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How To Make Sure Your Blog Stays Great

How To Make Sure Your Blog Stays Great

Becoming a well known, high trafficked site is every Blogger’s site bringing upon link backs, ad revenue and immortality… against the Digg effect. But there will be a point where the beast that is your reader base will never be satisfied — always craving the next posting, and sooner or later you start to slag off…

… Right down to Blog Purgatory. Your readers complain about the lack of content and miss the old you, the young hip you that clawed your way in the Blog-o-sphere. It’s a sad scenario isn’t it? I sure don’t want to be in this position but no one is invulnerable to the feeling of being so great that the Blog writes itself, but there is many ways to prevent this from occurring to you.


WHAT STARTS IT
There are many symptoms of cocky Blogging, with the end result being a mediocre Blog where quantity reigns over quality. And even with this impediment people will still read your Blog regardless of the downward spiral of content. This could be because you’re still a repository for interesting things but serve as a middle man.

The first steps in identifying cocky Blogging is to constantly be evaluating your skills. Comparing community interaction and the length of your postings is a great technique to see if your Blogging is up to snuff. If you notice any major differences such as your readers picking up the slack or you’re spending too much time regurgitating, these are all signs that something may be wrong and you need to take action to correct this. In my experiences I’ve seen this most prominent in technology related Blogs such as Engadget and Gizmodo.

The thing with writing about gadgets and devices is there is only so much information readily available, and only so much you can theorize about it before it gets to be bloat being tagged on. I’ve experienced this first hand. Blogging about the iPhone, for example. It’s not even out yet, but all we can do is regurgitate news and offer our opinion. Every now and then an opinion based post comes up, but the amount is limiting because the capabilities of the device have yet to tested in the real world.

One other thing is the payment that bloggers are receiving. Now, if you happen to have a multi-author blog, and they feel it’s not worth their time or effort only the bare minimal effort will be made to accomplish each post. Well why don’t they just quit? The thing is, unless you hit it big and depending on how much your time is worth, blogging doesn’t pay out a lot. I’m very much satisfied with the compensation I receive but some bloggers may not be able to pick up and hop over to another blog so soon. The benefit of still spreading their name is still very much attractive and making something a post is better than nothing.

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And lastly one of the biggest causes is, unfortunately, something we cannot control. Reader satisfaction. The reason a regular reader visits your Blog is to consumer information whether it be learning about something or finding out where they may obtain their information. You still serve a purpose to them because there is no real hassle for them to get updates from you. It would take a lot to divert them, taking action early is critical. Nonetheless your audience demands a flow of content, and if you cannot set a schedule of when your content is published that is easily understandable, but the bar will keep on rising higher and higher.

So, what can we do? What are some strategies to get around these problems? Check out Part II of this two part post next week!

Tanner Godarzi is a 14 year old Blogger that writes for Apple Matters, iPhone Matters and his own Blog Tech Blot.

View Comments (10)
  • I can’t wait until part 2 of this post, I seem to find myself doing this a lot looking at the posts that I have been putting up week by week and looking at the quality of them. lately I have been posting a lot of videos and it does feel weird to just be regurgitating information so often. I try as hard as i can to form an opinion on all the things I post. Sometimes its harder then others.

  • This is definitely a problem we all face. I as a reader and most recently an author of the infamous blogs I expect good quality content and I feel obligated to deliver no less than what I expect. One thing I learnt having dated a graphic designer is that look and feel of the blog site do add to reader satisfaction.

    Above that coming from the software design background, usability and accessability (rss pull vs email push, etc) also comes into play. So we push on and try get inspiration to write great thought provoking things on a regular basis, presenting users with a visual display that is easy to navigate.

    I will await the follow up article.

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