How To Kill a Blog Fast – Part I

As someone who has blogged for quite a while now, I can tell you that there are three major ways that you can kill a blog:

• Ignore your blog
• Ignore your audience
• Ignore your market

I am going to address the first issue in this post. When you blog about a certain topic, you should ALWAYS think about who you are blogging for and how you are providing value to them. I am sure you have a few favorite blogs that you follow on a regular basis. Ask yourself this question: why do you keep checking let’s say Engadget every day. Isn’t it because of the solid information that you receive from them? Or maybe it’s because they have something for you to chew on every single day.

Keeping up with blogs becomes a habit after a while. After following a good blog for a while, you tend to understand the habits of the blogger (e.g. number of times a day they post to their blog, post days). Now, as a blogger, you should be aware of this very powerful fact. If you provide good solid content, people will keep coming to you by habit. But this is a double-edged sword. If you start to slack off, the same people who are coming to you everyday, start to realize that, and you will lose them faster than you can blink.

Before getting serious about blogging, you need to plan on how often you are going to provide content to your readers. I know a few extremely successful bloggers who have changed their blogging habits quite a few times during their careers until they have found the right formula. It’s OK to change your blogging habits as long as you are consistent with it and actually having a plan. I do recommend staying conservative when posting blogs. You don’t want to post an article every hour and then stop posting for weeks before starting again. That will certainly kill your blog. It is also useful to have backup quality posts that you can use when you are not in the mood for blogging or you are too busy to blog. Also, don’t forget that blogging is all about quality and not quantity. Posting a quality story a week beats posting 10 garbage stories a day by 100 miles.

So how do you know you are not ignoring your blog?

Many bloggers ignore their blogs and they don’t even know it. You start slacking off little by little and before you know it, your precious blog is dead. It’s really simple though. You are ignoring your blog if:

• you keep putting off posting content for your readers.
• you post garbage content for the sake of keeping up with your blogging habit.
• you don’t do proper research before writing articles for your blog.
• you cut corners to post more articles.
• you keep changing your blogging habits dramatically (with no plans on finding the right formula).

No one said blogging is easy. But it is much more manageable if you set a schedule for yourself and blog in advance to cover your back. Remember that your blog is your asset. You want your asset to gain and not lose value overtime so don’t ignore it.

Stay tuned for the second part of this post about ways you can ignore your audience.