Just like your finances, successful blogging requires budgeting and planning.
Updating content isn’t enough.
Say what?? Yes, you read that correctly. Just updating content isn’t quite enough.
Hopefully, before you began your blog, you decided on what you were going to be writing about and had some idea of how much time it would take to do it correctly, but just in case you are like me and the target of your blog has sort of evolved over time, I’m going to try to help you get on track with your blog.
Now, this blog started out as a mish-mash of subjects and to be perfectly honest it still is and will probably continue to be throughout it’s lifetime. However, more and more of my posts are centering about blogging effectively. The success part is coming slowly but surely. How does one measure the success or failure of a blog?
Many people measure their success by outside measurements such as Alexa scores and page rank. Those are certainly valid TOOLS to begin to get a feel for how successful your blog is. Others measure their success by how much money they pull in in a month’s time. That is certainly another tool to measure success.
To me, however, the most true measurement of success is how fulfilled you feel with your blog. If having viewers (both PR and Alexa rank viewers and links as measures of a blog’s worth), or having a paycheck (fat or otherwise) from your blog at the end of the month is what defines “fulfilled” for you, then you are good to go.
I want more.
I want interaction with my readers. Static numbers on a page aren’t good enough. I want my readers to TALK TO ME. Tell me what concerns you. Tell me if I’ve entertained, educated or helped you in some way. To attain this, I have to budget my time and plan my posts.
I want to post often enough to keep you coming back for more. That means I try to plan my posts so that they have information you want (such as the post about Microsoft’s BrowseRank), a lesson that’s valuable (such as my experience with the new EntreCard Toolbar) or at least makes you laugh or cry (the post about my toning up). I also try to release them to you in some kind of fashion that doesn’t overwhelm you. I think you’ve found out that I can and do write a LOT. So, I’ve tried lately to limit the number of new posts to no more than 2 a day. I’m not doing so well on the photo blog — I went nearly a week with no new photos, then put up 4 or 5 yesterday 
. At least those are JUST photos, so it’s not like you’re trying to comprehend one of my 2,000 word essays. But this blog is rapidly approaching it’s 600th post and it’s only been “live” since March of ’06.
Taking my habits into consideration, that means that in order to write good, informative or entertaining posts, I have to budget out the time to research the topic, find suitable graphics (you wouldn’t enjoy them as much without some kind of picture now would you?) and sometimes that even means I have to create the graphic myself which takes time as well. If I’m running a contest, I have to budget out the money to purchase the prizes or find sponsors for them.
And, in the grander scheme, I also have to budget for domain name renewal and hosting as well. Without those two things, there would be no eyespi20.com at all! And I’ve been there and done that!
I could let all this overwhelm me and that would result in “writers‘ block”. in order to combat that, I also budget in time for me. That’s time when I’m not thinking about writing a post, time I’m not dropping cards and time I’m just doing something I enjoy doing. It might be reading, drawing or getting my nails done, but it’s something that takes me out of “blog mode”. Without those breaks, I would become stale and my goal of being fulfilled by my blog would be even farther away. I understand how some people “lose thier blogs”. Life interferes, they didn’t chose a subject they could stay interested in and focused on or they wouldn’t let the blog evolve.
How do you combat “stale blog”? What measurements do you use to define if your blog is a success? Do I post too much or too often? Should I be more narrow in my subjects?
You are my readers. SPEAK UP!
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