Thursday 26 July 2007

YesBut do it because you want to.


OK you’ve followed advice given to you, done everything you can think of doing, but yet you cannot increase the number of visitors to your blog. There appears to be an invisible barrier or door that slams shut as soon as you have twenty visitors a day. What can you do?

You’ve tried everything. Tweaked the appearance of the blog: changed the template, even adjusted the size of the fonts to the extent the words appear to be shouting out of the screen. Changed the font style, but all in vain.

What can you do next? A lot of bloggers just give up. In May 2006 Technorati reported 13,720,748 blogs it tracked were updated in the proceeding 90 days. That was 36% of all blogs tracked by Technorati. By March 2007 the number of active blogs had increased to 15, 534,430 but this only represented 21% of all tracked blogs. So in the year the number of tracked blogs had nearly doubled from 38 million to 74 million, but the number of active blogs had only increased by just under 2 million.

Bloggers need primarily DEDICATION. At the beginning it’s exciting; you’ve got all those ideas in your head. Then you get a few visitors, great “I’m on the way”. The initial enthusiasm projects you forward. But people who initially visited your blog no longer leave comments, the visitor counter keeps ticking over but a large percentage is you visiting your blog to see if anybody has left a comment. On top of that, thinking of things to write about is getting more difficult. It gets tougher to sit in front of the computer, especially when its sunny outside and the kids want to go out to play, or there’s that task you’ve been putting off which really needs to be done now.

You need to ask yourself one question: “Why did I start blogging?”. If it was to satisfy the need to express yourself and be creative then, remove the “vistor counter”. It doesn’t matter if you have 0, 10 or a 100 visitors a day. It’s nice when people leave comments and you can start conversations; but it doesn’t matter if no one leaves a comment. If the kids want you to play with them, then play with them; don’t feel pressured to write something for your blog.

Blog for PLEASURE without pressure. Don’t let the blog take over your life. When you feel creative then blog, when you don’t then don’t. You only live once, enjoy life, and when you feel the need to share, blog.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting statistics!!!
I always like to see how my ranking is going in technorati. It was over a million a few months ago, and now I'm under 250,000!
I hope that means traffic!
Keep it up!

Tony said...

Hi ozlady
It’s a reflection of the quality of your blog - and well deserved.
Best wishes
YB

david mcmahon said...

G'day yesbut,

Good work here, mate. I agree with you. I blogged very occasionally and only for fun.

I only installed a hit counter about nine or ten months ago.

That way there was never any pressure on me. A blogger who frets about traffic is not a good thing.

Take care

David

Tony said...

Hi David
Good to have you visit.
I know you do sterling work in encouraging people develop their blog, perhaps you could emphasise blogging for pleasure without pressure.