I feel like I’ve neglected interacting with other bloggers. I rarely comment on blogs and it can take me a few days to answer emails. I guess that I’m just a little bit shy.
- I’ve placed too much emphasis on post quantites and word counts. I need to evaluate my work with a more goal orientated approach (How many new subscribers should each new post attract? How many backlinks on average? How much revenue should each post generate per day?). Word count isn’t strictly tied to post quality. Aaron Wall is great at getting a point across using very few words.
- I need to reintroduce a weekly “Powerful Posts of The Week” entry that links to some of the best stuff out there. This will be especially useful when I’m struggling to come up with ideas for posts.
- I need to stop proscrastinating and actually implement ideas instead of getting boiled down in the specifics and doing nothing.
- I’ve undervalued feed subscribers for far too long. Some of you might remember this ill-informed rant a few months ago which questioned the need for subscribers. Since then I’ve realised that review sites take into consideration your subscriber tally when they decide upon your price, which is only fair as it’s a reasonable means of gauging a blogs popularity.
- I regret adding only reciprocal links to my Blogroll in recent months. I think it should contain links that are useful to people out there.
- I regret spending too much time writing articles for Digg rather than my readers. Although to be honest from August 2006 to February 2007 I didn’t have very many. I still think it’s crucial to cater for your existing readers even if they are in single figures. It’s far too easy to overlook word of mouth as a means of popularising your blog.
3 comments for this entry:
May 16th, 2007 on 9:28 pm
A bit more about the value of feed subscribers as mentioned in point #8:
Feed subscribers often don’t notice when you’ve skipped days (or weeks) of posting, because the RSS aggregator is doing all the work of checking. On the other hand, a traditional user, one who manually checks the site everyday, is going to feel frustrated if they don’t find new content. For them, those are wasted clicks that could have been spent, say, looking up Paris Hilton pictures.
May 17th, 2007 on 8:10 am
Michael,
That’s a very good point.
May 17th, 2007 on 11:32 am
I agree with you on the blogroll exchange comment – I recently wrote an article about why I avoid link exchanges on my blog.
- Martin Reed