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Maintaining a Successful Blog
By admin | October 16, 2008
I have written about starting to blog in the last couple of posts. What about starting and keeping going?
Starting a blog is relatively simple, maintaining one is rather more difficult and you should think about whether you have the desire to post on a regular basis or do the necessary work to promote your blog.
There are many different factors that contribute to the success of a blog and I touched upon them in my post a couple of days ago. These can be as diverse as the subject, the popularity and even the look of the blog. You also need to be able to promote the blog.
Understand Your Audience
You will need to know the sort of visitors who are likely to come to your site. Most successful blogs are in some sort of niche and concentrate on serving those people who share that interest. A blogger should be aware of what potential visitors are looking for and attempt to answer those questions.
You should also be aware of whether your visitor is looking for a short snappy post or one that deals with a given topic in some depth or a combination of the two. Again by researching your market before you start blogging, you should be able to decide what sort of posts to concentrate on.
Post Regularly
The importance of this cannot be underestimated. If you are not prepared to post on a relatively regular basis, then there is no point in starting. Regular postings encourage return visitors and one of the ways to encourage a chance vistior to come back is to show that the content on the site is regularly updated and gives value. I am the first to admit that my postings over the last month have been somewhat irregular and I have paid the price in reduced visitor numbers. So, it is important to keep going and keep posting.
If you are posting regularly then you will be developing a “voice” that your visitors will come to recognise. Although you can use “guest” bloggers you should ensure that the posts will be ones that your visitors will appreciate, both in the quality and in the “voice”.
Making Changes to Your Blog
You can and probably should change your blog on occasions but you should also evaluate what impact those changes have made. Rather than make a whole raft of changes at once, bring them in slowly and see whether they make any difference to your traffic in the short term. This can be critical because if you have a blog which is starting to be successful, then you could start to see a backwords trend if you are not careful to monitor the effect of those changes. On the other hand, dont hesitate to make changes because you think your audience wont like them. I read of one blogger who was inundated with comments but tried to keep on top of them by answering them, and spending a ggreat deal of time just maintaining them. He thought that if he stopped the comment facility ( you can disable it ) then his traffic would just disappear but one day, when it all became too much, he did switch it off and found to his amazement that the traffic was unaltered. He retained the visitors despite taking away their ability to comment.
So dont have any fixed ideas, experiment but ensure that you evaluate the changes made and the effects on the traffic to your site.
Til next time
Jane
Topics: Internet Marketing, Newbies, blogs | No Comments »